Writing Prompt: The Re-Write: Who Doesn’t Like Cake?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

This week’s prompt is a new type! One of the early prompt challenges was to edit a purposefully bad bit of writing. In that spirit, I’m adding a prompt designed to let you practice your revision skills without the risk of messing up your manuscript.

You have to keep the bones of the piece, but you can move things around and add dialogue and internalization and whatnot. As long as you can still identify this scene as the scene I started you’re good—so no completely rewriting it from scratch. The goal is to make my monstrosity better.

Edit the bad writing, strengthen and clarify the goals, conflict, and stakes, develop the setting, establish the character, etc. You know the drill.

Your challenge: Turn this snippet into something worth reading:

She had no idea what she was doing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, going to the movies with that guy George, who worked in accounting when he wasn’t taking people to the movies, and that had to have been her first mistake. Going into the break room for cake.

The cake was delicious. Three layers of chocolate with white frosting, the corners shaped into tiny flowers of pink and yellow. Between each layer was a strip of raspberry sauce with bits of real raspberry about a quarter inch thick. It sat on an old china plate someone must have brought from home. Stella maybe, or Lolita, or maybe that dude from purchasing, Augustus.

Augustus was cute, but George was cuter. She should have asked him what he was doing this weekend. He had a sweet way about him, even if he didn’t like cake, and really, who didn’t like cake? That should have been her first clue that this wasn’t going to go well.

Have fun! Written by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com