Writing Prompt: The Re-Write: An Love Story Opening That Needs a Lot of Love

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

This week’s prompt is designed to help you practice your revision skills without the risk of messing up your manuscript. Edit the bad writing, strengthen and clarify the goals, conflict, and stakes, develop the setting, establish the character, etc. You know the drill.

You have to keep the bones of the piece, but how you get those ideas across is up to you. Add whatever details strike you, as long as you can still identify this scene as the scene I started—so no completely rewriting it from scratch. The goal is to make this monstrosity better.

Edit this opening page into something worth reading:

I knew it would end like this. I knew it would stop and cease and drag me to a terrible, awful end that would look exactly like the scene playing out before me. Which sucked.

“Why are you doing this to me,” I asked tearfully, my eyes stinging from the waterfall of tears pouring from them.

The man who had been my everything looked back and said, “I told you I was going to leave you if you didn’t quit your job as an ER nurse and stopped working the graveyard shift.”

I gasped and pressed perfectly manicured nails against matching red lips. “But Maurice, you know how much I need to be needed. Saving lives in the ER fulfills my very soul. I can’t quit.”

“Not even for me?” Maurice asked.

That was the question, wasn’t it? I thought to myself. When he had first walked into my life I thought he’d been the perfect man. So tall, so strong, and his clothes had reflected that sense of style. But he had been the most confident man I had ever met, and sometimes it felt like he didn’t need me, not the way the patients who came into the ER on the worst days of their lives did.

Who did I want? I wondered. My patients or the man I thought I loved?

For fun, let’s try to keep this as a one-page opener, so try not to go over 300 words. Written by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com