Category Archives: exercise

exercise, plot, Writing

Plot a Mystery

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Plot a mystery

  1. Imagine you want to write a mystery. Who is your main character?
  2. Where is your main character?
  3. Your next nine answers should form a mystery story. At number one, how would you introduce the character and place?
  4. At number nine how would your story end? Does your MC ride off into the sunset, or jetski into space, or…?
  5. At number five, what crisis or mystery would you like your character to solve?
  6. At number seven, how would a second crisis grow from the first one, making it a mystery that really has to be solved?
  7. At three, how might your character end up in a place where he/she/it would encounter the mystery?
  8. At two, why would your character end up there?
  9. At four, give the character a need to care.
  10. At six, show how one crisis turned into another.
  11. And at eight, tell how the crisis was resolved by your character before the ending.
exercise, genre, Writing

Writing action scenes, from Sheila Deeth

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Writing Action Scenes

Sheila’s September 2013 talk and writing exercise were taken from a chapter in Writing Fantasy Heroes, edited by Jason M. Waltz

 

WRITING ACTION SCENES

Writers’ Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Seventh Star Press) may well be the better book, but a particular chapter in Writing Fantasy Heroes caught my eye. The chapter’s called Writing Cinematic Fight Scenes, by Brandon Sanderson, but the lessons apply to any action scene, and we all write action scenes sometimes, or else nothing happens.

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Editing, exercise, flash, Writing

Drabble workshop

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Drabble workshop

Let’s Drabble

Welcome

This is taken from a workshop I ran at the eFestival of words. Sorry for any typos, but I hope you might find it useful.

Welcome to the drabble workshop.

Let’s start with a quick definition, just in case you’re not sure what drabbling is.

According to Wikipedia, “A drabble is an extremely short work of fiction of exactly one hundred words in length, not necessarily including the title. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.”

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