Next weeks Prompt: Character Sketch inspired by a found name. (Cemeteries, or movie credits, or broken bowling alley signs... for example)
Challenge mode: make it fit your setting?
Prompt from last week: Write a setting 250-500 words
We went over our assignments, and discussed the narrative tools we used to make our settings more than just word pictures.
-Use emotional reactions to the setting to tell the reader what is being felt
-Use senses other than sight (definitely do this!)
-Present the reader with cues that may powerfully trigger other memories (either in line with your scene or to jarringly contrast with it)
-Use analogies (metaphors & similes) to give life to descriptions.
Simile: ...groaned underfoot, as though it had just been awoken.
Metaphor: ...groaned, just awoken as it passed underfoot.
A little futher: ...now sleepily groaning under the foot of man.
Metaphor, as a rule is much more active, and gives more life to the thing (gravel in this case) that you are comparing. In my actual text I chose to go beyond metaphor to anthropomorphize (attribute human qualities to) the gravel. Simile allows for comparisons of much more dissimilar things without being confusing. Consider this old saw:
Simile: That idea went over like a lead balloon
Metaphore: That idea was a lead balloon.
Teachable moment brought to you by Jenn!
We discussed using a three act structure (largely from script writing and theory) in conjunction with non-linear plot lines. The original blog post from which Jenn found the idea is here. The script writing and 3 part story structure tools came from Save the Cat! The most important concepts are that all stories can be broken into a beginning, middle and end. Call it introduction, rising action and conclusion or whatever technical terms you like but this is always the basic pattern to a tale (even non-fiction). Most stories play out with increasing tension towards a resolution but sometimes this can be best accomplished best by describing the pieces out of order. This is often the case when the author wants to convey not how something happened but WHY. Non-linear timelines work well for situations like time-travel (shocking, I know), memory, or multiple characters experiencing the same events in parallel. A few of the non-linear examples that came up included The Things They Carried, Momento, Run Lola Run, Dracula, Slaughterhouse 5, Catch 22 and Cloud Atlas. There were also a few web comics mentioned (with names I don't remember). We also read "The Continuity of Parks" by Julio Cortazar.
