Practice your scenes

Here is an exercise to help you with your craft today. In the comments write the following scene but within your genre. Let the tone, description and pace of this small scene be guided by the time period, mood of the scene, genre of the book, etc.

A man and woman are walking outside. Both are hungry.

How much tension can you make of this prompt? How many problems could you realistically throw at them? Will it even matter at the end of the scene that they were hungry or is that just what brought them to the place of conflict? Or will a new secret be revealed over dinner.

Be creative and tell us the genre and time period you're writing in. Have fun with it. I cannot wait to read what you write.

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Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at http://www.writingcareercoach.com/
Tiffany is a speaker and teacher. Find out about available topics for your group’s next event.
Tiffany is a National Examiner. Read her articles here.
Learn more about Tiffany’s Marketing techniques on her main blog.
Common-sense money management is free at The Balanced Life website.
Read Tiffany’s award winning manuscript “A Face in the Shadow” on her fiction blog.She writes a blog for the Christian writer Tuesdays at Writer’s Rest.

Brainstorming

I thought a fun thing to do today would be to have a little brainstorming prompt to take you in to the week. This is something I have on the wall next to my desk. You don’t have to write anything down [unless you want to] but I want you to think about it, chew on it, think about it some more:

How could things get worse? When would be the WORST moment for them to get worse?

Now, I want you to think about those two questions for each of your main characters. Bad guy and Good guy. Once you’ve figured this out then try to figure out a scenario that is impossibly bad. And then try to work each character out of the situation.

Finally, try to see your entire story [the full plotline] from the point of view of your bad guy. If the bad guy were actually the GOOD guy [by that I mean imagine the bad guys goals were the right thing to do in that situation] how would your plot look different?

Then come back next time to see what we do with this exercise!

Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at http://www.writingcareercoach.com/

Tiffany is a speaker and teacher. Find out about available topics for your group’s next event.Tiffany is a National Examiner. Read her articles here.

Learn more about Tiffany’s Marketing techniques on her main blog.

Common-sense money management is free at The Balanced Life website.

Read Tiffany’s award winning manuscript “A Face in the Shadow” on her fiction blog.

She writes a blog for the Christian writer Tuesdays at Writer’s Rest.