Hello, writers. I’m back! Many, many thanks to mettle fatigue, strawbale, bonetti, dconrad, and James Wells for writing great Write On! diaries over the winter, and thanks to mettle fatigue for keeping it all organized.
It was a hard winter for writers.
Almost every writer I know had a hard time working after the debacle in November, and a harder time after it became clear in January that things were going to be exactly as bad as we had imagined.
We went through the stages of grief and we never really got to Acceptance. But I think about half of us by now have gotten to the point where we realize that a great many writers have written while their countries’ governments collapsed. And we can do it too.
Not only can we do it too, but we aren’t doing anything bad by doing it. We’re shining a light in dark times. And this is true no matter what we write about. All writing is political. The act of writing is political.
During January and February I added 20,000 stolid, sluggish words into a manuscript about some children in a flying bathtub who try to bring down a corrupt senator. I wasn’t enjoying it at all. And the reasons I wasn’t enjoying it, I now realize, were
1. The children each had two loving parents.
2. The story was set in our world.
3. The story was very clearly “for children.”
But I thought the reason my writing was going badly was because
1. An evil traitor had somehow become President of the United States.
So I persevered up to the 30k word mark, and then I said to hell with it and started writing a book I really wanted to write, in which
1. The children are orphans in dire straits.
2. The book is set in another world.
3. The book is “for children” only insofar as it doesn’t contain sex scenes.
This is the kind of thing I love to write, and it’s going swimmingly. I’m so glad I dropped the other project.
So here’s tonight’s challenge.
Think of three story elements that you love. Not elements you think you ought to love, but elements you really do love. Write them down; you don’t have to share them.
Now pick just one of them.
And without telling us what it is, write the first five sentences of a story.
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