Hello, writers. This morning I was cleaning off a shelf when I found an old watch. It didn’t take a battery and didn’t tick when I wound it, so I got ready to toss it. Then I thought I might as well look it up on eBay.
That build makes it sound like the watch was worth a lot of money. It wasn’t. It was going begging for £5. (Just £, no $; apparently it was never sold in the US.) It was manufactured in the USSR. Probably it was given to my late sister when she was part of a team of New York State residents chosen to act as hosts for a Soviet goodwill delegation during the Glasnost era. The delegation members gave her a ton of gifts, mostly brightly painted wooden spoons, embroidered badges, and, of course, nesting dolls. And this watch.
Naturally my next thought was “If I turn the hands of the watch backward, what will happen?”
That’s because I write fantasy. If I wrote romance, the watch might be part of the heroine’s lost dowry, or might have an engraving that hinted at her mysterious past. Mystery: the fact that the watch is Soviet might be a vital clue.
But in any case, if I were writing the scene, I’d need to know this: Did the protagonist expect to find the watch, or not?
Was s/he...
1. ...digging frantically through all the stuff on the shelf, hoping against hope that the watch would still be there?
2. ...looking, s/he wasn’t quite sure for what, but there had to be something here that would answer the burning question _____?
3. ...just cleaning up, not expecting to find the watch at all?
In each case, the little scenelet, the action, that one would write would end with finding the watch. But the sentences one wrote describing the moments before the watch was found would be different. Is the character anxious, hopeful, frightened, bored? When s/he finally lays hands on the watch, does s/he feel excited, curious, angry?
The moments before the watch gets found are the moments when the writer has to draw the reader onward, build the reader’s expectations— something is about to happen.
Tonight’s mission, should you choose to accept it:
Of the three choices listed in the box above, pick two.
For each of the two situations, write two or three sentences that come immediately before finding the watch. Don’t mention the watch in these sentences. But do build the reader’s expectation that something is about to happen.
(It’s important to do two different versions of the exercise, not just one, so that you can build up the reader’s expectations differently in each version.)
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