An eleven-year old wrote this:



I am impressed.

Prompt 5:

Isabel first saw the poster while playing a game of tag in the town square with Thomas and the other children. She spotted another poster two days later when her school bus was stopped at the light on Marshwood and First. On Saturday morning, she went to the bakery with her father for bagels, and came across the poster again. It was tacked on a nearby stretch of wall between Rosa’s Café and the Laundromat. Bold, wine-colored letters announced the imminent arrival of “Solomon The Black’s Traveling Circus.” A faded picture of a bearded, piratical face appeared below the title. Beneath that were listed the featured attractions. There was “Octavio the Gentle Wolf.” And “Henrik the Man Ape.” Then came a vivid illustration that delighted Isabel. It was entitled “Special Feature: The Mouse That Soared!” and showed a tiny, caped, and goggle-wearing rodent flying like a miniature rocket over hills and forests. Isabel turned to rejoin her father, then stopped. She looked at the poster again. Near the bottom, in small black letters, it said: “Coming also: Madeline Frost, Witch of Fatality.” Isabel’s eyes widened and then unfocused. She felt a light tremor commencing at the base of her throat. It was her mother’s name.

Love this. Perhaps the best paragraph in the thread. I like the concrete details you add everywhere to give your world colour and flavour and depth. And then you hit us with a hook at the end of the paragraph to leave us wanting more. Couldn't find a negative thing to say about it.

Sorry for taking so long to get back, but you really slayed this prompt. Top to bottom perfect.

Everyone mind sharing the authors they've read the most?

I'd like to both see how reading habits influence writing style and figure out who to read next.

Mine are Nabokov and DFW. (Both somewhere around 400k words. Might be more. Not sure.)

Raymond Carver
Tobias Wolf
Richard Yates
Ernest Hemingway

Thanks, VM and smrk.

I spent three days writing a completely different paragraph for prompt 5, but I was really having to force it and it felt like a dead end the whole time. And then somehow I was able to throw it away and bang out the one ITT in like thirty minutes, which is record time for me.

Alas, I'm now experiencing a similar sensation of forcing and futility towards my current submission-in-progress for exercise 2. After a week of hacking away at this dialogue scene, I'm like 85% done, but I worry the final result will be inappropriate or irrelevant in the larger story that's intended to house it.

(I can only pray that the struggle at least has built up my flabby dialogue-crafting muscles and will pay off when I start on the next scene.)

lagdonk,

Almost a certainty some or even all of everything you write for these exercises will change by the end of the series. Enjoy the process.

Which one of these guys' narrators tend to be the biggest ***holes?

NegativeXnegativeXnegativeXnegative=positive!

My prompt 5 is probably the most dickish thing I've ever read. And I wrote it. I should read some more Cynthia Ozick or something.

Yeah, I guess I know in theory that I should accept, nay, embrace it. But it's like my brain is wired to freak out about it. Sometimes, I'll be writing a sentence, and then all of these permutations will burst open right in the middle of it. So I start trying to capture some of them using brackets and forward slashes.

Here's an example from my prompt 4 draft:

So then I finally tame this mess into some singular form, submit that as a rough draft, and somewhere in the back of my mind I try not to deny the reality that I should be prepared to scrap the whole thing if it doesn't serve the final story optimally.

ARAGAHHJHJGAHZZ

Critique my poem! (I have no poetry-writing experience whatsoever. It's supposed to be free, non-rhyming verse.)

I wish that one day the candle
lighting my room will burn brightly
in the dark night
and the window shades will allow
street lights that tower over the town
to come through
and fill my room
with their bright blue lights

Haha so you turn each sentence into a multiple choice problem?

I hear ya laggy. It gets easier once you take a bunch stories from first to final draft. You'll still feel the mountain of self-doubt, but you'll be able to remind yourself how awful all first drafts are, and how much better the final draft will be.

Well, there are writers whose books I study to learn what I think I need to know about crafting prose. E.M. Forster and Fitzgerald come to mind, because their writing synthesizes many of the strengths I admire and find scattered among the great and influential authors who preceded them -- Dickens, Austin, Eliot, Bronte, James, and others. Meaning that while I love dipping into Dickens to marvel at his divine command of simile and vivid imagery, it's hard for me to adapt what I find directly into my own contemporary writing needs. But authors like Fitzgerald and Forster have kind of done that work for me, channeling the ornate, lyrical, and old-fashioned beauty of nineteenth century prose into a less quaint, more restrained, and more 'modern-sounding' mold.

There's also this one book by Philip Roth, Letting Go, published very early in his career, that is my go-to primer on how to do psychological characterization in a deep and compelling way that captures the rapidly shifting layers of thought and emotion in a given moment of interest. Oddly enough, though, I don't really care for the rest of his oeuvre.

Not that I've come close to producing anything on a level or scale comparable to these ideals, or even faint echoes thereof! Someday, one hopes.

But as far as which authors I've read the most? My love of escapism and revisiting cherished haunts means that I have to answer: Asimov, King, and Tolkien.