How do you bring the pieces of your story together?
When I first started writing, I thought of telling a story as a linear exercise. Start at the beginning and work your way to the end. When I started writing novels, I found my linear method just wasn’t working. Stories, like lives, don’t always follow a nice, neat, straight line. They tend to zig zag with the addition of subplots, characters and settings. If you have ever pieced a quilt, you know it starts out as a jumbled mess of fabric. You have odds and ends of color that don’t seem to have any cohesiveness. Then as you cut the fabric into shapes and carefully sew those shapes together it becomes a work of art. Writing a novel is exactly like this. You have characters and scenes in your head that all have to come together in logical sequences so that your reader can move from place to place without getting lost. For today’s practice exercise here are five elements that need to be woven together. Make them into one cohesive story.
1. An opinionated female character
2. A male character in a hurry
3. A stuffed elephant toy
4. A new house with no lawn
5. A drought
Include all of these elements in a 500 word story. Make it work!