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WriteOn! A Series of Cliffs [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-10
Good evening, writers!
I was reading a book a while back, and I noticed that the title (I forget just what it was, now) sounded a little mysterious. It wasn’t clear to me what it was implying, but before I could figure that out, the author had introduced a detail about the backstory of a couple of the characters. What was their connection, and how was it going to influence events?
By the time the meaning of the title started to become a little clearer to me, and the relationship between some of the characters started to be elucidated in a series of flashbacks interspersed with the main action, a different bit of history with another character was floated as another mystery.
I realized that the author was pulling me along, but the story was good, and the individual mystery bits were intriguing enough in themselves that I didn’t mind it. In fact, I thought it was a great example of good writing.
Sensible Shoes had written before about “scene questions,” the unknown that drives a scene forward. Will the characters escape the caves? Will they ever get lunch?
But this made me realize that often a good story has questions and mysteries at multiple levels. Within each scene, but at larger levels, and even in things like the phrasing of the title, or chapter titles, or the backstories of the characters.
What do you think?
Tonight’s Challenge:
Write a scene of no more than a couple hundred words, engaging at least three different senses, in which one or two mysteries, or scene questions, are dangled in front of the reader, urging them to turn the page to find out what happens.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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