24 January 2021, Writing - part xx479 Writing a Novel, Example Initial Scene from Essie
Announcement: Delay, my new novels can be seen on the
internet, but my primary publisher has gone out of business—they couldn’t
succeed in the past business and publishing environment. I’ll keep you
informed, but I need a new publisher.
More information can be found at www.ancientlight.com.
Check out my novels—I think you’ll really enjoy them.
Introduction: I wrote the novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon.
This was my 21st novel and through this blog, I gave you the entire
novel in installments that included commentary on the writing. In the
commentary, in addition to other general information on writing, I explained,
how the novel was constructed, the metaphors and symbols in it, the writing
techniques and tricks I used, and the way I built the scenes. You can look back
through this blog and read the entire novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.
I’m using this novel as an example
of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel published. I’ll
keep you informed along the way.
Today’s Blog: To see the steps in the publication process, visit my
writing websites http://www.sisteroflight.com/.
The four plus one basic rules I
employ when writing:
1. Don’t confuse your readers.
2. Entertain your readers.
3. Ground your readers in the
writing.
4. Don’t show (or tell) everything.
4a. Show what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted on the stage
of the novel.
5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.
These are the steps I use to write a
novel including the five discrete parts of a novel:
1.
Design the initial scene
2.
Develop a theme statement (initial
setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action statement)
a.
Research as required
b.
Develop the initial setting
c.
Develop the characters
d.
Identify the telic flaw (internal
and external)
3.
Write the initial scene (identify
the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action movement)
4.
Write the next scene(s) to the
climax (rising action)
5.
Write the climax scene
6.
Write the falling action scene(s)
7.
Write the dénouement scene
I
finished writing my 29th novel, working title, Detective, potential
title Blue Rose: Enchantment and the Detective. The theme statement is: Lady Azure Rose
Wishart, the Chancellor of the Fae, supernatural detective, and all around
dangerous girl, finds love, solves cases, breaks heads, and plays golf.
Here is the cover proposal for Blue
Rose: Enchantment and the Detective.
|
|
|
Cover
Proposal |
The most important scene in any
novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the rising
action. I am continuing to write on my 30th novel, working
title Red Sonja. I finished my 29th novel, working
title Detective. I’m planning to start on number 31, working title
Shifter.
How to begin a novel. Number one thought, we need an entertaining
idea. I usually encapsulate such an idea
with a theme statement. Since I’m
writing a new novel, we need a new theme statement. Here is an initial cut.
For novel 30: Red Sonja, a Soviet spy, infiltrates the
X-plane programs at Edwards AFB as a test pilot’s administrative clerk, learns
about freedom, and is redeemed.
For novel 31: Deirdre and Sorcha are redirected to French
finishing school where they discover difficult mysteries, people, and events.
Here
is the scene development outline:
1.
Scene input (comes from the previous scene output or is an initial scene)
2.
Write the scene setting (place, time, stuff, and characters)
3.
Imagine the output, creative elements, plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and
develop the tension and release.
4.
Write the scene using the output and creative elements to build the tension.
5.
Write the release
6.
Write the kicker
Today: Why
don’t we go back to the basics and just writing a novel? I can tell you what I do, and show you how I
go about putting a novel together. We
can start with developing an idea then move into the details of the writing.
To
start a novel, I picture an initial scene.
I may start from a protagonist or just launch into mental development of
an initial scene. I get the idea for an
initial scene from all kinds of sources.
To help get the creative juices flowing, let’s look at the initial
scene.
1.
Meeting between the protagonist and the antagonist or the
protagonist’s helper
2.
Action point in the plot
3.
Buildup to an exciting scene
4.
Indirect introduction of the
protagonist
Ideas. We need ideas. Ideas allow us to figure out the protagonist
and the telic flaw. Ideas don’t come
fully armed from the mind of Zeus. We
need to cultivate ideas.
1.
Read novels.
2.
Fill your mind with good
stuff—basically the stuff you want to write about.
3.
Figure out what will build ideas in
your mind and what will kill ideas in your mind.
4.
Study.
5.
Teach.
6.
Make the catharsis.
7.
Write.
The development of ideas is based on
study and research, but it is also based on creativity. Creativity is the extrapolation of older
ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in a new form. It is a reflection of something new created
with ties to the history, science, and logic (the intellect). Creativity requires consuming, thinking, and
producing.
If we have filled our mind with all
kinds of information and ideas, we are ready to become creative. Creativity means the extrapolation of older
ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in a new form. Literally, we are seeing the world in a new
way, or actually, we are seeing some part of the world in a new way.
I’ve worked through creativity and
the protagonist. The ultimate point is
that if you properly develop your protagonist, you have created your
novel. This moves us on to plots and
initial scenes. As I noted, if you have
a protagonist, you have a novel. The
reason is that a protagonist comes with a telic flaw, and a telic flaw provides
a plot and theme. If you have a
protagonist, that gives you a telic flaw, a plot, and a theme. I will also argue this gives you an initial
scene as well.
So, we worked extensively on the
protagonist. I gave you many examples
great, bad, and average. Most of these
were from classics, but I also used my own novels and protagonists as
examples. Here’s my plan.
1.
The protagonist comes with a telic flaw – the telic flaw
isn’t necessarily a flaw in the protagonist, but rather a flaw in the world of
the protagonist that only the Romantic protagonist can resolve.
2.
The telic flaw determines the plot.
3.
The telic flaw determines the theme.
4.
The telic flaw and the protagonist
determines the initial scene.
5.
The protagonist and the telic flaw
determines the initial setting.
6.
Plot examples from great classic
plots.
7.
Plot examples from mediocre classic plots.
8.
Plot examples from my novels.
9.
Creativity and the telic flaw and
plots.
10. Writer’s block as a problem of continuing the plot.
Every great or good protagonist
comes with their own telic flaw. I
showed how this worked with my own writing and novels. Let’s go over it in terms of the plot.
This is all about the telic
flaw. Every protagonist and every novel
must come with a telic flaw. They are
the same telic flaw. That telic flaw can
be external, internal or both.
We found that a self-discovery telic
flaw or a personal success telic flaw can potentially take a generic plot. We should be able to get an idea for the plot
purely from the protagonist, telic flaw and setting. All of these are interlaced and bring us our
plot.
For a great plot, the resolution of
the telic flaw has to be a surprise to the protagonist and to the reader. This is both the measure and the goal. As I noted before, for a great plot, the
author needs to make the telic flaw resolution appear to be impossible, but
then it happens. There is much more to
this. Here’s the list of plots I’ve
looked at already:
Here is the list of classics that
everyone should read. What I want to do
is evaluate this list for the plots.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR
Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury –
Best modern novel in English.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible – Most important book to
understand Western culture.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George
Orwell
9 We The Living – Ayn Rand
10 Great Expectations - Charles
Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles -
Thomas Hardy
13 Dune – Frank Herbert
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare –
better to see as plays
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 The Cadwal Chronicles – Jack
Vance
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Green Pearl Novels – Jack
Vance
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret
Mitchel
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott
Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 Starship Troopers – Robert
Heinlein
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor
Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis
Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth
Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles
Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
37 The Tale of Genji - Murasaki
Shikibu
38 The House of Seven Gables
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
39 The Scarlet Letter
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 Dracula – Bram Stoker
43 Till We Have Faces – C.S. Lewis
44 Le Morte D'Arthur - Thomas Malory
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie
Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM
Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd -
Thomas Hardy
48 Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
49 Lord of the Flies - William
Golding
50 The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
51 What Katy Did - Sarah Chauncey
Woolsey under her pen name Susan Coolidge
52 A Little Princess - Frances
Hodgson Burnett
53 The Secret Garden - Frances
Hodgson Burnett
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane
Austen
55 The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
56 Kim - Rudyard Kipling
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles
Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 Beowulf – Unknown
60 The Odyssey – Homer
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
64 The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell
Hammett
65 The Count of Monte Cristo -
Alexandre Dumas
66 As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Robinson Caruso – Daniel Defoe
69 The Red Badge of Courage -
Stephen Crane
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
73 Heidi – Johanna Spyri
74 Hans Brinker - Mary Mapes Dodge
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 The Big Sky – Arlo Guthrie
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace
Thackeray
80 The Black Arrow - Robert Louis
Stevenson
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles
Dickens
82 Treasure Island - Robert Louis
Stevenson
83 The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn
84 The Miser – George Eliot
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest
Hemmingway
87 Tarzan – Edger Rice Burroughs
88 The Death of Socrates – Plato
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes -
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De
Saint-Exupery
93 Huckleberry Fin – Mark Twain
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan
Swift
96 Matilda – Roald Dahl
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre
Dumas
98 The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey
Chaucer
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
101 The Once and Future King – T.H.
White
102 The Deerslayer – James Fenimore
Cooper
103 The Black Book of Communism –
Various
104 Ben Hur – Lew Wallace
105 The Robe – Lloyd C. Douglas
106 The Pilgrim’s Progress – John
Bunyan
107 The Histories – Herodotus
108 Lives – Plutarch
109 The Call of the Wild – Jack
London
110 Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
111 The Shockwave Rider – John
Brunner
112 The Aeneid – Virgil
This is what I did. I looked at each novel and pulled out the
plot types, the telic flaw, plotline, and the theme of the novel. I didn’t make a list of the themes, but we
identified the telic flaw as internal and external and by plot type. This generally gives the plotline.
We have a list of all the major
plots from this list of classics in literature.
The question is what can we do with it?
This is the first step in evaluating our results. I took a percentage of the results based on
the number of classics.
Modern writing is all about the
Romantic—both Romantic protagonists and Romantic plots. This is where we are going and this is the
focus of modern entertaining literature.
In the end, we can see there are
just a few baseline plots that are characteristics of most classics. These are the revelation, achievement, and
redemption plots. When I write these are
baseline, I mean that they are overall plots that might also have a different
plotline or other plots directly supporting them. Here’s what I mean exactly about each of
these plots:
Redemption: the protagonist must make an internal or
external change to resolve the telic flaw. This is the major style of most
great modern plots.
Revelation: the novel reveals portions of the life,
experiences, and ideas of the protagonist in a cohesive and serial fashion from
the initial scene to the climax and telic flaw resolution.
Achievement: the novel is characterized by a goal that the
protagonist must achieve to resolve the telic flaw.
I evaluated the list of plots and
categorized them according to the following scale:
Overall (o) – These
are the three overall plots we defined above: redemption, achievement, and
revelation.
Achievement (a)
– There are plots that fall under the idea of the achievement plot.
Quality (q) – These are plots based on a personal or character
quality.
Setting (s) – These are plots based on a setting.
Item (i) – These are plots based on an item.
All of the plots we looked at fall
into one of these five. Let’s do that:
Overall (o)
1.
Redemption (o) – 17i, 7e, 23ei, 8 –
49%
2.
Revelation (o) –2e, 64, 1i – 60%
3.
Achievement (o) – 16e, 19ei, 4i, 43
– 73%
Achievement (a)
1.
Detective or mystery (a) – 56, 1e –
51%
2.
Revenge or vengeance (a) –3ie, 3e,
45 – 46%
3.
Zero to hero (a) – 29 – 26%
4.
Romance (a) –1ie, 41 – 37%
5.
Coming of age (a) –1ei, 25 – 23%
6.
Progress of technology (a) – 6 – 5%
7.
Discovery (a) – 3ie, 57 – 54%
8.
Money (a) – 2e, 26 – 25%
9.
Spoiled child (a) – 7 – 6%
10. Legal (a) – 5 – 4%
11. Adultery (qa) – 18 – 16%
12. Self-discovery (a) – 3i, 12 – 13%
13. Guilt or Crime (a) – 32 – 29%
14. Proselytizing (a) – 4 – 4%
15. Reason (a) – 10, 1ie – 10%
16. Escape (a) – 1ie, 23
– 21%
17. Knowledge or Skill (a) – 26 – 23%
18. Secrets (a) – 21 – 19%
Quality (q)
1.
Messiah (q) – 10 – 9%
2.
Adultery (qa) – 18 – 16%
3.
Rejected love (rejection) (q) – 1ei,
21 – 20%
4.
Miscommunication (q) – 8 – 7%
5.
Love triangle (q) – 14 – 12%
6.
Betrayal (q) – 1i, 1ie, 46 – 43%
7.
Blood will out or fate (q) –1i, 1e,
26 – 25%
8.
Psychological (q) –1i, 45 – 41%
9.
Magic (q) – 8 – 7%
10. Mistaken identity (q) – 18 – 16%
11. Illness (q) – 1e, 19 – 18%
12. Anti-hero (q) – 6 – 5%
13. Immorality (q) – 3i, 8 – 10%
14. Satire (q) – 10 – 9%
15. Camaraderie (q) – 19 – 17%
16. Curse (q) – 4 – 4%
17. Insanity (q) – 8 – 7%
18. Mentor (q) – 12 – 11%
Setting (s)
1.
End of the World (s) – 3 – 3%
2.
War (s) – 20 – 18%
3.
Anti-war (s) –2 – 2%
4.
Travel (s) –1e, 62 – 56%
5.
Totalitarian (s) – 1e, 8 – 8%
6.
Horror (s) – 15 – 13%
7.
Children (s) – 24 – 21%
8.
Historical (s) – 19 – 17%
9.
School (s) – 11 – 10%
10. Parallel (s) – 4 – 4%
11. Allegory (s) – 10 – 9%
12. Fantasy world (s) – 5 – 4%
13. Prison (s) – 2 – 2%
Item (i)
1.
Article (i) – 1e, 46 – 42%
Starting with the protagonist makes
novel writing about as easy as it is possible to make novel writing. As I wrote, if we start with the protagonist,
I can’t guarantee you the next bestseller, but I can assure you it will solve
four problems common to novelists:
1.
What is the plot?
2.
Why is my novel so short?
3.
Why is my novel so simplistic and
uncomplicated in terms of plot and theme?
4.
Why do I get writer’s block when I
want to write?
Usually, I imagine an initial scene,
and this initial scene is focused on my potential protagonist and the
setting. In my experience the
protagonist drives the initial scene. I
suspect this isn’t true of everyone, but I think it is the best way to write a
novel.
I’m writing about the initial scene
from my novel, Essie: Enchantment and the
Aos Si. I already described the
protagonist and the protagonist’s background. In this, we have our circumstance
for the initial scene. We have the
protagonist, the Aos Si. We have the
potential protagonist’s helper Mrs. Lyons.
We have reasons and the entire setup for the scene. So, here is the initial scene from Essie.
Lyonshall, Herefordshire, Great
Britain
Mrs.
Lyons, actually, Matilda Anne Robina Acland Hastings Lyons, who happened to
once be married to Colonel Bruce Lyons, and who held onto the Mrs. and the
Lyons as mementos although the man was long dead, heard a crash in her
kitchen. She was a light sleeper anyway,
but the crash rang loud enough to wake the dead. She reached under her pillow for the
prototype Etan Arms AP-1 nine millimeter semi-automatic pistol she kept
there. She examined the sleek weapon, a
gift from her favorite adopted great grandchild, Leila, and returned it, with
the safety still on, to its hiding spot.
She
slipped out of the covers as quietly as a very old woman could and instead of
her pistol, picked up the heavy cane beside her bed. She constantly carried it, not because she
needed a cane, but because everyone expected her to carry one—she enjoyed the
privilege and the recognition. Mrs.
Lyons was very old, but not weak, demented, or non-mobile. She looked wrinkled and gray now, but didn’t
care a lick about appearance anymore.
She still looked thin and athletic—about as athletic as she always was,
which wasn’t very, but she could move as well if not better than a woman half
her age. So she imagined.
Mrs.
Lyons pulled her dressing gown over her nightgown and hefted her cane. She didn’t turn on any lights. Her vision was still good, and her eyesight
was already well adapted to the thick moonlight that shined outside her
windows. She walked through her open
doorway and down the hall toward the front of the house.
Her
country house was small, much smaller than the places she inhabited as a child,
a young woman, or a married woman. She
was now a widow, and a small cottage in the country seemed to suit her. The hallway led to a classic branch. To the right, lay the foyer and front
door. The foyer opened to a dining room
on the left and a parlor to the right.
To the left lay the servant’s quarters—none in use at the moment. In front of her ran a short hall to a phone
closet and a water closet—an odd combination to be sure. To the right of that short extension, lay the
dining room and to the left… the kitchen.
Mrs.
Lyons heard another peculiar bump and then a thump from inside her kitchen—she
strained to listen closer… or perhaps the sounds came from her pantry. She held up her cane like a baseball bat and
peeked around the opening into the kitchen.
She squinted in the darkness, but didn’t spot anything amiss.
She
heard another thump. Slurping sounds and
a slight growl followed it. Mrs. Lyons
wondered at that. The constable had
reported thefts of food and unusual break-ins across the shire, but they seemed
wholly of human origin. This
sounded…animal-like.
Mrs.
Lyons almost continued on to the phone closet to ring the constable’s post in
the village, but she realized no one would be on duty at this time of
night. She shrugged, and
soundlessly—well, as soundlessly as she could, stepped into the kitchen.
She
snuck around the cabinet side, where she knew none of the creaking boards would
betray her, and almost tripped over a light metal boiler on the floor. Her visitor must have knocked that from the
counter. With greater care, she slowly
slipped to the pantry door. The door
stood open—of course it did. She knew she
had shut it tight after making her evening tea.
Mrs.
Lyons brought her cane up in front of her, but with a slight cock for
leverage. She craned her neck around the
opening to the pantry and kept to the shadows so she wouldn’t be backlit from
the kitchen window. Only a thin slice of
the evening’s full moon shone through that window, and it lay to her side at
the back of the kitchen. She noted her
kitchen’s outside door stood fully open and that let in more light than the
lace covered window. That door was also
obviously how her little kitchen thief had entered.
Mrs.
Lyons hefted her cane again. She didn’t
intend to use it, except in defense, but she did want to catch her little
kitchen thief. The sounds of eating, not
pretty sounds at all, as well as growls rose out of the depths of the pantry. Mrs. Lyons smelled the baked ham she’d put up
for the weekend. She spotted other odds
and ends scattered on the shadowed floor of the pantry. That put her immediately into a more
indignant mood. She didn’t like thieves,
but she liked untidy thieves even less.
Mrs.
Lyons pitched her cane back a bit more for leverage and pressed her elbow
against the panty light switch. It was a
new switch and not the old twist type.
With a push of her wrinkled elbow, the switch moved, the light came on
with a fluorescent blink, and a startled cry emerged from the pantry.
Mrs.
Lyons gasped. Her gasp sounded almost as
loud as the shocked yowl from inside her pantry. A naked girl or young woman sat on the center
counter and shielded her eyes. She was
completely starkers and trailed half of Mrs. Lyons’ baked ham from her
mouth.
For
a long moment, Mrs. Lyons couldn’t even imagine what she might say. Finally, she stuttered out, “There, you. Yes, you.
Put down that ham and come out, immediately.”
The
girl held her hands over her light-dazzled eyes and spit out the ham. That’s when everything turned
ridiculous. The girl moved faster than
Mrs. Lyons could see. She dropped to the
floor and ran behind the center counter.
Mrs. Lyons heard a hollow thump and a cry. Then a rush of naked flesh headed around the
counter toward the open pantry door. The
girl let out pained sounds the entire time.
She ran blindly into the pantry side wall and pitched to the floor. Then blinking and shading her eyes, she
shakily gathered her feet under her as if she intended to rush the doorway and
Mrs. Lyons.
Mrs.
Lyons stepped into the pantry doorway and lowered her cane in front of her like
a cricket bowler at the pitch. She
intended to block the door until she could shut it—to her mind, this had
definitely become a job for the constable.
As Mrs. Lyons reached for the pantry door, the girl sprang. The girl’s dirty hands still covered her
eyes, and she still cried out in pitiful pain-filled sounds. She probably couldn’t see at all. She just wanted to flee.
Mrs.
Lyons was not about to let the girl escape, not with a ruined ham and half her
larder on the floor. The girl rushed
forward directly toward the cane. Mrs.
Lyons closed her eyes. She felt an
impact, but her cane lay firmly planted at an angle against the old door
stoop. The girl hit the cane with the
top of her head and dropped like a stone.
Mrs.
Lyons slowly opened one eye then the other.
In front of her lay her pilfered pantry, and collapsed in a very awkward
and embarrassing sprawl lay the young woman.
Mrs. Lyons brandished her cane, “You get up. I intend to lock you up until the constable
arrives…”
The
girl made no sound.
Mrs.
Lyons held her cane at the ready, “I say.
You’ve placed yourself in a very compromising position…”
The
girl said nothing.
Mrs.
Lyons prodded her with the cane. She saw
no movement. She knelt at the girl’s
head with her cane at the ready. The
girl didn’t move. Mrs. Lyons carefully
put her cane to her side and touched the girl.
The girl still breathed, but a small pool of blood grew under her head.
Mrs.
Lyons turned the girl’s head and lifted it slightly. A gash on the girl’s forehead leaked blood
down her face and dripped steadily onto the floor. Mrs. Lyons let out a low curse, “Bloody. What am I going to do with you now?”
The
girl sucked in small gasps through her mouth.
Mrs. Lyons breathed out a great sigh.
She turned on the kitchen lights and found a couple of clean rags, “I’ll
add this to your debt, girl.” With
obvious skill, Mrs. Lyons folded one rag and placed it on the gash and tied the
other tightly around the girl’s head.
The bleeding seemed to stop.
Mrs.
Lyons examined her intruder. The girl
looked dirty, very dirty, and was completely unclothed. Old scars crisscrossed her back and flanks as
though she had been beaten with regularity.
Her face looked a bit dirtier than the rest of her. Mrs. Lyons couldn’t really tell what she
looked like under all the grime. Her
hair was long and back and silky. Filled
with grease and bits of leaf mold and dirt, it looked as dirty as her thin
body. She was small and looked
malnourished. Mrs. Lyons was almost
twice the girl’s size, but she was a tall woman. She could tell the girl was fully mature,
that is as women went, but young, very young.
Mrs.
Lyons gave another long sigh. She closed
the pantry door and locked it, then went to the back hall closet where she kept
most of Colonel Lyons old equipment. She
retained everything as a reminder without expecting to ever use it. She returned with two sets of old handcuffs,
the rugged type used by the military and not the constabulary. She cuffed the girl’s feet and then her
hands. The girl still didn’t move.
Mrs.
Lyons felt a bit guilty. She wasn’t at
all sure what she would do with this strange girl, but strange girls of all
types had long been a part of Mrs. Lyon’s life.
Best keep her for now. Mrs. Lyons
didn’t think again about calling the constable—not at this moment—too late in
the evening anyway. She closed and bolt
locked the outside kitchen door.
The
next step became a bit more difficult and daring. Mrs. Lyons turned the girl over and grasped
her arms. Although the girl was a
deadweight, Mrs. Lyons had no difficulty dragging her through the kitchen, down
the hall, and into the first guestroom across from her own.
Mrs.
Lyons didn’t want to subject her clean linens to this dirty girl. There was no help for it. Mrs. Lyons took a couple of washcloths and a
bucket of soapy water and cleaned the girl fore and aft, front and back. The soapy water turned foul. The rinse came next—the result wasn’t much
better. Dry towels, then Mrs. Lyons went
to an old armoire in the room and selected a nightgown. She always wanted a child, especially a girl
child, but she’d not been blessed that way.
Her very good friends bore daughters, and Mrs. Lyons made due as an
aunt, confidant, chaperone, and friend to them all. In consequence, she kept some clothing for
her friends’ children, and this young woman fit nicely into one for a large
girl.
The real
difficulty came in dragging this unconscious young woman onto the bed, but Mrs.
Lyons succeeded. When the girl lay
there, still out like a light, Mrs. Lyons removed the handcuffs and attached
one to the girl’s left foot and the other to the end of the bed and the other
to the girl’s right wrist and to the head of the bed. It wouldn’t be very comfortable, but Mrs.
Lyons had entertained few sneak-thieves.
She covered the girl and went back to bed—before she slept, she brought
her cane very close and checked her pistol.
That’s the initial scene. I’ll discuss it more tomorrow.
In the end, we can figure out what
makes a work have a great plot, and apply this to our writing.
Let’s start with the idea of an
internal and external telic flaw. Then
let’s provide it a wrapper. The wrapper
is the plot.
The beginning of creativity is study
and effort. We can use this to
extrapolate to creativity. In addition,
we need to look at recording ideas and working with ideas.
More
tomorrow.
For more information, you can visit my
author site http://www.ldalford.com/,
and my individual novel websites:
http://www.ancientlight.com/
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com
No comments:
Post a Comment