Two Different Worlds
Welcome. How are your writing muscles feeling? Stronger? More flexible? Later, we’ll get you to do a few endurance runs to build even more writing stamina. For now, a challenge for some, familiarity for others.
Don’t forget the importance of the Field Notes. They are there to stimulate your thinking about the exercise. If necessary, take time get your mind fully focussed on the theme, just like psyching up for a major event.
Field Notes:
Time to get the juices flowing in those who like writing between worlds. Today, explore the boundary where the everyday meets the indefinable. Change the mundane and ordered, satisfy your impulse to shove at the edges of reality, to blend real with fantasy. Which is real, which is fantasy? Let your creativity run wild.
Between dusk and dark, go to a place you are familiar with in daylight. Feel the difference. Find darkness’ secrets. Meeting places concealed in shadow. People moving about. Some in reality. A very few crossing, or not, that border you are piecing together. Hold it and caress to keep the boundary obscured from outsiders.
WARM UP
10 minutes
Your story unfolds from when this scene's central character knows their target is close by. They are expecting a meeting of some kind — hence the title "boundary between worlds". The reveal can come at any time, unexpectedly. How will you do that?
Readers must leave tingling with what they have just read, not wanting it to end.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a scene that has a boundary between reality and fantasy and the dangers of crossing from one to the other.
WRITING
30 minutes
Target 300+ words.
Write furiously. Don’t let anything distract you from pouring out all that is in your head. Lock everything else out.
COOL DOWN
10 minutes
You must be anticipating the read as much as I am when you turn it into a riveting novel.
Did you find a good way of showing the boundary and reveal a spine-tingling view of the “other” side?
Do you have any hints about where the plot will go from here, or where it came from?
Did you get a sense of the spine tingle you wanted your readers to experience?
Which sentence is your favourite? Why?
Some of you will have found this exercise stretched their muscles into uncomfortable positions, others will have found it no bother at all. Both groups will have benefitted. Accept each of these as a challenge, not as a ploy to get you to change your preferred writing style or genre.
Pass along any feedback. Please share your work for others to enjoy. Hope you had fun with this challenge.
See you soon.
Damon
