  Short Stories
This week: Upstaged! Edited by: Legerdemain  
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The purpose of this newsletter is to help the Writing.com short story author hone their craft and improve their skills. Along with that I would like to inform, advocate, and create new, fresh ideas for the short story author. Write to me if you have an idea you would like presented.
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Being Upstaged
Hollywood has a saying "don't act with babies or animals". They're just so cute, no one will notice the actor. I can imagine it would be frustrating to deliver the perfect line and the audience not hearing it because they're all cooing over a baby raccoon. Babies can't help that they're cute; they're made that way so parents don't leave them in the woods someplace. Baby animals are too dang cute too...it's all the fluffiness.
When writing your stories, remember to keep your antagonist and protagonist as the main characters. It's good to have interesting peripheral characters, but don't let them upstage your main characters unless whatever they're doing is crucial to moving your plot along. A rich and diverse stage of characters makes for a good read, but if you're not sure whom the bad guy is, or who is going to save the day, it's not a good thing. Your reader still needs to understand what the main conflict is and at least have some inkling of what direction your plot is headed.
Even your most evil character, probably not so fluffy and a lot scarier, needs to be kept trim and secure in his evilness. If you let him grab hold of your plot, you might not get it back. And that my friends, means a whole lot of edit when you realize the plot took an unexpected turn. We know he eats maggoty meat, we created him, but the reader doesn't need to know if it isn't necessary to the story.
Keep an eye on your fluffies, they might go rabid and take over.
This month's question: Have you had a secondary character run off with your plot line?
Send in your answer below!  Editors love feedback!
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Genre of the Month: Inspirational /// The task is simple: use the genre above as inspiration for a short story!
A simple contest for reviewers to earn Cash Prizes!
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This item number is not valid.
#2093466 by Not Available. |
Excerpt: As the bell rings on the first day of his Senior year, David Chambers lingers in the hallway near his locker. This should be the year to achieve great things, but David wasn't feeling very optimistic. Things had happened over Summer break that would change all that.
Excerpt: I looked around the room for the fourth time, in search of diversion. I was sitting in the austerely appointed and highly veneered corporate offices of Hanover Keen Incorporated, a Wall Street heavy hitter. It was also the shark tank among the shark tanks. Me, a gentle guppy of a guy, was vying for a piece of the reef with the meanest, most competitive and demanding Securities Trading operation out there. This was the big time and -- most distressingly -- this was my third visit. I wondered if the other guys in the room were my competition. They wondered back.
| | Wishes Do Come True (E)
A ballet student with limited talent surprises everyone with her performance.
#2074053 by Dee  |
Excerpt: The ugly pink and black shoes hung on the fence where Mandy set them to dry the day before. A pink burst of light reflected off the laces, making her squint as she grew closer to them. It was strange finding the odd colored shoes washed up on the beach, and equally odd that they fit her perfectly. Dismissing the thought, she put them on and stood up. "Okay," she said, looking down at them. "I hope you're going to help me dance like a prima ballerina," she said. I couldn't do any worse in these than I did in toe shoes, she thought. They looked clunky, certainly not shoes a ballerina would wear, yet they felt as light as air on her feet. Mandy could not believe how confident they made her feel. Too bad I couldn't wear these on stage, she thought, executing a few movements.
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This item number is not valid.
#2093518 by Not Available. |
Excerpt: Waking up with someone pounding on your door is never pleasant; especially when it's the police. Granted, the sun was climbing towards noon and most decent people were awake and carrying on with their mundane lives, but when you're the low woman on the physics supercomputer access list you take your research hours where you can find them; even if that meant working until four in the morning.
Excerpt: It's always my thirteenth birthday when I begin remember. Until then, I could be any child. The world is full of the promise childhood holds, and my destiny isn’t sealed. Until my thirteenth birthday, everything is new. Then things change. |
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This month's question: This month's question: Have you had a secondary character run off with your plot line?
Send in your answer below! Editors love feedback!
Last month's question: What do you use to break tension in your stories??
jaya replied: I usually go to nature to describe the elements or just a scenario without breaking away from the story line to break the tension or provide a slight diversion.
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Short Stories: August 24, 2016 Issue [#7826]
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