This week: Let's Make A Call Edited by: Legerdemain  
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Let's Make A Call
Cell phones are an integral part of life now. We not only use them to communicate with one another, also use them to exchange information. But do we want them in our stories? It would be interesting to rewrite World Wars with the same military and current technology. It would have been a lot easier on Paul Revere, he could have texted everyone.
Then there's the reverse side of inventions. Yes, cell phones are wonderful - when they have service and are charged. Drones lose connection with their remote and down they go. Bluetooth hates me. I'm going to leave it at that. And Alexa is always listening. Well hey! I don't like being told it's bedtime. But I do like being reminded of appointments. So much more efficient than using the old kitchen timer.
Then there's formatting of texts in your story. How do you show your reader what part of the dialog is spoken, what part is text, and what part is the Musak playing overhead in the store? Do you type out your texts, or do you use text speak? I rarely even use textspeak (hru?) in my texts, so I find it hard to use in my stories.
So the question is: How far do you inject technology into your stories?
Obviously it's another venue to show what is going on in your story, but it also can be a huge distraction. Are you sprinkling technology into your story like croutons on a salad or are you throwing down a loaf of bread and making the texts a complete part of the story?
I'd like to hear from you. And as always, Write On!
This month's question: How far do you inject technology into your stories?
How do you use that in your writing?
Answer below  Editors love feedback! 
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Excerpt: My female shopping gene is broken. I don't enjoy the type of shopping where you trudge around stores trying to find some particular thing and I have no patience for browsing.
Excerpt: "Wie geht's, Fräulein?" the man in the white lab coat greeted, as the woman before him awoke from her chemically-induced nap. The man was tall and thin, probably in his early seventies. He possessed a manic energy that sent his wispy white hair swaying with every erratic movement.
Excerpt: I eased through the crowd like a ghost on the wind. Past the noodle houses and smoke shops, between the junkies and synthetic prostitutes, no one saw me. I wasn’t really there.
My tech was something new – chronoflage. Hidden just a fraction of a second behind the normal timeline, I could see every pedestrian, taxi, and brilliant virtual marquee just as they’d been. But delayed time meant I couldn’t affect my surroundings.
Excerpt: My new smart-phone was not only highly intelligent, but also psychic. How convenient--it turned out to be--just when I told my new boyfriend I'd like to experience a first-time camping trip. How did my phone know I didn't have a tent?
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Excerpt: "You're gonna love this, General," said Professor Floyd. "This is the big breakthrough we've been looking for, the most important advance in stealth technology ever."
Excerpt: Her eyes were fixated on the telephone that hung on the wall. It was an old fashioned pay phone made of black molded plastic and shiny silver metal. The rotary dial, with its bold alphabetized numbers, confused Laura, but she knew somehow it was her link to help. She held an obscure memory of the contraption but the invention was from a different era. She pushed her fingertips into her jean pocket unwittingly digging for a coin that would somehow deliver her to safety. She hoped to convey the dire emergency of her situation to some faceless voice residing in the black box.
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Excerpt: Her hand shot to her mouth, trying to mask the sound of her breathing. She thought she could hear something tapping, but it was too faint. She inched closer to the sound, despite the voices screaming in her head, reminding her of the all the movies she had seen. But her desk was over by the sound, and she had nowhere else to go. Besides, it was just a sound. As she inched closer, she began to notice the gushy noise in a rhythmic fashion.
*Squish* *Squish* *Squish* *Squish* *Squish* *Squish* *Squish* *Squish*
Character Prompt for March 2020:
Your character is returning home again after being away for a long time.
They can be looking forward to returning home, or dreading it.
They can return as triumphant, or as a failure in whatever it is they left to do.
Write the story of your character's homecoming experience.
MARCH PROMPT/ A Conversation with Your Dentist
The story must have a plot with some sort of fantasy element integrated into it and have a beginning, middle and end.
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This month's question: How far do you inject technology into your stories?
How do you use that in your writing?
Answer below Editors love feedback!
Last month's question in "Action/Adventure Newsletter (February 12, 2020)" : Which trope was your favorite? Have you used these?
concrete_angel responded: I love this newsletter! Tropes and cliches can sometimes overlap, like you said, but more than anything, tropes are the building blocks of stories. Character archetypes all fall under some sort of trope, but we're not getting rid of the Jerk with the Heart of Gold or the Eccentric Mentor anytime soon. Tropes are bleached bones of stories. It's up to the author to give them flesh. If the author doesn't... they'll probably read as dry and cliche, but when the author takes a couple tropes and builds a world around them, they'll do their jobs as the skeleton of the story and help it hold its own weight (and readers' attention). Readers come to some works just for tropes. I'm guilty of that, for sure. Heist stories? Found families? The writer has my attention.
BIG BAD WOLF is hopping  answered: We all use tropes, even if we don't notice them at first. Of course, as the page says, Tropes Ain't Bad.
Spring in my Sox  sent: I literally just used a version of the remove the earpiece. I had an operative behind enemy lines being monitored remotely turn off her earbud and do exactly the opposite of what her handler was ordering.
Quick-Quill  replied: I don't like using the obvious tropes you listed. However Geico made a successful ad out of kids walking out of a cornfield, not using the running car to escape, but chose the creepy garage with hanging chainsaws.
It worked. deus ex machina works too. Using any one from your list is viable. We all use them, just more subtly.
Tehuti, Lord Of The Eight  said in newsfeed: I don't think I've ever used any of those in the newsletter; never even heard of the hand-reaching one.
I try not to overthink using "tropes" too much, because it seems EVERYTHING can be considered a "trope" nowadays; and if you spend too much time reading over all of them and trying to avoid them, you'll never write anything. It's pretty much guaranteed that everyone uses tropes. IMO (take it with a grain of salt, because I'm "not really a writer"), they're fine if you use them creatively and/or in moderation.
(Plus that TV tropes site nags me to turn off my adblocker, which I refuse to do for safety reasons, so I can't visit it anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
runoffscribe  responded to Tehuti, Lord Of The Eight in the newsfeed:
A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works.
Wikipedia
Lazarus Long (Time Enough for Love, Heinlein) argued that it is the shortest words in English that are the most slippery. He was speaking of "love", but "trope" is longer by but one letter. It is a neutral term, a simple noun with fewer connotations built into its various usages than has "love".
Certain tropes may be trite in their common forms. The fun is in taking some well-worn story device (a service tech seduces a kept woman) and turning it on its head (both are women: Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon in Bound).
There is no defining a thing by what it is not, but it is useful to reconnoiter the limits. Neither character, nor setting nor plot is a trope. Using a desert island to tell a castaway story is a trope, and a trite one. In The Martian, Matt Damon was a castaway on Mars. The setting is a trope, distinctive and not trite.
That movie was a nice reversal on the old television comedy My Favorite Martian, in which Ray Walston played a Martian castaway in suburbia. Suburbia is a trite trope, and this may be a pointer to a trope which is evergreen. Juxtapose the trite trope against the inventive trope. Boot it and watch it run.
Yes, I just cited a trope as consisting of two lesser tropes. It happens all the time.
Bilal Latif  revealed in the newsfeed: I don't think I've used any tropes mentioned in the newsletter, but of those specifically, I think 'shoot the fuel tank' could work quite well in the right piece.
s has a revelation in the newsfeed: I've never used the tropes mentioned, but have used the following:
* An adventure brings 2 friends of the opposite gender together as lovers.
* The adults don't believe the kid that there's danger a-lurkin'.
* Hero drives at random and finds exactly what he needs to find.
Wow, I'm a walking cliché...
Thanks to everyone responding to the newsletter, not only in the email but when they are shared in the Newsfeed. Your feedback is important to me! Not only do I get to learn more, I get to know my fellow members at WDC, thank you! Leger~ |
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Action/Adventure: March 11, 2020 Issue [#10070]
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