G’ Memorial Day! Hope all’s tremendous!
Characterization, plot, dialogue, viewpoint, setting, figurative language, etc… – fiction writing subjects like these need mastered in order to produce literary fiction. Given this, I often pick one and attempt a chapter with focus on it. A week or so ago, I’d picked ‘suspense’ and had attempted a chapter with it in mind. Here’s the beginning of it (and don’t laugh…hard…lol!):
Gabriella marched to a log and snatched a notebook. “What about this?”
Bethany shook her head and gestured toward a firepit. “Throw that in, too.”
Gabriella shrugged and ambled to the pit.
“Stop!”
Both girls snapped toward a shadowy tree trunk.
“Who’s there,” Bethany said.
Nothing.
Bethany waved to Gabriella. “Burn it.”
Gabriella held it over the fire.
“Reese,” a voice said. “My name’s Reese.”
“Step out,” Bethany said, and a girl did and stood beside the trunk.
“A kid?” Gabriella said. “Way out here?”
Bethany sighed, peered at the girl. “What do you want?”
“To know why you were going to harm that,” Reese said.
“What?” Bethany pointed at the notebook. “This? Because it, like everything else in this bag, belonged to a lying creep I know longer want to remember. So, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got memories to burn.” She waved at Gabriella who dropped the book into flames.
“No!” Reese said and dashed through shadows to the firepit and extended her hand toward the flames, and Gabriella and Bethany seized her.
“What are you doing??” Bethany said. “The nearest hospital’s fifty miles away.”
“You’ll destroy it!! Let me go!!”
“Not if you plan to destroy yourself…”
“Rory!” Reese said. “Casey Rory!”
Bethany and Gabriella glanced at each other.
“Isn’t she the ‘lying creep’ you’d referred to?”
Bethany snatched Reese face-to-face with her. “How do you know Rory?”
“Save the notebook, and I’ll tell you.”
“Spill it!”
“In the woods near you guys’ high school, I saw her…”