Category: Writing course

Question 1

This required me to record and transcribe a conversation. I’m not going to reproduce this here because some of it is private.

Question 2

This required me to turn the transcription into something that could be included as dialogue in a story. I’m not going to reproduce it for the same reason.

Question 3

This question asked for three different dialogues, taken from a given selection, or a made up one.

Sacking an employee

In she walked, the Jezebel. Swaying her hips and somehow bouncing, despite her smooth carriage.

‘Please have a seat, Ms. Jones.’ I spoke pleasantly, belying my inner storm.

‘How can I help, Mr. Smith?’ Her voice was low and seductive, and she crossed her long legs provocatively.

She knows, I thought. But it’s too late.

‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Ms. Jones. Mrs. Brown has come to me about your recent performance. She said she has instructed you time and again to wear clothing more suited to our office environment, and that you have been tardy several times over the last month. She also says that she has repeatedly told you to stay away from social media during work hours.’

‘She has?’ Her harlot’s eyes began to fill, and her voice took on a wavering note that was purely designed to weaken my resolve. ‘But she said that everything was going to be okay, that she was going to smooth things over.’

‘Rules are rules, Ms. Jones, and I will not have them mocked.’ I put iron into my voice, speaking the words I had rehearsed. ‘I manage this branch, and your standard of dress and slipshod approach to your work here campaign against the high standards upheld by other employees.’

Her lower lip trembled momentarily, and then she started crying in earnest. I steeled my heart against her and sat, unmoved. After a few moments, she fired one last salvo. ‘Mrs. Brown said that customers liked me, and she said that I brightened the branch up. Th- that I had a p- positive effect on m- morale!’

She was wailing now, the trollop. ‘Please leave now, Ms. Jones,’ I ground out. ‘Security is waiting for you at my door. Gather your effects from your workstation and exit the premises. You will be sent two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice.’

She stood and turned, her shapely figure trembling with the force of her emotion. She left my office, the embodiment of feline grace.

How dare she? Working here for months, parading around in next to nothing, all availability and come-hither looks for the customers, and all of the staff. Everyone.

Except me.

Detective interviewing a criminal suspect

Detective John Taylor touched a button, and a green light started glowing. John closed his eyes. ‘This is Detective John Taylor, interviewing suspect Frank Williams. Interview starts at two-oh-one the morning of January 1, 2019.’

John rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them. He looked at Frank. ‘Mr. Williams, let me get right to the point. Actually, do you mind if I call you Frank?’

Frank shook his head, somewhat apprehensively.

‘What, I can’t call you “Frank”?’ Already, the exasperation was building.

‘No, I don’t mind if you call me “Frank.” It’s my name.’

‘Frank, then. Frank, what the hell were you thinking?’ John paused. Frank just sat there, doing his best impression of a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching road train.

‘You’re in a very serious situation here. You’ve tampered with the city’s traffic management system, occasioning some grievous injuries, and some of these may become fatalities. We’re going to hit you with every charge we can think of, including pulling off-duty officers away from their New Year’s Eve parties. It’s certain that you’re going to end up in jail.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Not what?’ John was thrown a bit of stride. He wasn’t used to that kind of denial.

‘Certain. That I’m going to jail.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘It is! We’ve got a clear trail of evidence from the software that controls the traffic management system to your IP address, to your home. We found you sitting in front of your computer, with the hacking software active. I don’t know how you did it, but you got the red light cameras to recognise cabs, and you got something else to change all the lights in the intersection to green whenever you spotted one. People got hurt in so many accidents that we still haven’t finished counting.’

John paused again, waiting for something, anything from this strange little man. Nothing changed. Then Frank blinked once. Twice. Then nothing.

‘Well?’ asked John.

Frank blinked again. ‘Well, what?’

‘Don’t you have anything to say?’

‘About what?’

John closed his eyes again. Took a deep breath. Opened his eyes. ‘About the charges the state will be pressing against you.’

‘It’s not certain. Nothing is.’

‘Oh, Frank. This is most definitely certain.’

‘But nothing is certain,’ Frank almost wailed, showing emotion for the first time. ‘My mum told me! “Nothing is certain,” she said, “except death and taxis.”’

‘Taxes,’ John corrected, almost absently.

‘And now I’ve proved that we can’t rely on them— what?’

‘Taxes,’ said John. ‘“Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” That’s the saying.’

The colour drained from Frank’s face, and his mouth dropped open. Then it closed with a ‘clop’ sound. He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands.

A lull in the action

‘You OK?’ The encrypted radio issued a burst of static when I released the button.

Bill answered almost immediately. ‘For the moment. You?’

‘I’m good. Where are you? I lost track of you after that grenade dropped between us. I went back and left, into the alley. The shrapnel just blew straight past.’

‘I went right and ended up behind a dumpster.’

‘The Veolia one?’

‘Yes, the Veolia one. Geez. I mean, how many dumpsters did you see?’

‘Sorry. Hey, it was pretty loud from where I was. How’s your hearing?’

‘There’s a lot of ringing going on, but we’re talking, right?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

There was a pause, and then Bill asked how I was doing for ammo.

‘Uh … getting a little low,’ I said. ‘Probably got enough for what we have to do, but I won’t be bringing any back.’

There was a bit of a pause.

‘Steve?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I might be able to lob a couple of clips over to where you are.’

‘What, haven’t you been using it?’

‘It’s not so much that I haven’t been, but that I won’t be.’

My breath caught in my throat for a moment.

‘What happened?’

‘I think some of that shrapnel came through under the dumpster. I thought I was OK, because I couldn’t feel anything wrong. But I can’t feel my legs. It doesn’t hurt, Steve.’ He paused. ‘But there’s so much blood.’ His voice was getting weaker, but he sounded somehow disgusted. ‘I’m going to die in a puddle of my own blood.’

‘I’ll be over there in a sec.’ I fished around in one of my many pockets and pulled out a small mirror. I edged it out of the mouth of the alley at the level of the pavement. I wanted to find out if I could see what the opposition was doing. A shot rang out, and the mirror spun off down the road.

‘You OK?’ Bill’s voice was the merest whisper, and the radio’s burst of static sounded somehow tired.

I pushed the button on the side of the radio. ‘For the moment.’

Question 1

This question required me to write down whatever I could about a place I’d never visited. I then had to research the place properly and, then compare and contrast my assumed knowledge and the facts. There was nothing particularly creative about my assumptions and research concerning Havana, Cuba, so I’m not going to reproduce it.

Question 2

The task here was to spontaneously write three opening sentences or paragraphs to introduce each of the following. Well, looking back at that, I don’t think I did too well with the “spontaneous” thing. Quite a bit of thought went into each of the following three items.

Setting

The day was warm and dry, and the waves washed gently on to the shore. Large Norfolk Island pines shaded the table, its occupants, and the takeaway meal that had so recently been wrapped in butchers’ paper. Without warning, a kookaburra swooped between the couple, speared a piece of fish and flew off to perch in a tree overlooking the beach. In keeping with the day, it laughed. Its victims laughed too, and one of them took a picture of the bird, posting it to Snapchat.

Character

‘I was thirty-five,’ she said to me, ‘because I remember waking up on my thirty-sixth birthday and feeling so very alone.’ She looked down at her hands, entwined unmoving in her lap. She was no longer pretty, but grief had softened her features and when she eventually looked up, I saw resilience rather than hardness.

Event

The rollercoaster, locked into its loop, passed shatteringly over the weakening piece of track. The tiny section of mechanical fatigue that had started as an imperfection too small to be detected by quality control procedures grew. And grew again. And then, one morning, just after the cars had crashed over the flaw, it broke. Not that anyone saw it. Not then. But as the rollercoaster raced around the track yet again, accompanied by squeals of excitement, the section fell away. Amid shrieks of tortured metal and mechanical carnage, the squeals gave way to screams. Then, for a moment, there was silence.

Question 3

I had to conceive four different ideas for stories, and explain how they came to be.

Story idea 1 (Comedy)

Bartholomew (Barry) Sherman, a renegade submarine captain who became a pirate, and Harriet (Harry) Forster, the owner of an illegal arms warehouse near the Mediterranean coast, tire of their jobs. Near the start of the story, they trade places. Both overcome their underlings’ inevitable opposition and take such joy in their new roles that they start to reconfigure them. Harry starts attacking other pirates for their loot and rescuing whatever captives the other pirates have taken; Barry starts sabotaging his competitions’ shipments and funnelling stolen arms to oppressed people.

This started out as a dream I remembered.

Story idea 2 (Fantasy drama)

Tom Thumb finds himself in Lilliput and must reconcile the fact that despite being with people his own size, he is still persecuted … simply because he is an outsider.

This was another nocturnal notion, but not a dream.

Story idea 3 (Science fiction drama)

Set in the near future, everyone in Western culture has wearable technology. Network access is ubiquitous, as are cameras and access to them. This makes is possible (for instance) to see around corners using augmented reality. While the physical appearances of buildings and their internals are boring and colourless, everyone walks through an environment of their own selection. A young man is brought into this milieu from a remote village in India to study theology. The story explores his culture shock, the relationships in which he finds himself, how he deals with the conflict between what he regards as God’s will and his hosts’ lifestyle, and what compromises he makes to function in this environment.

My wife and I are currently sponsoring such a young man as he engages with Youth With a Mission’s Discipleship Training School.

Story idea 4 (Fantasy satire)

An elf with a flair for engineering starts bucking the system by dreaming up or discovering mundane solutions to problems that are traditionally solved magically. It would be designed to poke a bit of fun at people who have ‘sacred cows’ in how they deal with situations.

This started out with an ‘out of the ordinary situation’ (an imp disrupting luggage processing at an airport), and somehow took a left-hand turn into something quite pointy.

Question 1

The task here was to develop a fictional character based on some real-life observations.

Gilbert Fitzgerald

What he looks like

Gil Fitzgerald is 170 cm tall and weighs 95 kg. He has dark hair, a circle beard and he only shaves twice a week.

He wears glasses with fairly heavy black frames.

His gait is a little awkward. His extra weight is impacting his posture, and he doesn’t make the effort to stand up straight. When he walks, his toes are much further apart than his heels. He doesn’t lift his feet very high, and often his feet slide along the ground. When he does lift his feet, they land heavily.

At work, he is required to wear the ‘front-of-house’ uniform. This is a red shirt, with black shoes, pants, jacket, apron and cap. This is OK by him, because by choice, he wears fairly similar clothes when he’s away from work.

Gil doesn’t look happy. He doesn’t make an effort to keep his demeanour light, and has an enervating impact on those around him. It’s like there is more gravity when he’s around, making everyone feel heavier.

Where he lives

Gil and his mother (Kylie) live in the suburbs. The house is a small three-bedroom home. Gil’s mum keeps the house very tidy, but he refuses to let her into his room. It is his sanctuary, and he has it configured the way he wants. There is a computer, and X-box and some really good speakers. The bed is an ensemble with an inner-spring mattress.

Relationships

Gil’s father (Glen) died after a very brief bout with cancer when Gil was eight years old. Glen was insured, and the insurance was enough to pay out their house, so Gil and his mum didn’t have to worry too much about money. However, Glen’s absence has had a significant impact on Gil’s life. Gil doesn’t tell anyone that his father is dead; rather he says that his father left when he was eight. He doesn’t want to have to put up with condolences, and it seems like most people have had a parent leave, so that’s a pretty normal thing to face. His imagination sometimes runs away with him, and he feels that there is dad out there who might want to come back and get to know him.

Kylie (Gil’s mum) has got on with life but has never tried to strike up a relationship with another man. She is very particular about her environment and is a bit of a ‘neat-freak’ without being clinically obsessive. She has tried not to lean too hard on Gil for emotional support, but well-meaning friends spoke to Gil about being the ‘man of the house’ soon after Glen died, and she’s concerned that he’s taken too much weight upon himself. Gil doesn’t talk to her very much, so she’s not sure how he really feels about that. Kylie has read ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ and is pretty sure she can’t make him share his feelings with her but doesn’t know how to get him to open up safely. She cooks and cleans but has no idea what to buy him for his birthday or Christmas.

Superficially, Gil ignores his mother. She’s like part of the furniture. Although she has tried to be both mum and dad, Gil classifies her mostly as ‘not dad’ and when she nags him about his physical or emotional health, he shuts her off. He understands that this is rough on her but does it anyway.

Gil’s boss is James. James doesn’t care very much how Gil feels, he just wants the job done. From Gil’s point of view, this is great. James lets Gil do the work without getting in his way, and when the job can’t be done or isn’t clear, James will take the time to find out why and either educate Gil or fix the situation. Gil likes the boundaries and his expectations are managed well.

Megan is a co-worker at McDonalds. Gil has not kept in contact with anyone from his school days and is generally cocooned by his gaming and technology. Megan, however, has taken a shine to him and tries to engage him in conversation. She’s a year younger than he is, and in his own mind, she’s ‘kinda cute.’ However, he has no real model for relational behaviour. Without seeing his mum and dad interact, his role models for relationships are TV, games and online pornography (which he classifies in his mind as ‘erotica’). He doesn’t really know how to respond to her.

Character traits

It turns out that Gil could get by quite happily without his glasses but wears them for two very specific reasons. The first is that his eyes are quite wide-set, and without them, he thinks that his face looks a bit like a plastic doll’s face when someone has pushed the bridge of the nose in. The second is that he discovered over time that people took his input regarding technical matters more seriously when he wore them.

Gil has an almost mystical rapport with machines. He’s the go-to guy whenever some piece of technology plays up. It’s almost embarrassing when people ask for help, because when he shows up, the machines generally just start behaving. The person who asked for help usually starts trying to convince him that there really was a problem, and he believes them, but doesn’t know how to put them at ease. He usually just mumbles something inane (he thinks) and goes back to what he was doing. He doesn’t know why or how things come together when he gets there … it just does. Oh, if the problem persists, he can figure it out almost every time, but usually things straighten themselves out. This is why he’s given the responsibility for the kiosks at work. Under his supervision, they just work. When someone else takes over, it seems like one is breaking down every second day.

He calls himself ‘Gil’ rather than ‘Gilbert,’ because that’s how his parents abbreviated his name. Children in the first couple of years at school took no real notice of this until one of them realised that this sounded like ‘gill’, and fish breathe with gills. So someone started calling him ‘Fish-breath,’ which evolved into ‘Stinky.’ He doesn’t consciously remember this, but he always chooses to buy more expensive deodorants and aftershave products. He won’t go anywhere without cleaning his teeth.

A typical day

A typical day for Gil is to wake at 7am, have breakfast (toast and cereal). He works a day shift at McDonalds, eating lunch in the restaurant. He comes home and plays his X-box until dinner time, then he leaves the table and either continues gaming or watches Netflix. Then he goes to bed around 11pm or midnight.

Question 2

This question was to take a brief factual description of some space, and then develop an atmospheric evocative description of the space. I chose my home office.

The factual description

This room is a top-storey three by three-and-a-half metre bedroom, repurposed as an office. There is a south-facing window that looks out over the top of other houses and trees, out to a hill with a cell-tower on top.

Looking around the room, the salient features are a mattress lying on the floor in front of a built-in wardrobe, a couple of chairs, a desk and computer equipment. There are also several stacks of paper, boxes and bags. One of the stacks contains loose paper, and old keyboard, a cylindrical plastic half-full CD container and a frypan.

Of the chairs, one is larger, positioned in front of the desk, and has no armrests. This is clearly the work chair. The other has a cloth nappy on it. Both are good-quality office chairs, and they stand on heavy plastic carpet protector mats that have been patched with gaffer tape where they’ve cracked.

The desk has moulded aluminium supports instead of legs, and the top is a board with a white enamel veneer. It is cluttered. There are cables and more cables, a keyboard, mouse and mouse mat, a laptop computer and two large monitors. The computer tower sits on the floor beside the desk, because clearly, there isn’t space for it on the desk itself. There are also some toys: a ForeverSpin dock with five tops and a ForeverBase; a pewter statuette of Yoda with a lightsabre; and a folding knife with a five-inch blade.

The computers are of high quality, and both monitors are 4K displays. There is an uninterruptible power supply behind the computer. The quality of the equipment seems at odds with the general clutter.

The atmospheric evocative description

Dust. That was his first impression. All of the surfaces were lightly coated with dust. Here and there, someone had made an effort to wipe a surface, but clearly, the dust was winning. It was not the dust of abandonment—it was the dust of not caring.

There was evidence of activity in the keyboard’s shiny keys and the worn mouse buttons, but it was due to the requirements of duty, not delight. Lights on various devices flashed and flickered in a desultory fashion, resigned to conveying information that would never be acknowledged. Admittedly, the computer and its peripherals were of high quality, but they were old enough for it to be obvious that the occupant didn’t care enough to update. Similarly, the pewter statuette of Yoda and the ForeverSpin tops were quality items, but like everything else in the room, they were succumbing to the insidious advance of the dust. No-one had picked them up recently. And the rest of clutter on the desk? It seemed that the occupant was in the habit of picking things up, and then just putting them down instead of putting them away. It was not the clutter of creative activity, and it held nothing of interest.

There was no artwork on the walls, and the light grudgingly admitted by the windows seemed pale and somehow bleak. The mattress on the floor appeared lifeless and uninviting, as if it offered a short and shallow period of death instead of the opportunity to rest and be revived. Whatever was in the wardrobe itself remained hidden and unregarded, and maybe it was better so.

Question 1

This question asked about themes that were appropriate for different categories of stories.

Themes appropriate for suspense

• Pawns can become queens
• Nothing is as it appears / no-one is as they appear
• Trust no-one / anyone can betray you
• Be afraid … someone is watching / you cannot hide anything

Themes appropriate for murder mystery

• Crime doesn’t pay / you’ll never get away with it / status doesn’t protect you from the law
• There is always someone smarter
• The end doesn’t justify the means
• As a twist in the tail: if you have enough money or power, you can get away with anything

Themes appropriate for modern day fantasy

• Beauty can be found (and experienced) wherever you look
• You are more powerful than you believe
• You are part of a greater story with a role to play in a great adventure
• There is more to life than what you see with your eyes
• There is the regular “good conquers evil” theme, but what is “good” and what is “evil” is being increasingly blurred by the advent of anti-heroes such as Thomas Covenant and Deadpool

Themes appropriate for science fiction

• There will always be dangerous unintended consequences
• Lack of knowledge can kill you
• Whatever the odds, humanity will overcome
• Human nature remains the same despite the setting … whether utopian, dystopian or anything in between

Question 2

This question asked me to develop a plot around a nominated theme. I chose “dangerous unintended consequences”.

Causative action

A biomechanical researcher develops nanotechnology that can rebuild people’s ocular lenses in-situ to make the person’s vision perfect. Her employer takes the product to market before a proper course of testing and trials.

Complication 1

The manufactured lenses don’t last, and decay within a couple of years. The people who have undergone the initial treatment face further treatment or blindness.

Rising action 1

Lawsuits are brought against the company, and the company holds the researcher responsible for the problem, despite her opposition to having the technology released so quickly. She has to come up with a solution to the problem, and spends a lot of time in the lab, neglecting family and friends.

Climax 1

The researcher discovers the problem with the technology and produces a fix that allows the manufactured lens to last indefinitely.

Falling action 1

Patients are brought in, undergo a procedure that introduces still more nanotechnology into their eyes, and their lenses are built as required.

Complication 2

Some patients’ original nanotechnology hadn’t completely degraded before the second application. There are adverse reactions between the two versions of the treatment, and over time, they produce a corrupted form of the lens material that escapes the confines of the eye, causing deposits to form in the brain.

Rising action 2

We see personality changes in the patients we’ve been following from the start. People around them become suspicious, and one patient’s spouse (a neurologist) recognises the changes as being similar to a brain tumour. The patient undergoes a scan, the deposits are found, and the cause is identified. By this time, the effects are irreversible, and patients start to die.

Our researcher (the protagonist) experiences crushing guilt. Her employer starts talking to her, endeavouring to keep her quiet in case she starts pointing her finger at their procedures. Her grief turns to rage, and she publishes all of her notes and memos to the internet. The company attempts to discredit her, then kill her.

Climax 2

The company’s manipulations misfire, and it is exposed.

Falling action 2

The researcher lives, but still feels guilt at what has been happened to her patients. Outraged and bereaved relatives still seek revenge and/or compensation, but from company rather than the researcher.

Denouement

The reality of what they’ve done is brought home to those in the company responsible for pushing the technology to market, and they are imprisoned. The researcher leaves her profession because of her grief, and joins (or founds) a technology watchdog organisation.

Question 3

This was an analysis of the first few pages of two stories from the same categories. I chose Jack and Jill (the third book in the Alex Cross series) by James Patterson, and Tripwire (the third book in the Jack Reacher series) by Lee Child.

Because there was nothing particularly creative in this analysis, I’ve not included the text here.

I enrolled in the Writing Fiction course offered by ACS Distance Education. As I started submitting my assignments, I found myself wanting to show people what I’d written — yes, I’m just as hungry for approval as any other (wannabe) writer. So rather than having to pull up my OneDrive documents, and zoom and pinch to make the documents readable on my phone, I thought I’d add the relevant segments to a special category of my blog.

Question 1

This was an analysis of a short story that is available here: http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=isample&article=_002. It’s “The Sound of Distant Thunder” by Mike Barretta. Because it does not require me to come up with any thing new, I’ve not included the answer here.

Question 2

This question asked how I would turn this story into a story from a different category. I chose to say how I would turn it into a suspense story.

The last segment of this story explains the origin of the Tutors, and their reason for being. To turn this into a suspense story, I would introduce the man (and the shadowy organisation behind him) at the start of the story, but withhold his motivation. I would gradually reveal this motivation at various stages of the story. The man would be perceived as a puppet master who casts the Tutors into the world, seeking children with great potential for him to exploit for his own (possibly nefarious) ends.

The reader would be given a glimpse of this man as Tutor DX113-044 reports on Diallo’s progress at the beginning. He steeples his fingers and murmurs sotto voce, “Ah, Diallo. Come to me. See what I can do with you.”

He is controlling the Wraith, and is Diallo’s real (but unseen) opponent. He admires the boy’s skill, but predicts future trials and wonders at his ability to overcome.

The author mentions brain farms … the reader would be encouraged to consider whether the man wants Diallo for inclusion in one such enterprise.

Every obstacle faced by Diallo could be interpreted as being arranged by this man. As Diallo continues to overcome, the reader would be encouraged to wonder whether the man regards the boy as a threat but is constrained from acting openly.

As Diallo approaches the house at the end of the story, he would reflect over the challenges he has faced, and consider how the destiny he sought has been thwarted thus far. Is the door he is approaching just one more obstacle? Will this be challenge that defeats him? Perhaps kills him? The man would have seen him approaching from the day before. He would be eager for the boy to come to him, because he can’t be seen to be trying to entice anyone to his house. The man’s anticipation would serve to contrast Diallo’s nervousness until the tension resolves when he opens the door: “Diallo! Your journey has been hard, my boy … but welcome home. Welcome to the stars.”

Question 3

This question asked about what categories of story I’m most suited to writing, and then asked to explain and differentiate between them.

I believe I’m most suited to write science fiction, fantasy and comedy. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure that comedy is something that must stand apart from either or the other two categories. Yes, you can have stories that are written purely to amuse, but Terry Pratchett wrote laugh-out-loud satire set in in a fantasy world, and Douglas Adams wrote similarly funny science fiction.

For me, there are two main differences between science fiction and fantasy. The first is the treatment of the supernatural aspects of the story. If something seemingly supernatural becomes part of a science fiction story, the protagonist is likely to be trying to find an explanation for it, or accepting it as some as yet unexplained phenomenon or the remnant technology of a superior race. There is nothing beyond physics and evolution as an explanation for any event or state of being. Fantasy embraces the unknown as the province of gods or spirits, and people can have influence over these elemental forces by using arcane ritual or occult knowledge.

The second main difference in my mind is the nature of the conflict presented in the two categories. Conflict in science fiction is generally psychological, sociological or physical, or represented by people solving problems presented by nature. Conflict in fantasy is more likely to be between forces of good and evil. From this point of view, I’d say that Star Trek was a science fiction collection, and Star Wars was more of a set of fantasy stories.