Exercise #5

1. Heightening Inconsistencies:  What does your character want that is at odds with whatever else the character wants?  What patterns of thought and behavior work against their primary goal?
2. Echoing Details:  Make a list of important details in the first half of the story.  Which of these details has unexplored potential for the second half of the story?  For taking the plot in another direction?  Use some aspect of this detail, but in a new and different way, at least twice later in the story?  (The tree and flying and the sky and the glass sliding door are all related details in Jealous Parrot.)
3. Does the diction of your story begin to form a pattern?  (Think of all the bird language (pluck) in Jealous Parrot.)
4. What is still mysterious to you about your story?  Why?  Write 7 sentences (sprinkled throughout the story or in one big chunk) which accentuate and deepen this sense of mystery. 
5. Something Happening Elsewhere:  From the point of view of your main character, have them imagine a scene that is happening elsewhere--a scene that is or isn't happening without your character being there.  It's happening simultaneously (or not and they just think it is).  The goal here is to allow your characters' imagination to take them (and the story) somewhere surprising.  (How does this imagining relate to what the main character wants?  (And can't get.) 

NOTE:  Let me know which exercise you've chosen.  If you are working on a story-in-progress, underline the new writing generated by the exercise in the draft.  

Bring 2 copies:  one for me, and one for a member of your group.