Word Pirates

Yesterday’s Word Pirates meeting was one of the good ones. As usual, the first thing we did was to read our work aloud to each other. (BTW, I was very happy to see that even when some of you don’t make it to the meeting, you still do the prompts.)

After that, we discussed what makes a story a story. Though we didn’t come up with a solid answer to that question, we did agree that the point of a story is to connect with an audience. So how do we take a memory or story idea and turn it into something that people connect with? We discussed different ways to do that, from breaking the idea down to its emotional /social elements, to just writing it and seeing what happens, to making sure there is good imagery and emotional honesty in the piece. We also agreed that a character should shift within a story, even if that shift is small.

Which brings us to this week’s prompt: Write a short-short where a character changes in some way. For example, something could happen so that a wife suddenly falls out of love with her husband, or a vegan could smell some bacon cooking and suddenly decide to be a meat eater … etc.

Our next meeting is October 19th. Since I will be out of town, the meeting will be held at Steve’s house in East Petaluma. In honor of Part 3 of the Interview Series, which will be with an editor from Creative Nonfiction, we will be focusing on the essay. See you then.