Hello everyone! Happy Memorial Day!
“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” – Lou Holtz
Everyone reaches a moment in their life where they face a situation (physical, financial, emotional, relational, etc.) which feels too overwhelming to handle. There are three basic responses to these situations:
- Fight – Work to resolve the problem
- Flight – Remove oneself from the situation
- Freeze – Avoid or ignore the issue
Your writing challenge for the next two weeks is to come up with a potentially crippling situation and write a short story about how the protagonist handles it. The issue can be internal (a health issue or mental disorder) or external (a difficult relationship, financial troubles, a sick loved one, etc.). You must have a goal for the protagonist to either succeed at or fail to achieve.
1. Beginning: Introduce your high stress situation and decide how your character will respond to it (fight, flight, or freeze).
Things for You to Consider as the Writer:
- What is the protagonist’s attitude towards the situation?
- Will that attitude change over time?
2. Middle: Come up with three ways that your protagonist will try to accomplish his/her goal and a minimum of one consequence for each action taken. I strongly recommend that the first two attempts fail or that they are only partially successful. The results of the first two attempts should add to your protagonist’s stress in some way. The protagonist’s third attempt should be your climax.
Example Responses to Stressful Situations:
- confiding in and/or depending on someone (e.g. God, family members, a friend, a therapist, etc.)
- trying to manage stress through:
- a healthy diet and/or exercise
- impulse shopping
- excessive eating
- using a controlled substance (e.g. drugs, alcohol, etc.)
- becoming depressed
- responding irritably to people
- making a major life change
- etc.
3. Conclusion: Does your protagonist succeed or fail?
Happy writing!
Katie
katiemerkelwriter 