Hidden agenda

Related to misunderstood characters.....

Sometimes a good way of building suspense in a scene is to make it appear as if characters, or even other things, have a secret. It's easy to descend into melodrama again using this technique. You don't want to cause blunt force head trauma by beating the reader to death with “There's a secret! A secret, I said!” Being able do this subtly, and yet still create the right level of suspense shows skill.

So here's the challenge: Write a scene with a secret. Remember, it isn't just characters that have secrets. An object, a pet, a place can all hold secrets. Showing that something inanimate or inarticulate has a secret may even be harder that skillfully showing a character with a secret, so bonus if you choose this for your challenge entry.

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Misunderstood

Countering Friday's prompt:

Sometimes a character's actions, reactions, and overall demeanor leads the reader into believing the character is antagonistic, or guilty of some dark act within the context of the story. This has been cliched in film and television, where the ugly, foul-tempered character turns out to be a hero finally (and the heroism usually results in the character's injury or death!).

However, writing your character as being misunderstood can be a powerful tool to build sympathy for him or her (or it), which is why the technique is used so often. One key is to do it subtly, without beating your reader about the head and neck area with stereotypical villain characteristics like the scar, the taciturn manner, the limp, etc. Another option is to write the character as being misunderstood in terms of something other than good and evil. For example, a character may be misunderstood as unintelligent, or cruel, or as a bully.

Your task for this prompt is to write a scene where it become obvious - gradually, it should dawn on the reader rather than surprising him or her - that a character is misunderstood.

Good luck.

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Two-faced

We've all known two-faced people before, someone who appears to be your friend but undermines your efforts, or denigrates you when you're not around.

Depicting a character like this can be a good way to generate dislike for a character, or to generate sympathy for a character. But writing a scene which shows this type of behavior, and doing it subtly, shows skill.

So here's the challenge: Write a scene which hints at a character being two-faced, but without showing the actual acts.

Good luck.

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Miraculous

While reading this post at the blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, I found this quote from Freeman Dyson:

Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.

(link to quote)

This is an interesting theory. It seems to match my personal experience. It also gives me the idea for an interesting writing exercise.

Many fictional plots are melodramatic, but if the melodrama is not kept in check, the writing can become humourous (usually unintentionally). The ability to write an understated scene of melodramatic events can be a useful skill. Miracles, by their very nature, verge on the melodramatic. They elicit exaggerated emotion, and typically involve exaggerated characters and events.

So here's this week's challenge: Write a short scene depicting miraculous events, but understate them so much that they seem nearly commonplace.

Good luck.

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