WRITER IN MOTION: THE PROMPT

Writing
Written By Paulette Kennedy
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The Prompt

Photo by Casey Horner

This past week has been a long one, y’all. The anticipation for the prompt was real! (It didn’t help that our ringleader Jeni Chappelle had been teasing us for days in the Slack chat!)

But, here it is! And I couldn’t be more excited. I love the ocean and anything with a maritime theme, so I was super stoked that this prompt would work well with ideas I had been lightly brainstorming in anticipation. A soon as I saw the prompt, I immediately started working on the outline for my short story. I’m not a natural outliner, I’m a born pantser, but thanks to Jeni recommending Take Off Your Pants, I have become quite the plotter of late. Short stories are not my strong suit — and it’s extra difficult to create a full character arc in less than 500 words, so I knew I would need an outline to keep my story from meandering.

I will post my outline after I post my first draft next weekend. But I’ll reveal two things:

  1. It’s Historical Noir

  2. It takes place in Marseille, France.

After I had my outline, it was easy to pound out my bare bones rough draft in about an hour. I tend to be an underwriter, so I like to leave room for adding to my drafts during revisions. I’m pretty stoked about this story and my protagonist, so I can’t wait to share the draft with you!

For those of you curious about our timeline for WiM, Jeni made this great graphic:

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Paulette Kennedy
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WRITER IN MOTION : THE ROUGH DRAFT
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ANNOUNCING WRITER IN MOTION