What Most Men Don’t Know or Forget to Remember: A Biased Study of Adding Details to the Story

by Delsora Lowe

Did this title get your attention?

Here's the real title: Crazy Eights - Scenarios for Your Stories

I had to laugh as the subject for this “Crazy Eights” blog came to me when I was trying to wedge my left foot into my right boot while daydreaming about ideas for a story conflict. Multi-tasking and wedging feet into an uncomfortable position, reminded me of the day I picked up my five-year-old at nursery school. The teacher asked me if my husband had dressed my son that morning?

“Yes, Why?”
The teacher laughed. “Your son came to school with his shoes on the wrong feet.”

What Shoes?

Why do I point this scenario out?


Now I’m not suggesting that all men have trouble multi-tasking, but many men in my generation have never really had to.  It was the era of superwomen, who could have a home and family and a profession all at the same time. And…manage everything perfectly, easily juggling multiple balls with a few boxes and triangles thrown in. Nowadays, most men juggle as much as women. No one has the luxury of only concentrating on one task at a time.

And obviously, I have trouble multi-tasking at times.


Instead, I am pointing out one example of how you can take a minor incident and add depth to your plot, setting, and characterizations. Here are eight crazy and fun examples of real-life scenes I have observed that will spark an idea or add that extra depth of color to a story.

Eight examples – little snippets of life that can be the inspiration for a scene or an entire book – some crazy and some not so crazy.

1- Kid walking funny with shoes on wrong feet and wondering who dressed the child. The child or the parent? What may have distracted the parent? Why was the small child dressing himself? Did s/he throw a temper tantrum and insist on dressing themselves? Was the child trying to be a grown-up and show the parents s/he could do this?


2- Little girl skating with her dad on the two inches of ice formed on a frigid day on the flooded town green, dressed in a purple puffy coat with pink and white flowered leggings, pink boots and hat, pushing a child-sized wooden chair painted in the exact bright pink as her outfit. Who bought the clothes—gramma, mom, dad? Whose idea was it to paint the chair to match the jacket—grandpa’s, dad’s? And how does this scene of teaching a child to skate with a fun “skating aid” fit into a story?


3- A flamboyant outfit or hat on a person strolling down the street or through the grocery store. One of those outfits you can’t help staring at and wondering what possessed someone to wear the outfit. Did they just come from play practice? Do they have a closet full of similar clothes? Are they homeless and wearing whatever they could find in the church giveaway box?


4- A tug-of-war argument over a melon, or two people reaching for the same ear of corn, in the grocery store? Does it end with the hero and heroine each paying half and sharing the melon? Or a fist-fight?  Or a person grabbing the melon and running from the store, chased by the police? Or in an amicable way with one relinquishing the melon to another? Or with a third shopper grabbing the melon and tsking the two as s/he strolls off with their melon?

Mixing Together Ideas for Plots and Characters

5- A young woman teaches ski school on the bunny slope. Her young charges are picked up by nannies. What kind of life do these children have? Who are their parents? What kind of house do they live in?  Is the nanny live-in or providing daily-care only? Who is the young woman and what does she do when she isn’t teaching ski school? Does she have three jobs to support herself? Does she go from location to location working seasonal work? As an aside, I wrote an entire book, The Prince’s Son, starting with these questions.

6- Walking down a hill on a brick sidewalk, past sweet, little cottages, all with fences. One has a gate open and the garden inside is spectacular. Who lives here and works in this beautiful garden? What do the other gates hide? What would it be like to live on such a quiet, neighborly street? I wrote a book, still in draft form, where the reconciliation scene takes place on such a street; one that I wandered down on Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine. I need to dig this manuscript out and finish the book.


7- Pacing in an airport waiting for a delayed plane to head to the funeral of your best friend, and striking up a conversation with a man who has been caring for his sick father and anxious to get home to his wife and kids. You can imagine the myriad of stories on who is waiting for a plane and why. Are they happy or sad? Business or pleasure? Afraid of flying or seasoned traveler? Leaving or heading toward home?


8- Looking out the hotel window, as the sun rises, onto a deserted parking lot. A bus is parked way back in the corner. A black car approaches and parks in the middle. A man in black approaches the bus with a big handled black box. The driver emerges and both disappear behind the bus for a long time. Later one emerges and drives away. Who are they? What are they doing? What happened to the bus driver? Was he murdered and stuffed in the box which is now in the luggage compartment under the bus? It turns out the bus was waiting to pick up an airline crew that overnights at the hotel and the man, I assume, was bringing supplies to the driver. But you can imagine the murder and spy mayhem that went through my head for at least a half an hour as I watched and wondered. Crazy, right?

Have fun with this. Open your eyes to the world around you and turn a mundane, observed scene into a short story or an entire novel. Even if you are not a writer, have fun making up scenarios about what goes on around you. Before I started writing, my friends and I would play this game in the airport or as we sat in a coffee shop.

Here’s to a happy and crazy eighth birthday for the Romancing the Genres Blog. And here’s to many more birthday celebrations!

May Flowers

What true-to-life scenes have caused you to make up stories?

~ cottages to cabins ~ keep the home fires burning ~

Delsora Lowe writes small town sweet romances and contemporary westerns from the mountains of Colorado to the shores of Maine.

Author of the Starlight Grille series, Serenity Harbor Maine novellas, and the Cowboys of Mineral Springs series, Lowe has also authored short romances for Woman’s World magazine.

A first meet, royalty and the nanny romance between a self-exiled prince with a royal chip on his shoulders and the local rancher's daughter who rails against any man who tries to tell her what to do. When she tries to tell the prince how to raise his son, tempers flare and sparks fly.

Amazon E-book link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PZD3FNC/ref=sr_1_2?crid=32PO3EI3KDLQI&keywords=delsora+lowe&qid=1553611414&s=digital-text&sprefix=dels%2Cdigital-text%2C196&sr=1-2-catcorr 

Amazon Print Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1091276862?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

Books2read link, includes Barnes and Noble and iBooks: books2read.com/u/b6xzr6

AUTHOR LINKS:

Author website: www.delsoralowe.com

Author FaceBook page: fb.me/delsoraloweauthor

Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Delsora-Lowe/e/B01M61OM39/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Books2Read Author page: https://www.books2read.com/ap/8GWm98/Delsora-Lowe

BookBub Author Page:

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/delsora-lowe-93c6987f-129d-483d-9f5a-abe603876518

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16045986.Delsora_Lowe 

PHOTO CREDITS:

Hearts - 8 - playing card  

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Crazy Eights  

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Crazy Lunatic Scientist  

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Man in 8 T-shirt  

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Flowers  

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The Makeover – Literary Style

By Robin Weaver

All of us watch those shows (even if we don’t always ‘fess up).  You know the ones I mean.  A frumpy stay-at-home mom and a Goth-looking college student walk onto the set. An overly bubbly announcer introduces some wonderful product and an amazing makeup artist. Then, voila.  A curling  iron and a bottle of hair gel later, Frumpy and Dumpy are now the hot momma who could play Mrs. Robinson and the fraternity girl most likely to get an STD.

I am, of course, talking about the infamous makeover. I can’t tamp down my skepticism enough to believe Frumpy and Dumpy really looked that bad prior to the makeover.  Surely the show’s producers intentionally frizzed their hair for those hideous “before” images.  Maybe they even put gray paste on the To-Be-Made-Overs’ faces.  And I’m certain some production assistant scours thrift stores in search of the worst clothing possible.  When the assistant finds her prize, she stomps on the shapeless dress or baggy jeans with combat boots prior to dressing the poor “volunteers.” When presented in cocktail dresses for the REVEAL, like any woman who goes from Goodwill to couture, the makeover models look one heck of a lot better.

Seriously, short of surgery or drastic liposuction, how much can you really do in a short period of time to improve your looks?

Fiction, fortunately is different. Forget hair products. You, the great and powerful Oz-thor, have magic at your disposal. With a few strokes of your literary pen, you can take a bad manuscript (assuming there’s a decent plot or you have a good voice) and make the tale into a fascinating story.

Have a heroine you don’t like?  Kill her off on page one and promote the amazing sidekick to leading lady status. Are you main characters boring? Just add equal parts of tension and quirkiness and Ozzie and Harriet morph into Morticia and Gomez Addams.

You can even reshape your basic plot into a totally different story. Believe it or not, you can do this with minimal rewrite.

I originally wrote Forbidden Magic, my first novel, about vampire-type characters living in a world without warm-blooded creatures.  My vamps existed on a mineral mimicking the properties of human blood. Naturally, the mineral was becoming depleted (aka external tension). Unfortunately, no one wanted yet another vamp story.

I instigated a makeover.  First, I made my characters Dökkálfar and álfar—ancient elves.  Since my hero and heroine were no longer vampire, they no longer needed blood. Thus I needed another rare substance necessary to my characters’ survival. To keep my external conflict from disintegrating, I decided the sun on my fictional world wouldn’t have the spectrum of Earth’s solar unit.  Naturally, I made this spectrum necessary to elfin survival.  So what could emulate sunlight? What else? Crystals. And all the quartz had been mined.

I kept the same plot. My characters’ goals, motivation, and conflict didn’t change. Yet my novel had a completely different look. And since the story didn't fit my normal writing style--romantic suspense and mystery, I gave my author name a makeover, too.  With an alias--Genia Avers.

If your novel isn’t getting the attention it deserves, if your manuscript is dated, or if you just need more oomph, you too can perform the literary makeover—no license required. Remember, a good story (regardless of genre) needs great characters, with great conflict, and a goal worth achieving. The rest is just…well, hair product and cocktail dresses.

How about you?  Performed any literary makeovers on your manuscripts?

Available at Amazon.com.









Available at Amazon.com.