Allotting the Time

First, REMINDER:  Because of a summer reading event, next week's class will be on the patio.

Secondly, if you are not interested in linking up your stories this week and if you don't have another idea to write on, feel free to pop on over to Share a Pair of Stories for a straight-up lifestory writing prompt.

Okay, if you are here to link up your stories, let's review our progress so far.

1. We found the theme (or themes) that seems central or recurs often in our stories.
2. We discovered which other genre's characteristics our story shares.
3. We identified the places that our shorter stories should fill on a plot line of our larger story's genre.
4. We identified the inner change that our character makes during the course of our stories and started to put specific events to the changes.
5. We noted common components of the inner change narrative.
6. We combined our two plot lines together.

Today, we will face a cold, hard reality:  the climax of the book generally takes nearly half of the word count.

Find your climax and expand it.  Expand it in every way you can conceivably imagine.  Go back to the post on the senses and the intelligences and go over that scene to the best of your ability.  Add dialogue.  Get creative with your sentence structure (short and long).  Play with your paragraphs.  Rework.  Rework.  Rework.