Denise E Lindquist
Bio
I am married with 7 children, 28 grands, and 13 great-grandchildren. I am a culture consultant part-time. I write A Poem a Day in February for 8 years now. I wrote 4 - 50,000 word stories in NaNoWriMo. I write on Vocal/Medium daily.
Stories (1266)
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A Scene With Two Characters
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts — The Exercise - Write a scene in which a character’s body, as well as his mind, is engaged in doing something — stage business. Possibilities listed below: Explore how various activities and settings can change what happens within a scene. For example, what happens when characters are planning their honeymoon if they are painting an apartment or one of them is cutting the other’s hair? Or what happens when characters are having a confrontation in public — say, in a fancy restaurant — rather than in the privacy of their home. It is also instructive to analyze how a writer you admire handles the interweaving of dialogue and body language. Go through one of your favorite stories and highlight all the body language and choreography. We guarantee this will teach you something. The Objective — To give a concrete life to the scenes our characters inhabit. To understand how action and choreography relate to the objects in the scene and how all of these relate to and help shape dialogue and the engagement of the characters.
By Denise E Lindquist5 months ago in Writers
Role Play and Real Play
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter - What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts - The Exercise - Have a fellow writer do this exercise with you. Make up situations involving two people who disagree about something - for example, two friends who have planned to shoplift something, and one is getting cold feet. Or a landlord and a tenant disagree about the terms of a lease. Next, tape your dialogue as you and your friend "act out" the two "roles" in a scene. Don't decide what you're going to say ahead of time. Improvise, through dialogue, as you go along. Then transcribe the dialogue exactly as it was said. Here is where your writer's ear comes in. Read over the written account of your scene. How much of the original exchange is useful for your story? How much of the dialogue might you summarize? And are there any "perfect" lines that you would keep? Finally, try writing the scene using the transcribed dialogue to give shape to the scene. How much of the original dialogue would you keep? The Objective - To hear and see how real talk is repetitive, disjointed, and boring. At the same time, to train your writer's ear to transform actual speech into carefully crafted dialogue.
By Denise E Lindquist5 months ago in Writers
Poetry In A Sandwich Form
Author's Note: The first and last stanzas are the same, representing slices of bread. In between are couplets of any format you like or any number of stanzas you like, as if you were making a sandwich. I took the poem format literally.
By Denise E Lindquist5 months ago in Poets
Sounding Real When Writing Fiction
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts — The Exercise — Observe how the speech fragments below convey a sense of accent or national, regional, race, class, or cultural distinctions mainly through word choice and arrangement. Easily understood foreign words or names can help, too. What do these fragments suggest about the individual speakers by conveying the flavor of their speech? The Objective — In this case, it is threefold: to help reveal character, to convince your reader by making your dialogue sound credible, and to add variety. Differences in speech aren’t just realistic; they’re interesting and provocative, and they can give vitality to your story. Speech without flavor is like food without savor.
By Denise E Lindquist5 months ago in Writers
A Self-Deceiving Portrait
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts — The Exercise — Using the first person, write a self-deceiving portrait in which the narrator is not the person she thinks she is - either more or less admirable. You must give your readers clues that your narrator is skewing the truth. The Objective -- To create a narrator who unwittingly reveals - through subtle signals of language, details, contradictions, and biases - that his or her judgment of events and people is too subjective to be trusted. The reader must thus discount the version of the story offered by the narrator and try to re-create a more objective one for himself.
By Denise E Lindquist5 months ago in Writers
Grandchildren Overnight Again
Okay, my grandchildren are probably a year or so younger than the photo, being at eleven and twelve years old. It isn’t all bad! Much of our time together was fun. I am just feeling my age, with very little patience for the morning scramble, “Grandma, can we go to our house before school. I didn’t bring clean pants.” We don’t have time. I will quickly wash them.
By Denise E Lindquist5 months ago in Families
