(Kinda) Bi-weekly writing exercise thread #1

[Strazio Rockwell]

Greetings Omniverse!

As some of you know I posted a thread a few weeks ago trying to drum up potential interest in a bi-weekly writing exercise thread, well, here it is. The way this will work is every (roughly) 2 weeks I'll create a new thread with a new prompt or constraint, and you lovely Omniversians will create prose following said prompt or constraint. Some weeks these will be simple and others they will be more difficult and complex. Ideally this would provide a platform to improve your writing, and also allow everyone to get a gander at your work outside of the O-verse. Feel free to offer/request critique or just give props to anything you think deserves it. Also don't be afraid to ask for clarification on any prompt.

I'd also like people to post their finished pieces using to spoiler tag to avoid walls of text suffocating questions or critiques.

The Prompt
[spoiler]Alright, so we'll kick this off with an excersise from Stephen King's book "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft."

In the particular chapter that this exercise is given, Mr. King talks about the merits of situation-based writing over plot-based writing. He refers to stories (and subsequently situations) as fossils; they already exist buried in the ground and it is the job of the writer to excavate them intact. In his words "A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot." He goes on to say that very few of his books were ever plotted, not a single note on a single scrap of paper for most of them, just pure narrative storytelling generated from an interesting situation.

Mr. King offers the reader a location to a fossil and I will pass that location onto you. He says to write 5-6 pages concerning this fossil, but that seems a bit excessive for a bi-weekly forum exercise, instead I ask for 1000-3000 words of unplotted narrative. You'll have to dig for the bones to see what they look like, but I'm sure you can do it. 

You'll be familiar with this story as it seems to unfortunantly crop up every other week in the media. A women, call her Jane, marries a man who is bright, witty, and absolutely charming. We'll call this guy Dick. Unfortunantly Dick has a dark side, he's short tempered, a control freak, perhaps a bit paranoid. Jane tries her best to make the marriage work, why she tries so hard is something you'll have to find out, and I think she'll tell you if you ask nice enough. They end up have a child, and things seem to get better, but when the girl gets to be around 3 the abuse begins again. First verbal and then eventually phsyical, perhaps Dick thinks Jane is sleeping around? At last Jane divorces him and gets custody of their daughter, little Nell. Dick responds by stalking her and Jane eventually gets a restraining order against him. Finally, after an incident that you will write in vivid and scary detail, Richard the schmuck is arrested and jailed. All of this is backstory, how you work it in and how much you work in is up to you.

This is the situation. One day, shortly after Dick's incarceration in the city jail, Jane picks up little Nell from the daycare and takes her to a friends house for a birthday party. Jane then takes herself home, ready to enjoy the several hours of peace and quiet, maybe she decides to she'll take a nap. Something pings at her, just below the level of consiousness, as she lets herself in. Something uneasy that she can't quite put her finger on, maybe just nerves from the fallout of her five years in hell with Dick. Before taking her nap she decides to brew a cup of tea or coffee and watch the news. The lead item on action news in a shocker, three men escapes from the city jail, killing a guard in the process, two of the three were apphrended shortly afterwards, but the third is still at large. None of the prisoners are identified by name, not in this news cast. But, Jane, sitting in her empty house knows that one of them was Dick. She knows, because she has recongnized that ping of unease that she felt. It was the smell of Vitalis hair tonic, Dick's hair tonic. Jane sinks into her chair, frozen with fear as she hears Dick's footsteps coming down the stairs. She thinks, "only Dick would be vain enough to make sure he has hair tonic, even in jail." She needs to run, but she's paralyzed in terror.

That's a halfway decent story already, but fairly generic. What I want you to do for this exercise is swap the sexes of the antagonist and protagonist. In other words, make the ex-wife the stalker. Perhaps its a mental institute she's escaped from instead of a jail? Make the husband the abused and frightened one. Write this without plotting, let the situation and that one unexpected inversion carry you along and I'm sure you'll do just fine.[/spoiler]