Treasure Hunt

I'm not at a point where I can do this, but since the two of you are doing so much fun work bouncing ideas around, I thought maybe you would find this exercise interesting. It's from, of course, Writing Begins with the Breath (Hering).

Design a treasure hunt for your characters. Start with an object that has significant meaning to the character. Allow the character to focus on that object, describing it, holding it, imagining where it came from or how it came to be in his or her possession. Then, follow the object where it leads. Let the object, say, a socket wrench, spring you forward to a Rand McNally map of Nebraska. Let the map bounce you into a laundry room off a two-lane road in the Rockies. Keep going. Let object spring to object. Be specific in your descriptions. Enjoy the process. Let curiosity be your guide.

Both of your stories have travel as a starting point (or at least a very important theme) - so this could be a neat way to explore possibilities.

********

Based on both of your responses to my last post, I'm planning to send something out within a month. There's a small agency in NYC that will look at stuff as long as it's "in a mature stage of development" as long as you send in three complete chapters. I have my doubts about their effectiveness given their authors and publications, but it's worth a look. At the same time, there's an arts and music festival coming up over mother's day weekend in Black Mountain (www.theleaf.com) that is a very convenient deadline, plus there's no way I'm going to do a damned thing while I'm there except maybe catch up on my journal. So I'm pushing to get three chapters to readers at the earliest possible opportunity. Thanks to wise comments by my friends, my husband, and the plot monkeys, these three chapters are significantly different than what I started with. Which is fine; it's better. A lot better - or at least, it feels that way to me.

Wonder of wonders, I'm actually keeping up with the schedule. And I love it - the act of writing is so much more joyful than it was before I just accepted that there were some things that didn't belong in the story and ought to just go. Letting go has been a wonderful - if at times very painful - process.

So I hope to catch up with you both this weekend, hopefully? Until then, happy writing, happy imagining, happy running, happy baseball, happy everything, whatever you choose to do.

~Andi