October Focus: Broken Expectations

This October, the Writing for Page and Stage online class from MAST Mayflower and ArtfulScribe has focused on various aspects of creative writing. Every term, we share sessions on craft skills across fiction, poetry, scriptwriting. Our sessions offer a variety of approaches to allow for different learning styles, we look at a range of existing texts and we engage in writing activities that offer a balance of structure and support, freewriting and fun, whilst developing our skills and range in a supportive environment.

This term, so far, we have explored effective use of metaphor in prose, creating a variety of pacing in both prose and script, play text layout, creating interesting dialogue, using music as inspiration for our writing, flash fiction and poetry.

This blog will look at what we did in our session on creating interesting dialogue.

‘The Good News?’

With global news as it is, we first explored what was actually ‘the good news’ in our personal lives that may not get broadcast on national TV or radio. We then looked at the dramatic possibilities of what could happen when good news is expected, but those expectations are broken. This could work both ways, with bad news being expected and good news coming as a surprise.

We voiced what feelings arise for us when we’ve not received the good news we have hoped for, in order to tap into the possible ‘emotional juice’ that could help heighten a scene. Together, we thought of situations when it might be funny when expectations are broken. We also looked at when it is tragic or frustrating.

From the job interview that felt like you were the perfect candidate (you weren’t) to the scary time you thought someone was wrapping on the front window in the middle of the night (only to discover it was a branch being blown against it in the wind) when things don’t go as expected, there’s plenty of room for humour, Hijinx and tension in the in-between. Can you think of situations where things have or haven’t worked out as expected in various different aspects of life? What are the gifts and challenges of these situations?

The gifts and challenges of life can offer opportunities for growth in fictional characters.The stakes are higher when a character really wants something to work out a particular way. In session, having done the ground work around expectations and related emotions and possible dramatic situations we wrote scenes in response to a simple prompt:

Write a scene where a character is expecting good news and doesn’t get good news.

For this, we also incorporated our learnings from previous sessions, practising how to lay out a script and, if wanted, how punctuation and word choice might enhance a sense of pacing within the piece. You can see some a snippet of one of group member David's lighthearted piece in the image above, taken from our group Padlet (our online noticeboard where we share our work).

If you feel drawn to try out the exercise we did, you may also enjoy writing a piece where a character is expecting bad news and gets good news instead. Explore what happens when you play with the audience’s expectations, too. You could do one scene as a script and one as prose. In keeping with the theme of expectations, let yourself be surprised by what arrives on the page and how it is to follow your curiosity in writing, rather than have any set expectations as to how things should look or turn out. Happy Scribing!

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October Focus: Broken Expectations