Sunday, July 10, 2011

Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- Spec Script

Okay, so it's not seven sentences, but this week, it's what I want to share with you. I recently completed a spec script for the TV police drama "Southland", one of my favorite shows ("Breaking Bad" is another). In case you aren't familiar with Southland, each episode starts with a flash forward in time, giving viewers a sneak peek at something that will happen later in the episode. The action freezes, and the voice of an anonymous male (ie. a character we never meet), gives us a hint at the theme of the program. Here's my opening -- please note that I know it's not set up here in proper screenwriting format, but my spec script does follow the standard. HTML coding just ain't my thing.


FADE IN:

EXT. STREET - AFTERNOON

Smoke blots out the afternoon sun. Blue and red lights flash on the faces of TERRIFIED BYSTANDERS.

In the background, a building burns. FIRE FIGHTERS and POLICE OFFICERS try to restore order to the crowd. PARAMEDICS carry INJURED WOMEN on stretchers to waiting vehicles.

SAMMY and BEN watch from a distance.

SAMMY
I should have seen this coming.

He turns his head at the sound of an approaching SIREN and sees SAL bolt from his car just beyond the perimeter of the crime scene. Sal leaves his vehicle running, leaves his door open. He pushes his way through the throng. Sammy intervenes, blocks Sal.

SAMMY
What are you doing?

SAL
Get out of my way.

Sal breaks free of Sammy's grip and races toward the burning building.

FREEZE FRAME

ANONYMOUS VOICE
Some cops believe they should have as much authority in their homes as they do on the street. Right now, Detective Salinger doesn't have authority anywhere.


***
Southland has been given the green light for season 4 on TNT, but I'm not sure when the season begins. While you're waiting, read the work of other suspenseful seven-sentence Sunday writers here.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- Found Writing

I was cleaning out the files on my desktop the other day, and opened a document I only barely remember creating. I think I had a dream about this start to a story. The document contained only these seven sentences:
She balances a small mirror in her left hand, focusing entirely on herself. With her right hand, she pencils brown arches over her eyes. She waits whenever there’s a bump in the road or the bus driver stops suddenly. She picks up the curve of the arch several times, which rather ruins the effect. She bites her tongue -- there's a silver ball pierced through it -- to aid in the procedure, as if the pain she inflicts upon herself improves her concentration. Eventually, she sees that I’m watching her, and her bright red lips bend like licorice as she suggests in a whisper a rather filthy activity, one I will spend a good portion of my afternoon imagining her doing with me. She texts and twitters for the rest of the ride to Manhattan, and I hope it’s all about me.
I find the protagonist quite creepy, and I will have to give some thought as to what horrible deeds he's up to.

Make sure you check out the other "Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday" writers. I'm sure they have some delightful mischief to offer.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- One Day Late!

What better way to keep you in suspense than by posting my Sunday entry a day late?

I have as good an excuse as I can come up with -- I was in the final round of a screenwriting competition. What I love about this kind of competition is that it pushes you to invent something that you might not have come up with on your own. I had fun creating some desperate characters, and I just sent in my entry a few minutes ago. Now, I want to forget about it. I've learned not to obsess about competition entries, but just to move on and get busy doing something else. Otherwise, it feels like staring at a lottery ticket until the draw date.

Last week, I revised a short story about a young girl caught in the middle of a bank robbery. She tries to imagine the robbers as something other than they are, but they're so evil that she can only see them as a different type of bad. As this scene begins, she's on the floor, hidden underneath her mother's cloak.

Each man pointed a gun at the crowd and ordered everyone not to look at them, but Esther could not resist. She lifted a corner of her mother’s cloak.

Esther watched the men stride into the bank, and with every step, their bodies transformed. Their ragged camouflage jackets became shiny green scales, their thick bodies grew wiry, their guns became thick black fingers. They were no longer men, but appeared to Esther as snakes with arms. They shimmered with evil, their heads darted furtively, yet Esther could not look away. The creatures’ eyes were dark and menacing, and venom dripped from their gold fangs.

You'll find other far more punctual Suspenseful Seven-Sentence writers at http://suspenseful7ss.blogspot.com .

Friday, March 25, 2011

The Little Victories

I'm delighted to have made it to round #2 of Cyberspace Open, a fun screenwriting competition.

Congrats to all the other semi-finalists!

Monday, March 14, 2011

CBC Short Story Competition

The CBC is asking readers to vote for their favorite opening lines of short stories in a current competition. Which story gets your vote?

Sunday, March 6, 2011

7 Suspenseful Sentences Sunday

I wrote a short story called "The Curve of His Shoulder" during the Kenyon Review's Writers Workshop in 2009. (If you're a writer and have never given yourself the gift of a writing retreat, do consider it.)

The story takes place in the woods, and examines how differently two people can see one object. Matthew is a photographer from Dallas, out on a day trip. He sees a deer in the forest.
In a clearing to Matthew’s right, a young man steps out from behind a tree. Handsome, Matthew notes, tall and lean. Matthew acknowledges the man with the upward half of a nod, then points at the deer. The young man responds with an appreciative smile and a slow thumbs-up. Matthew, who craves the isolation of the West Texas hills, is now thankful for the man’s company. A pleasant smile, Matthew thought, and he is happy to share his deer with a fellow human. He focuses his camera on the deer’s profile, and zooms in so close he can see the mist of the deer’s breath on its nostrils.
A shot splits the silence. The deer’s head snaps sharply to the right as the bullet pushes its narrow skull toward Matthew.

This story will likely never be published, yet it's still one of my favorites. Do you have a story that will live only with you?

Monday, February 28, 2011

Follow this writer!

A very talented YA author I know is looking for followers for her blog. Seems that publishing houses these days place a strong emphasis on their authors' social media savvy.

Visit http://freckle-head.blogspot.com and sign up to follow.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

7 Suspenseful Sentences

A story I wrote recently is about a young girl growing up in a rough section of New York who escapes into fantasy whenever the harsh realities of life catch up with her. The ghetto becomes a kingdom, her mother's tattered clothes becomes elegant robes, and the people who threaten her turn into fantastical animals.

In this scene, the young girl (Esther) and her mother (Crimson) are in a bank when two robbers enter.

The silence was shattered as two snake-like creatures entered the bank. The beasts bristled with evil, their heads darting furtively. Their eyes were dark and menacing, and venom dripped from their gold fangs. One stayed at the back of the building, while the other slithered further into the room.
Crimson pulled her daughter closer and covered her with her cloak. “Stay still, and don’t make a sound,” she cautioned. The coolness of the icy floor beneath her and the warmth of the velvet above made Esther feel like she was two different people.


I think I can relate to Esther. Part of the fun of writing is escaping from your own life briefly and creating a whole new world.

You'll find other writers' entries for Suspenseful Seven Sentences Sunday at http://suspenseful7ss.blogspot.com

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Flash from My Past

I love prizes. I love deadlines. I love writing flash fiction. I enter as many competitions that feature all three of the things I love as I can find.

Today's posting features an excerpt from a story called "Stall," which got honorable mention in a competition sponsored by Gemini Magazine. The protagonist is a Russian mail-order bride, who is trying to evade the man who has brought her to America by hiding in the women's restroom in an American airport, hoping she'll miss the connecting flight to her new husband's hometown.

Suddenly, from the other side of the door, Katya heard a woman’s voice. Although she couldn’t understand what was being said, she knew from the intonation that the woman was upset. Katya peered through the crack between the cubicle door and the wall. There was a man in the restroom. Him. Katya shuffled her feet away from the door, but she was too late. He had recognized her shoes.


The whole story can be found here. I hope you will enjoy it.

Please make sure to check out the other Suspenseful 7 Sentence writers by visiting http://suspenseful7ss.blogspot.com

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- No End in Sight

Sometimes what prompts me to start writing a story is nothing more than an image, which ultimately finds itself somewhere in the middle of my work. My novel-in-progress began with one such image -- that of a dog finding something disgusting in some shrubbery near a country cottage:
She backs out of the low shrubs and turns toward me, her tail wagging proudly. Hanging from her mouth is half of an arm, from about mid-forearm down.

At one end, there’s a claw-like hand; at the other end, a blood-encrusted stump. Cookie approaches me until I tell her to stop. “Oh, Christ! Cookie, drop it!” She’s ready to listen, and deposits her prized possession ten feet away from me. She can sense I’m not as excited about her discovery as she is, and looks askance as a maggot crawls across her quizzical face.

My novel has been in progress for over a year now. I have about 50 more pages to achieve what I think is a reasonable length for my first draft, and I'll confess that I'm not sure yet how it ends. At this point, I'm in as much suspense as you are.

Check out the other Suspenseful 7 Sentence writers at http://suspenseful7ss.blogspot.com

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday -- That Helpless Feeling

A few days ago, I came closer to death than I'm ready to. I was in my car, my son in the passenger seat beside me, pulling up to a quiet intersection. Ahead of us, to the left, two cars collided, each going about 45 mph. One of them had run a red light. I don't know which. One of the cars was sent airborne. It landed on the right-hand side of a car several car-lengths ahead of me to the left, then proceeded on two wheels toward me, finally coming to a rest about ten feet away. While this was happening, my son and I were basically frozen in time. I watched the events unfold as if my windshield was a movie screen. There was nowhere I could have gone, nothing I could have done to avoid obliteration if that's what was to be my fate. Mercifully, I'm still here, as are all of the inhabitants of the vehicles involved. Stunning.

This reminded me of a police officer in my story "Administrative Leave" (Ellery Queen, Sept./Oct. 2010). He is at home after an officer-involved shooting in which he killed a young man. As he stares out his bedroom window, a strange man standing in his backyard stares back. Feeling trapped and frozen, the police officer watches the events unfold.
He pulls a cell phone from his left pocket. His right hand stays hidden. He punches the keys with his thumb, never taking his eyes off me. The phone on the table on Lorraine’s side of the bed rings. My head snaps instinctively at the sound. I turn back to the man and he smiles. He knows he’s got the right number.

I hope your week ahead provides you with plenty of options to take charge of your destiny.

Check out other bloggers at Suspenseful Seven Sentences.
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Monday, January 10, 2011

Suspenseful Seven-Sentence Sunday

I was supposed to post this on Sunday, following the rules of "Suspenseful Seven Sentence Sunday" bloggers. I was, however, in the throes of a screenwriting competition. I did very well in the first two rounds of the contest, writing two scripts of which I'm quite proud...and then came the brick wall I faced yesterday. My brain seemed stuck in cement, and I couldn't come up with anything I felt satisfactorily complied with the required elements of my script: a tugboat (location) and an X-ray machine (object). The genre was up to me to determine. Let there be no suspense about the results of the script I submitted within minutes of last night's deadline. It's a complete dud. I laughed myself to sleep...had to, otherwise I'd have cried myself to sleep. Soggy pillows aren't much fun.

So, while I'm not optimistic about advancing to the final round in that competition, I am hopeful of finding a home for a short story I recently completed. It's based on a few real-life incidents, one of which has haunted me for years. In the late '70s, a middle-aged science teacher at my high school killed himself by laying down on the railroad tracks one morning. He'd been the kind of teacher that high school students would have perceived as weak; as a result, his students disrespected him, misbehaving in all sorts of outrageous ways. How much his work situation drove him to end his days is unknown to me, and I have no knowledge of his home life. (I'm glad to say that I was never a student of that man, but must confess that I'm not completely innocent of having tormented some other teachers in the ignorance of my youth.) I've long wondered about how some of those misbehaving students handled their teacher's suicide. I wonder if they think about him years later, and now, in middle age themselves, are ashamed of the people they were when they were teenagers.

In my fictional story, one of the students from that science teacher's class is now a police officer, a few years away from retirement. One night, he encounters a young man intent on suicide by cop. Here are seven sentences from that story:
Tyler made a U-turn and stopped parallel to our vehicle. As he passed, he held up a little something for show and tell: a Smith & Wesson. He had one hand on the wheel. The other hand pointed the pistol at his own head. He gave me a look like somehow in his eighteen-odd years of life he’d managed to acquire more wisdom than me, like I was a stupid old man who didn’t know a thing. I recognized the expression. There was a time when I felt exactly the same way about people my age, and the memory of that only made me angry.
I'll let you know if the story finds a home in print soon.

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