2024 Reading Challenge

2024 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 1 book toward her goal of 285 books.
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2023 Reading Challenge

2023 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 5 books toward her goal of 265 books.
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Homework Assignment Three: Plot

Continuing the series of writing exercises inspired by Susan Breen’s The Fiction Class, today we are moving on to plot.  For more information on the book and this series of posts, please check out the original book review here.

Plot: This is an exercise in learning how to write a climactic scene. A boat sinks during a storm, and only ten of its passengers make it onto the lifeboat. One by one the passengers are knocked off until, after a month at sea, only two survivors are left. There is not enough food for both of them, and one of them is going to have to get rid of the other. One of them is a teenage girl who is very strong for her age, but she is blind. The other is a musician from a successful boys’ band. He is twenty-six years old and smaller than the girl. Who will survive? Write the final scene.

“It’s dark.  Why is it always so dark?”  Ryan whined.  For the twenty-ninth day straight.

“God,” Sandra thought, “what a prima donna.  I’m blind.  You don’t hear me complain because it’s always dark.”

Ryan was right.  It was dark.  Dark and cold and rainy and dreary.  Sandra was also right.  Ryan was a prima donna.  A spoiled, petty, princess of a “boy” (if anyone can still legitimately be called a boy at twenty-six).  They were both right.  For the twenty-ninth day straight.

Sandra couldn’t believe it had come to this – that she was spending what were probably her last days on earth stranded on a stupid little lifeboat, lost at sea, alone with this ridiculous specimen of a human being.  All she had wanted was to go on a boat cruise, to feel the wind in her face and smell the salt air, to be reminded for one day of all she had lost.

She hadn’t always been blind.  Once upon a time, a very long time ago (well, technically not a long time ago – it was only two years – but it felt like forever…) Sandra had been able to see.  And to sail.  Sailing was her passion, her love, her favorite thing to do.  Her parents were both marine biologists and she had spent her life on and in the water.  She had learned how to sail almost as early as she learned how to walk.  She was a natural.  Until the accident, that is.

She had been cleaning the boat, getting it ready for her fifteenth birthday party.  Everything had to sparkle.  She was using the bleach mixture she had found in the storage cabinet – exactly as she had seen her parents do a thousand times before.  Only, not really.  Because this time, things went very wrong.  The nozzle was clogged and when she fussed with it, impatient and aggravated because she still had to take a shower and dry her hair and pick out an outfit and do a bunch of other little getting-ready things, she ended up shooting a stream of pure, undiluted bleach straight into her eyes.

Ever since, she had been blind and her parents had been afraid.  Afraid of everything, afraid to let her do anything.  And especially afraid of anything boat related.  She had been working on them for six months before they finally agreed to let her go on the boat cruise for her birthday this year.  Alone.  As in without them hovering around her, making sure she didn’t touch anything or do anything or live at all.  And now look what happened – a huge storm, a shipwreck, a month lost at sea, and a steadily dwindling group of other people.  So here she was, stranded with only this unbelievable idiot of a boy band-er for company.  And she swore to herself that if she had to hear him whine one more time about the dark, that she would absolutely lose it.

She could take him.  She knew she could.  Sandra was a hearty girl, a natural athlete.  Being blind hadn’t changed that.  And she knew her way around a boat – even a lifeboat, even in the dark of her post-accident world.  Sandra knew that there were things that even this idiot could do to improve their chances of survival – someone had to watch for signs of life, land, or rescue teams, after all.  But by this point, she almost didn’t care if she ended up stranded out here alone forever – as long as she didn’t have to listen to one more whining word out of his stupid whining mouth.

“Wow – it looks like it is finally going to stop raining!” Ryan chirped in an unbelievably chipper voice.  Well, unbelievably chipper for someone whose world had gone from perfectly manicured and structured to meet his every whim to wildly unpredictable and life-threatening in a matter of less than thirty days.  “Finally, the sun will come out and the Coast Guard will be able to send help and we’ll be okay!  I bet I get on to all the talk shows and magazine covers and cool blogs because of this!  I can probably write an entire album of songs about it too – I can call it “Drowning in Song” and I bet it’ll zoom up the charts!  Everybody loves a hero story – I’ll be the brave guy who saved the blind girl from the horrible stormy darknessssssss…”

As his voice trailed off, Sandra smiled to herself for the first time in twenty-nine days.  Her smile wavered a bit after the splash, and then her indomitable spirit – her blindness-surviving spirit – won out and it came back, bigger than before his fall.  If he hadn’t rambled on so much, she never would have been able to echo-locate him on the other side of the lifeboat with such pinpoint precision.  And if he wasn’t so self-absorbed, he might have noticed her sneaking around behind him.  If not for those two things, well, it all might have ended very differently.

Right up until the end, she really did think things might just work out for both of them after all.  The sun really was finally breaking up the clouds – she could feel its nascent warmth on her face and could smell the change in the sea air.  He was probably right, that he would have made it onto magazines and television and all that.  He probably would have even gotten a batch of new songs out of this whole mess.  Probably, probably, probably.  If only he hadn’t mentioned the dark…

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