I’ve written a lot in the past year about writing, but unless you’ve downloaded the free short story I have hanging out on the side bar of my website, you have no idea if I know what I’m talking about. This post will, I hope, fix that. I am nothing if not a fixer of problems (in my mind at least). So here is a sample of a scene I’ve written, I hope you enjoy it:
Excerpt from, “Midnight at the Sultan’s Palace”
“The Sultan’s Palace is a bit of a letdown,” Chaz said. He adjusted his glasses and gestured out the van window to emphasize his disappointment to his crew. “I expected a grand mansion with minarets or something. That’s just a fancy three-story house like dozens of others we’ve seen around the French Quarter. We’ll really have to over-sell it to the audience.”
The pale pink building towered above his oversized van parked across narrow, one-way Dauphine Street. The four men inside craned their necks for a better view of the house. Its’ elegant wrought-iron balconies and railings surrounded the upper floors like the decks of an old riverboat tied to a pier whose passengers were too well off to notice the men in the van below.
“Three and a half stories,” Barry, his tech guy said. “I found the plans for the place before we came out to film. The house has an elevated basement under the main floor. You can see the little cross-barred windows from here.”
Chaz couldn’t care less about how many floors there were inside. This investigation was supposed to recharge his audience for the third season of his Spirit Searchers cable TV show. He needed a ratings boost for the network to renew them for season four.
The Sultan’s Palace had sounded like the perfect December filming location. It was warmer in New Orleans than most places they investigated this time of year. The location had lots of reported activity, from door slamming to full body apparitions. Best of all, unlike Eastern State or Trans-Allegheny, there was no competition from other shows trying to film on the longest night of the year.
Back to writing about writing…
Chaz and his crew are in for more excitement than they planned. Their investigation happens to be on the night that magic returns to the Earth. The spirits of the house come barreling into the present, scaring the cable TV crew out of their minds in the process. I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination until I add this short story to the downloadable content on the site.
The point in sharing this short bit of the opening scene is to show how many of the elements I’ve talked about come together in writing. This snippet grounds you in time and place, New Orleans after the advent of cable TV paranormal programming. It’s 2012 in this case. Description, dialogue, and internal monologue all flesh out the scene as the crew arrives to start their investigation.
Had I shared more of the scene, I could go on about differentiating characters, showing vs. telling, building suspense, depicting action sequences, and showing character growth. All of that is hard to cram into a short story. But once I could do that, scaling it up into chapters was simple. Once I decided I could master the short story, writing a novel length story was well within my grasp.