October 18, 2021– October will be over in just under two weeks; can you believe it? We’ve figured out Luna’s Halloween costume, the cats’ costumes, and our own, so we are officially ready to celebrate Halloween over Zoom with our families!
We hope you’re enjoying the author challenge this month, which is photo writing prompts, and I hope you’re discovering things about yourself as an author and about your work. Let’s dig into today’s assignment.
Instructions: Write a 2,000-word short story using the photo prompt above. Use first-person narrative in the mystery genre. A lot of people make the mistake of using too much internal dialogue when writing in the first person, but a quick tip to help you correct this is to think of your manuscript as if it were being made into a movie. If your book made it to the big screen, would your audience know what’s going on based on what you’ve written?
First-person narrative: First-person narrative sits the reader right beside the main character during the story. The reader experiences everything the main character does and has a front-row seat to the action! Use the pronouns “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us” to tell a story from the main character’s perspective.
Mystery genre: The mystery genre contains stories with narration in which one or more elements remain unknown until the end; the stories are like puzzles, where the reader is given one piece at a time to figure out the big picture. It starts backward (like with a dead body) and then finds out who the killer is. A thriller is when the story works forwards.
Happy writing! As always, feel free to send us your work for consideration to pandapublishing8@gmail.com.
Pandamonium Publishing House 