More random flashfic

[igenlode]

Another piece of random flashfic, written off the cuff to illustrate a point for someone who was complaining that her scenes all sounded like "character A walks into the room with green walls. They talk to character B who looks sad. Character A says this and frowns. Character B..." and wanted to know how to be more fluffy and fill it in. (I think I may have overlooked the 'fluffy' requirement!)

And yes, I was making the plot up as I went along, so I had *no idea* who the characters were or what they were talking about :-P

It sounds as if what you want to do is to write the scene *from the point of view* of one of the characters, rather than trying to do a sort of TV-screen depiction of your characters walking around on set and delivering their lines.

So suppose your original scene goes something like this:

Henrik walks into Bessie's bedroom, which has green walls and a purple duvet with stars on it. "Look, I didn't mean it," he says to Bessie, who looks sad.

"You could at least have stuck up for me," Bessie says.

"I told your aunt it wasn't your fault," he says with a frown.

"No, you said it was your idea because I was too scared," Bessie says.

Then you can write it more like this (sorry, I simply cannot handle the narrative present tense with any degree of competence):

Bessie huddled down on her bed, hugging her knees and pulling the duvet up around her for comfort. It was a somewhat faded purple with a starfield pattern on it that was supposed to be an accurate representation of Sagittarius, her birth sign; Aunt Amy had bought it for her at the poky little shop off the High Street that sold dream-catchers and crystals, back when she was nine, and it had been with her in the bedroom she had shared with her cousin Rose in those days, and then when she had moved up into the attic and her first-ever room of her own. She had insisted on having the walls painted green, despite Aunt Amy's attempts to persuade her that it would be better to use "a nice neutral magnolia tint", and over the years they had hosted posters of her various obsessions, from a full-scale "Phantom of the Opera" phase to the artworks she'd drawn herself last summer.

She'd never really taken the star-sign business seriously -- not as seriously as Aunt Amy, at any rate, who was a Libra and read the astrology predictions each week with a worried frown -- but the duvet was a warm familiar hug around her shoulders, and she was still shaking from the scene downstairs in the kitchen, and the sheer unfairness of it all. It was bad enough to get yelled at by her aunt because she and Henrik had nearly been drowned ("But it was the dog, Aunt Amy! We had to rescue the dog--"), but it was worse for Henrik to try to make out that the entire attempt had been his idea and that she was just some helpless little girl-next-door tagging along.

They'd known one another all their lives, and between them they'd spent most of that time in quarrelling and making up again, mainly over her determination to have her own way. Going out onto the fallen log to try to save the frantically-paddling stray had been her idea, and she had been the obvious one to do it because she was the lightest, and if Henrik hadn't tried to come after her then the log wouldn't have broken loose and swept all three of them down into the broken water beyond the bend. And he could at least have stuck up for her instead of trying to lay claim to the whole thing and making himself look like some kind of arrogant idiot, with Bessie his starry-eyed follower.

He had followed her upstairs, belatedly, as Aunt Amy's voice faded from the kitchen. She looked up as the door creaked open, with Henrik hovering uncertain on the threshold.

"Look, I didn't mean it," he said, frustrated.

"You could at least have stuck up for me." She could have shaken him until his teeth rattled. Instead she pulled the duvet higher like armour around her, fighting back a sudden humiliating rush of tears.

A scowl. "I told your aunt it wasn't your fault."

"No, you said it was your idea because I was too scared." How was she going to get it into his head that she didn't need protecting, that she could stand up for her own ideas and defend her own decisions, and that if he hadn't tried to interfere in the first place none of this would have happened anyway?