Sentimentality

Dead Fish Afternoon! I miss you all so much. It was so great to work with you over the past week, and I could not be more proud of you all. I hope that many of you will stay involved with the blog and with each other. My email address is mitchellr@susqu.edu and you are all welcome to email me any time you like, for any reason. If you all want to add your email address as comments to this post, we can get a good contact list together. Alright! Here we go, the first writing exercise in the post-camp era.

Since I'm feeling so sentimental, I thought we could take a look at sentimentality in fiction. Where better to look, then, than to young adult fiction. We all had plenty of laughs at the melodrama of Twilight last week, lines like this beauty, "It was nice to be alone, not to have to smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape." We can all laugh because we know, looking from the outside, we can see how sentimental these lines can be. But, sadly, these are mistakes we can make ourselves. We can all write lame lines, even characters. Your challenge this week is to take a character from young adult fiction, Twilight, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games,  anything from the genre, and write a scene (scene, scene, scene!) that reveals character and motivation in an earned and felt way, rather than cheaply or melodramatically. I think this should be a fun one. Be ambitious. Be imaginative. Be writers.

Oh, and one more thing, in the spirit of this exercise, I'm jumping head first into The Hunger Games today.