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brevity and contrast for powerful dramatic effect

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Almost two thirds of the way through One Hundred Years of Solitude, Remedios the Beauty levitates and floats away amidst a billow of bedsheets. It's a brief scene but arguably one of the more sublime moments in modern literature. One of the things that makes this ascension so remarkable is the way it follows so closely on, and immediately precedes, a series of violent deaths, some related to the curse afflicting men attracted to Remedios, and two the result of a brutal policing regime ushered in by the Conservative party. The extraordinary contrast between Remedios's exaltation and the horror of these deaths creates substantial narrative energy - a kind of emotional roller coaster for the reader. In a book set partly in wartime and over such a long period, death is somewhat of a commonplace, but these several deaths stand out because of the marked contrast here.
PROMPT
Consider borrowing Márquez's narrative quick-change strategy to draw attention to an important passage with great efficiency. Rather than dwelling on the moment in question at length, set it off with strongly contrasting content. The result may be more breath-takingly dramatic than a longer version would have.

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Elision as a tool for creating suspense

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In Chapter 51 of Moby-Dick, the captain of a passing whaler, The Goney, drops his speaking trumpet into the sea before he can respond to the Pequod's hail. Even Ahab's shout to the Goney as it sails away is truncated: "Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific Ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to--"

So, why is this encounter remarkable, when the two ships pass without interaction?

Absence is louder than presence, and not saying something is more powerful that what might have been said. The sailors keeping watch in the Goney's crow's nests do not speak to those on the Pequod either, despite how close the ships are. It's as if they are too stunned to do so. We don't learn what left the Goney's crew in this state - or the Goney itself so weirdly bleached and streaked with rust, but the ship seems like person whose hair has gone white from shock, and the dripping red streaks of rust seem more bloody than metallic.
PROMPT
Is there an important scene or statement that is hard to render well, perhaps so intense it may be melodramatic? Skip it, but show your reader what's been skipped. Imagine a redacted text. It's always all the juiciest information that the CIA or the FBI or Charles Lamb (when hacking away at Shakespeare) conceals. It makes you want to know, to fill in the gaps from your own imagination. So, redact. And make sure to do it a bit clumsily, so the reader knows -

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listening in can change a lot

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Dialogue is a great tool to inject dynamism into a narrative, but even more complexity can be wrought from overheard dialogue, since a covert third party, the eavesdropper, is injected into the geometry of the scene. From Hamlet to Jane Eyre to The Woman in White to Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, what's overheard is often transformative for literary characters. The eavesdropper may understand the overheard conversation differently than the original interlocutors. The eavesdropper may have intentions that are at cross purposes to those of the interlocutors. A secret may have been revealed. A new one has also been created (the fact that the eavesdropper now knows something) - unless, of course, the eavesdropper was discovered, in which case a different drama has opened up.
PROMPT
Add a secret listener to a scene of dialogue, and see how it changes things. Who's the point of view close to, the speakers or the eavesdropper? Or try having someone read the private diary of another, in a written form of eavesdropping. Who's in the right, or in the wrong here? Alternatively, become an eavesdropper yourself and poach some dialogue from reality. See if you can use the differences between characters' takes on overheard material to create or magnify tension.

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A a run-up to our convo tomorrow about setting up Humor and Suspense, some thoughts about whales and disjunction...

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Comedy often works because of disjunction, whether between two things we'd expected to match that don't or two things we hadn't expected to be similar that are. It also comes when we dwell on what we wouldn't (or shouldn't) normally do, or when we fail to attend to what we ought - again, disjunction.

Take Chapters 76 and 79 of Moby-Dick together, The Battering Ram and The Prairie. This whole part of the book is an extended (quite absurdly extended, really) set of mediations on the head of the whale, and these chapters in particular focus on the forehead and noselessness of the sperm whale.

The Battering Ram describes with outrageous foreshadowing the implement of the Pequod's eventual demise. The whale's flat forehead is highly padded and deadly, a heavyweight's boxing gloves gone exponentially large, yet also mystical, with blank-page connotations, especially when we ponder Moby-Dick himself, whose forehead is a true blank page - white, like paper. With the chapter The Prairie, Melville returns to the same space, that flat forehead, but focusses on the lack of a nose in the whale. Noses, as Cyrano knew, are almost always comic - in their presence, but also in their absence. To say you can pull the whale's nose is to make us think of that silly act.

What's going on here may be a corollary to gallows humor: it's taking pressure off from the heavy foreshadowing we've been subjected to, not that there won't be some serious calamities to come, thanks to whale heads, but just so the sails don't blow out before we get there, Melville makes the thought of it all more tolerable (by far) with a bit of a goof-off: "Dash the nose from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!" (Naturally, Melville must close this joke-filled chapter with something more serious, just to tip the balances: The return to the trope of hieroglyphics and Chaldean, reminding us of the impenetrable genius of the whale, on whose white-page of a forehead an utterly inscrutable language is written.)
PROMPT
Wherever things are most serious in your text, seek the ridiculous. Where things are frothy, seek murky depths. Try juxtaposing the comic and the grave -and doing it in quick succession. Start by goofing off, having fun, writing absurd or extreme that doesn't need to be good enough. Then see if you can salvage the humor - or darkness - you've forged by welding it permanently to the main body of the story, not despite but because of how dichotomous it is.

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the body's largest organ is most interesting when it isn't smooth or dewy ...

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People often focus on the skin of the young or beautiful, it's hue, texture, or clarity, but skin, like everything, gets more interesting when it's less than perfect. Grooves, veins, spots and outcroppings, from moles to pustulant acne can all be used to convey essential information about the life their owners - or in the case of Gabriel García Márquez's Don Fernando in One Hundred Years of Solitude, their deaths: "his skin broken out in pestilential sores and cooking slowly in a frothy stew with bubbles like live pearls."

To push the envelope on your character descriptions, try skipping the basic facial or bodily features and focussing on the flaws of their skin instead.

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expand your narrative world through exploring multiple points of view

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Rashomon, there are four points of view that tell the same narrative differently. Rashomon has become a catch phrase for describing this sort of mosaic narrative. Whether you're not interested in using multiple points of view or not, you can use the concept to expand your narrative world. Try writing an existing scene over from a different point of view - or a few of them - to capture different details of the world, different possible understandings of the situation at hand. Then you can go back into your original text and augment it withmaterial that the limitations of your primary POV had led you to overlook.

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use multiple points of view to expand your narrative

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find and emphasize the existing patterns in your work

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regardless of how much people have, how people handle money reveals their character

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The clink of coins, the smell of well-worn bills, whether they have a great deal or too little, people obsess over money. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Aureliano Segundo enjoys a spate of good fortune and fecundity among his livestock, making him so wealthy he decides to wallpaper the family house with pesos. Ursula, horrified at his profligacy, has the whitewash-caked bills taken off the walls, but then a statue filled with gold pieces is discovered. She buries the coins, hoping their rightful owner will return, rather than claiming them.How people deal with money is a great revealer of character, and the description of coins and bills is a great way to reveal that.

PROMPT

Whether through a small transaction, a decadent indulgence or a fit of envy, show one or more characters dealing with their finances or handling - dreaming of - cash.

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regardless of how much people have, money matters

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focus on the sense of smell

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The most neglected sense in literature is arguably smell. Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel Perfume (translated into English by John E. Woods) is a remarkable corrective to that. It tells the story of Grenouille, an orphaned olfactory savant who becomes aa perfumer. His sense of smell is fantastically acute, though he himself has no scent, no signature odor of his own - the combination of which factors turn him into a social pariah and ultimately a murderous sociopath. The book positively revels in smells, beginning with this passage from the second paragraph:

The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.

PROMPT: Write or rewrite a scene using scent as your primary descriptor.