Plotters Ink Assignment- June 2015

This month's "genre" assignment focuses on two large topics: Animals and/ or Children.

For this exercise,  Animals can include anything in nature that is not a plant, i.e.,  fauna rather than flora, such as domestic or wild animals, insects, birds, reptiles and "critters" in general.

Some writers may choose to write a fictional story with a creature as the protagonist (like say, Lassie) or how humans interact with a creature for better or worse (like say, Jaws or Moby Dick). Some critics don't like it when writers "personify" (attribute human characteristics like thought or speech to animals), but for this assignment it might be fun to get into the creature's head as if it could think and act like one of us ( as in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle).

For the Children option, you could write a story with a child as the protagonist (main character, such as Dora or Fancy Nancy), or a story geared toward children as your intended audience.

A third possibility is to combine the two options into a story like Life of Pi, in which a young boy and a Bengal tiger spend time alone together, trying to survive on a small boat adrift in the ocean.

As always we have limits on story length, but we've relaxed the rules a bit. If you can fit a story on one side of an 8.5 x 11 inch (letter size) paper, using at least an 11 point font, that's acceptable even if it's more than 400 words.

If you plan to attend the monthly meeting on June 11 at 2 PM, please bring several copies (10 is a good number) so that the rest of us can follow along as you read aloud. Some or all of us may give you some feedback or suggestions, a practice we encourage because it helps us all grow as writers and critiquers.

If you wish to submit a story for publication on the Plotters Ink blog http://plottersink.blogspot.com
submit it in .doc file format or in the body of an email to whitesborowriters@gmail.com.  You do not have to attend a meeting in order to submit a story for publication and there is no deadline to do so.

Writers may submit stories for Plotters Ink previous assignments or for any of our other blogs.

Have fun with this and as always, Keep writing!