Thursday Writing Prompt No. 28

This brass control mechanism for a trolley car at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum has some interesting lettering and texture. The patent dates on the left are for the late 1800s.

Yes, the Thursday Writing Prompt is a day late. I’m so sorry, but I hope today’s writing exercise will make up for it.

Today I’d like you to think about recurring dreams. Do you have any of those? It’s not always the exact same dream, but the theme is the same. For instance, I sometimes have dreams where I’m in a parking garage just driving around trying to find the exit. I can’t find my way out and I’m getting aggravated. This dream sometimes takes on another form, in which I’m trying to use my phone and I keep pressing the wrong number keys and I have to hang up and start over. What both of these dreams have in common is the emotion of frustration: I’m trying to do something and I can’t quite get it done. It’s not an outside person or event that is keeping me from success, it’s something that I can’t manage on my own. And that makes me frustrated. I assume that the dream means I’m trying to figure out something in real life or wrestle with some emotional problem.

Supposedly your subconscious keeps working on problems even when your conscious mind isn’t thinking about them,  and so the idea is that dreams are one way that our subconscious minds communicate with us. What this means for you as a writer is that writing a dream sequence for one of your characters can be a useful way of adding some background material into your story without necessarily doing an info dump. For those of you who aren’t familiar with that term, an info dump is basically a long stretch of narrative where you have no dialogue or action but plenty of description. Info dumps aren’t necessarily bad, but they can disrupt the pacing of a novel and turn some readers off.

So here’s today’s writing prompt: write a dream sequence for one of your characters in which he or she is trying to come to grips with some problem that you’ve already put into the story. For instance, you have a story in which the two main characters are going to get a divorce, but they don’t want to do it until after the holidays because they don’t want to get involved in family arguments. This tension between wanting to keep the rest of the family happy — or at least, at arm’s length — while not wanting to be together is very stressful for both people. Pick one of them and make them dream about their feelings.

The dream sequence actually doesn’t even have to make it into your story in full. Write it for yourself, for background. Get to know the character a little more. And if it makes sense, include the dream or have the character refer to it somehow in your story.

 

HDR Photography at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum

Car 264 is a working trolley car. Here it is parked in front of the museum and is waiting for passengers to embark.

This interior shot of car 264 shows the wicker seats and beautiful wood trim.

On Sunday I went with a group of photographers to the Baltimore Streetcar Museum. It was freezing cold, but that didn’t stop us from wandering around the grounds taking pictures of the trolley cars and other rolling stock. The museum people were extremely friendly and allowed us to go into the car barn and even take some photos from inside some of the cars that were being refurbished.

My favorite was car 294, a closed-in car that had removable windows. The car was built in 1900 by the Brownell & J.G. Brill Company. The interior featured wicker seats and beautiful wood paneling. The area over the windows was lined with turn-of-the-century advertisements for a range of products, which was pretty interesting by itself.

Many of the cars at the museum are working cars, and while we were there taking pictures a number of them went out on short trips, ferrying passengers. We were too involved in our photography to go on a ride, but the museum is easy to get to and we may just decide to go back in the spring for another visit. Or to get some of those shots that were almost — but not quite — what we wanted to get.

For these photos I’ve used the Topaz Adjust filters to bring out detail in the highlights. I could get better detail in the windows of the second shot if I used multiple exposures and combined them in an HDR program. So far I’ve tried a few trial programs and I can’t seem to get the hang of the software. None of my multiple-image HDR photos ever seem to line up evenly, even when I use a tripod to take the pictures.

Using a tripod was essential to get some of the detail on the cars in the car barn, which I photographed with my Nikon D70. The exterior shot of car 264 was taken with that camera and a 20mm lens.

For the interior of the car, I used my Nikon Coolpix 6200 and did some hand-held shots. I was able to hold the camera near the floor and get angles that would have been difficult to get otherwise. I used to think point-and-shoot cameras were amateur stuff, but I’m getting consistently good images from my equipment and find that using both SLR and compact point-and-shoot on the same photo outing is giving me a lot of mileage from my equipment.

I try to take pictures that show texture, and I hope that the interior shot gives a good feeling of the smooth worn surface of the wicker and the grunge on the floor. For a 112-year-old trolley car, the furnishings were in very good shape. One of the wicker seats was torn, but most seemed intact. What surprised me was that there is heat underneath the seats which makes them warm. I’d been walking around outside taking exterior photos and then we went into car 264. I sat on the third seat and it was warm! After freezing temperatures that was wonderful! Needless to say, we spent quite a bit of time inside taking detail shots before we were thawed out enough to venture back outside.

The museum has a nice collection of vehicles, as well as displays and a small store. It’s a small museum but definitely worth a visit if you like transportation-related museums. Enjoy the pictures.

 

Thursday Writing Prompt No. 27

Detail of airplane engine at the Smithsonian's Udar-Hazy Air and Space Museum.

I almost forgot it was Thursday. No, really! Okay, actually I didn’t, but I’ve been so busy trying to print out copies of my first three novel chapters to take to a workshop tonight that I almost forgot about the weekly prompt.

I’m reading about the use of darkness and light as elements in writing fiction. In our culture we associate darkness with evil, and light with goodness. There are plenty of other connotations, too. Western culture uses black as the color of mourning, while Eastern cultures associate white with funerals. It’s important to know what your readers’ expectations are going to be when you put your work out for them to read.

So this week’s Thursday Writing Prompt is going to be about writing the scene for a haunted house. You’re going to use the concepts of lightness and darkness to set the scene for your story. Don’t worry about characters, dialogue, or anything else. Just focus on setting the scene and let the description flow.

Think about how haunted houses are usually depicted: decrepit, dusty, cobweb-ridden. Usually they’re older houses, and portions of the plaster have fallen off the walls to reveal the lathe board behind. Dead trees decorate what’s left of the yard, and the roof is caving in. Mysterious clouds gather over the property as though caught in an invisible fence.

Break the mold. Create a haunted house setting that’s a modern suburban rambler or even a mobile home. It doesn’t matter. But think about the use of darkness and light. Paint the page with shades of black and white in your words. Create feeling and mood. There’s no word count, but aim for at least three paragraphs to give yourself a chance to really envision your story setting.

 

Support Free Speech

Today Google is wearing a black rectangle to warn us of censorship. In yet another ploy to “help” us by telling us that they’re going to fight piracy, our bungling government is fixing to wreak havoc on free speech. And  the sweeping laws that they propose will not address piracy, but instead limit our freedom. As usual, law-abiding citizens will pay the price and the pirates will still roam free.

Make no mistake about it: this law is not about piracy, it is about restricting free speech and controlling what information you have access to. If that does not frighten you, it should. These censorship bills is not something that any of us should ignore, no matter our political persuasion.

Please take some time to visit some of these websites and educate yourself about what is going on. Then, take action by writing or phoning your congressional representatives. Please, do not just assume that someone else will do it!

Google – More about SOPA and PIPA

Fight for the Future

SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets a Chance to Break the Internet

PROTECT IP Act Breaks the Internet

How SOPA Would Affect You

SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship

Directory of Representatives