Saturday, May 30, 2009

TasktSheet 3: Character Development Scene

At 3:45a.m. on Monday morning, Ethan woke from a terrible night sweat. He charged into his mom and dad's bedroom just down the hall and demanded that they listen to his account of the terrible nightmare he had just had. "I now have proof that starting Kindergarten today is a very bad idea!" he screamed. Anxiously, Ethan started describing the new Kindergarten teacher he had seen in his dream. "My teacher was as old as Mrs. McCloskey that lives next door and she smelled like the baby powder mom uses when she changes Brady's diaper," explained Ethan. His mom and dad glanced at each other with a slight smile, trying to make light of the early morning awakening. "We all sat together in a circle and sang a song about animals and letters and I had to sit by a girl!" Ethan started to get very upset and panic. He crawled in bed up next to his mom and began to cry. "Mom, I don't want to start school today."
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3 comments:

  1. Michael KingMay 31, 2009 at 5:29 PM

    I am unsure why, but this made me smile. I think it is because I sometimes forget how the young view things. Like, sitting in a circle and singing a song - and him having to sit by a girl - being a dramatic thing in a young boy's life.

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  2. Allie39May 31, 2009 at 8:13 PM

    I'm with Michael, I too,found myself smiling while reading this. It really left me wondering if the teacher really did smell like baby powder and if they sang songs about animals :)

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  3. Ray LacinaJune 2, 2009 at 12:52 PM

    Nice -- I love the negotiations already beginning, even before heading off to school! I'm going to cheat and make two suggestions, but both are related to dialogue: first, break the paragraph up a bit to break up Ethan's speech. Even though there's only one speaker, he's shifting from topic to topic here -- a fact that could be obscured by packing it all into a single paragraph. The second: try to drop the descriptors of dialogue whenever possible -- let the dialogue itself show us the emotion behind it, or give us a "beat" -- a bit of action -- that shows us Ethan's feelings. To be honest, both are here already -- which makes those tags (such as "anxiously, Ethan began describing...") redundant.

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