Today, day two of Hannah Tinti’s online short story class, we focused on setting up the story. Just like yesterday, Tinti led us through a detailed, sentence by sentence prompt to turn the first sentence we had written from the exercise yesterday into a full, paragraph long set-up of a full story.

I found it much more challenging today than yesterday, but this was largely a result of the fact that I was working on it while my husband, Damien, was in a meeting, so I had our daughter crawling all over me and begging for my attention. I asked her to help me write the story, though, and started reading aloud what I had so far and what I was adding. That way she felt like she was part of it, and it felt like we were doing something together (although, like I said, it was still more difficult, then, than it would have been to just write totally undistracted).

In the end, I’m pretty pleased with what I came up with. It’s still very drafty—needs a lot of work, I know—but I feel the characters beginning to come alive beneath my fingertips, and I know, soon enough, my characters will start writing the story for me, just like they always do when I get on a good roll with a new story. Tomorrow, I think we’re going to be working on the inciting incident, or propelling event, or whatever you want to call it. I’m stoked! I don’t have any idea where this class is going to take this story, but judging from yesterday and today, I have complete faith that I will, indeed, be ending the week with a complete draft of a full short story, just like One Story promised.