Writing Prompt: The Re-Write: Let’s Talk About It

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

This week’s prompt is designed to help you practice your revision skills without the risk of messing up your manuscript. Edit the bad writing, strengthen and clarify the goals, conflict, and stakes, develop the setting, establish the character, etc. You know the drill.

You have to keep the bones of the piece, but how you get those ideas across is up to you. Add whatever details strike you, as long as you can still identify this scene as the scene I started—so no completely rewriting it from scratch. The goal is to make this scene better.

Last time we turned a white room of dialogue into a scene, so this time, let’s add the dialogue to a scene that needs some.

Edit this page to include dialogue that supports the scene:

Killing five thousand colonists was an easy decision for Jeremiah Sullivan to make. Killing his brother was harder.

He didn’t need his brother to destroy the Tellus colony—he already had an undetectable device hidden in the ion regulation system of the Lancaster’s engines—but the device was unstable. It was possible the detonation would occur after the colonists had disembarked for the planet.

And that would not do.

Jeremiah reached out and squeezed his brother’s shoulder. After all, history was written by the victors.

Write as much or as little as you’d like.

For the curious, this is actually part of an abandoned prologue for a very old project of mine.