On Constructing Architecture And Stories

This week, I’m in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. It’s my first trip here, and despite having caught the red-eye flight and having had very little sleep, my first impressions are all positive. It’s a carefully planned city, and the architect responsible for designing the bulk of the Parliamentary buildings and surrounds was brilliant.

Parliament House, which contains both houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives, sits on top of a small hill. It’s a low rise building, with clear lines of sight to the Department of Defence, the Australian War Memorial, and the central business district (downtown). The architect, Walter Burley Griffin was an American (you can learn more about him here) whose vision for the Australian capital city was extraordinary. The Parliament House building is designed so that when politicians enact legislation, they walk outside, see the city, the Department of Defence, and the War Memorial and remember the consequences of their actions. It’s meant to keep politicians accountable to the people, and to make them consider how their actions impact others. Burley Griffin left us a story in his architecture. A story of the interconnectedness and interdependencies of people.

This made me think about how I construct stories. How do the actions of one character impact upon the others? Have I made that clear to the reader? Does my story speak of the interconnectedness of the characters in a way the reader can easily follow?

This week, I want you to think about how each of your characters interacts with the others. How do they work with, against, or around each other? Are the scenarios believable? Do your characters’ reactions seem authentic to the way you have written them? Does your voice convey important information about your characters and setting? Are you tending to the interconnectedness of the characters and settings in your story?

July Poetry Slam: Palinode

This month’s Poetry Slam features the palinode, which is Greek for “counterpoem” – retract your own ideas or join Team Petty as we recycle and revise poetry that needs a second look. Learn more from Rowan here.

Prompt Up!

Prompt Up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float it down to other territories.

Amy brought us into an earlier, more volatile time in her essay Spaces with Men. This week’s prompt taken from her piece is: “He is a bomb.”

How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:

Basic YeahWrite guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.

1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the fiction|poetry badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;

EDITOR’S NOTE: With the recent WordPress updates, there’s a paste bug that affects some (but not all! Yay!) themes. If you see double quotes (“”) in your HTML view, those should be single quotes (“) not (‘) though. Here’s the exact code you’ll need for your badge this week: <a href=”https://yeahwrite.me/fiction-poetry-writing-challenge-326/”><img src=”https://yeahwrite.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/fiction326.png”></a>

2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid;
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge; and
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.

Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.

Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…

About the author:

Asha keeps moving from one side of the world to the other. Her most recent move has taken her back to Perth, Western Australia where she grew up. She lives near the beach but hates sand between her toes. It’s a real conundrum. Asha began blogging at YeahWrite in October 2014 with this post, and YeahWrite was lucky to pull her on board as a Contributing Editor in December 2016. She is currently working on a novelette that grew from a series of flash fiction pieces. Asha is published in a variety of places including Modern Loss, PANK, Dead Housekeeping, and SheKnows. You can find her inconsistent blogging at Parenting In The Wilderness, or at her fiction blog, FlAsha Tales.