Week 6: Butt-In-Seat Time

The Skinny

This past week I wrote the first scene of my novel, and the second-to-last scene. For this week, I am organizing the plot points that will connect those two dots.

The News

• I read Into the Woods, which is another book that claims to have found the key to understanding how all stories work. Like most of these books, the author overstates his claims, and forces every story to fit his format. However, if the pompous language can be ignored, there are some useful points on how to structure the middle of a story. 6.5/10.
• I started writing a short story called Comeuppance that I will submit to a few mystery lit mags.
• My longer piece for this week (below) is in the style of my blog: unofficialhamlet.com. My new author site (spmurphyauthor.com) is still a work in progress, but I expect to release it in late May.

Russian Story of the Week

Have you ever heard the term "Potemkin Village?" Legend has it that Grigory Potemkin, a prince and the lover of Empress Catherine II, was given money from the treasury to erect new villages in Crimea. Instead, he pocketed it. To his alarm, Catherine insisted on seeing the villages. So Potemkin instructed his builders to create the shell of a village, which looked like a fully constructed set of buildings if you didn't look too closely. His men would erect the facade, and Potemkin would show Catherine what he had "built" from a distance, counting on her poor eyesight. She was fooled. As soon as Catherine left, the men would take down the shell, and rush ahead to rebuild it at the next spot. Potemkin succeeded, and his name became synonymous with building something or putting on an act to appear better than you are.