Write Club report: Dramatic irony

Welcome welcome. If you haven't yet heard of Write Club, start here. Also:

• This post tells you who we are.
• Here's a post containing a FAQ for other fiction writers who want to walk the walk with us.
• And finally, here's my post about plotting my first story.

And now for today’s view from the locker room, where there's a requisite aroma of smelly socks and a feeling in the air that with all that training going on, there will be agony, and there will be tears. But these are good things. They are important things. For, without great goals and all the sweat and pain of achieving them, who are we but beings who just let life happen, allowing it to unfold like a story someone else had the privilege of telling?

Image credit: Pixabay

Today is merely day two of Write Club. Day two of 112. Will we last the duration? Do we have what it takes? Of course, of course. The question must be asked, but the answer is “never say die!”

With those thoughts behind me, today I want to write a little bit about dramatic irony. It is one of the tools available to us as writers. I didn’t mention this yesterday in my story plotting post, but an additional layer of the O. Henry story serving as our inspiration for the first achievement of Write Club, is irony. In the story, which you can read in @tanglebranche’s story prompt announcement, the dramatic irony is that the very things the two characters give up is what is needed to fully enjoy the gift the other obtained through personal sacrifice. When people say “oh, the irony,” this is what they mean.

I’m happy to report that I’ve come up with my characters, conflict and storyline, and my work on the first story for Write Club begins today. I shared the first part of my process in yesterday’s post, along with some loglines I was mulling over prior to getting started. In addition to the four I shared yesterday, I wrote six more loglines (one line plot summaries) for a total of 10 before choosing one that I will live with as I craft the tale.

I’m not going to share it. It’s too sweet, young, newly hatched and vulnerable. But it is does indeed contain a dramatic irony element.

My challenge will be to tell it well, tell it richly, and without using the irony as a hammer. It must not attempt to be the story, but to be a layer. It must lend weight and beauty to the story without pulling it down into the harbor with the other sunken ships of painful, poorly told fiction.

Will I eventually write the other logline stories? Perhaps, if they inspire me. I am enjoying the process of crafting loglines before embarking on the writing process. I expect I will develop far more loglines than I can ever write into stories. When you think about the potential combinations of people, settings, conflicts, and storytelling style, there are as many stories to tell as there are stars in the galaxy. And then there are many more galaxies.

And so I begin.

If you are a writer seeking community and support, you can find editors to help you at The Writers’ Block on Discord.