Welcome, The Further Four

Dude, Buzz Aldrin is so cool.

Cranky Rah and the Poet-Accountant la-la the Space Race. We love the autobiographies of Jim Lovell (he of Apollo 13 and "Houston, we have a problem."), Scott Carpenter (For Spacious Skies) and Gene Cernan (The Last Man on the Moon). We think Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is the bomb (and, yes, we do talk like that). We've even read Flight Director Gene Kranz's Failure is Not an Option (the Apollo 13 disaster may not have landed men on the moon, but it gave us some great quotes).

(Full Disclosure: Cranky Rah had to skim more of Gene Kranz's book than she would like to admit. He speaks engineering like poets speak love.)

We watch the movie Apollo 13 (again) (and again), and every time we watch it, we think, "Hey, maybe we should watch From the Earth to the Moon again, too." Cuz, hey, it's easy to fit 12 hours of an HBO miniseries into our crazy lives. Like, who needs sleep when you can watch a docudrama about astronauts? Not we.

This is why, when my daughter (hereafter known as R) protested at her new writing group being called The Wees (okay, it does sound a little like what you do when you drink a lot of tea), I turned to NASA nomenclature to help me come up with a new name. First, there was the Mercury Seven (John Glenn and company, the first Americans into space). Then the New Nine (or Next Nine or Nifty Nine—one name wasn't enough for those men who were going to walk on the moon). So welcome to The Further Four.

The Mercury 7 (not the Cranky
Rah 7), compliments of NASA

The Further Four (put their initials together, and you get something that sounds like a medical scan: ECRG) are 12-ish and, like The Three, they love to write. Unlike The Three, they're really at the very beginning of their writing journey, so when we got together for the first time on Monday, I wanted to start out simple.

Maybe you know about the Five Ws from journalism or school writing: Who, What, Where, When and Why. (There are those who throw in How, too. Which starts with an H, not a W. And which is kind of covered in the actual Ws, so I left it out.) Anyway, the Five Ws aren't just for steely-eyed, ambulance-chasing journalists. Every good story—fiction or non—should answer the Five Ws.

Who?

Who are the people your story is about? These are your characters.

What?

What happens to your characters? This is your plot.

Where?

Where do your characters live? Where do the Whats happen to your characters?

When?

When do the Whats happen to your characters? This isn't just the year or era your story takes place; it includes the time of year, time of day and the age of your characters. It covers the timeline of your story, too: Does it happen over one hour, one month or many years?

Why?

Why do the Whats happen? What leads from one What to another? And why do your characters behave the way they do? This is also called motive.

The Five Ws of Anger

Look at Ben. See? He hates
losing an hour, too.

Any good meeting of writers at Cranky Rah's cave must include playing around with whatever we're talking about. So to explore the Five Ws, The Further Four and I each created a character to write about, using the same Apples to Apples approach The Three and I used last week. (Cranky Rah might not like Ben Franklin when he steals an hour from her every spring, but she's a firm believer in "waste not, want not.") 

E got the adjective crunchy, which was awesome. It was a great chance to talk about how crunchy could be a physical trait or a character trait.

After we had each created and shared our character, we all wrote again, this time putting the character in a scene that answered the other four Ws. My one requirement was that the character had to be angry in the scene. 

We ended up with characters with crunchy hair who had had a very bad day, a nasty, thumb-sucking girl, and an angry pink shark who kind of regretted losing his temper and eating all his dolphin friends. So all in all, a productive writing day.