Hi folks! If you’re new here, this is the 200 Word Novel, where I’m writing a book 200 words at a time, Monday through Friday. Each Friday I post the last week’s progress, raw and largely unedited, along with some reflections on the past week’s writing. If you’re here primarily to read the story, you can find the start of the novel here. If you’re mostly interested in the weekly introspection on writing (and occasional life update), you can find that down below.
Tavi made a face. “Don’t particularly care to see what’s under there, then,” he said.
“And we shouldn’t have to,” Bria replied. “It hasn’t snowed in the past three days, so whatever cargo we can recover should be above the current snow drifts.”
“Great.” With that, Tavi scurried forward among the debris, picking a careful path around the areas thick with unpleasant scent. Bria followed suit, and the two animals scurried among the snow, looking for crates, packages, and lost satchels among the open area before them.
Despite the gruesome circumstances that led to this present situation, the work itself proved straightforward and more tedious than fraught. Before long, they had managed to accumulate an impressive little stockpile of various recovered goods, sorted into neat piles on their sled.
“I’m impressed the merchants won the fight,” Tavi said as he hoisted a wooden box onto the cargo bed.
“Could be that their attackers were starving,” Bria replied. “We are far towards the outskirts of the Known Woods out here. And the mayor mentioned they had not had reports of any encounters with such animals for at least a season. It’s possible they’ve wandered far and were desperate.”
“Do you really think Ferals only eat… animal flesh?” Tavi asked with a shudder.
Bria shrugged. “They believe the Old Ways are natural and right, decency and civility be damned. And also, you really shouldn’t call them that.”
Tavi gave a melodramatic sigh. “Right, of course. What does the handbook say is the proper name then?”
“…Cultists of the Fang and Flesh,” Bria said.
“What a mouthful,” Tavi said.
“That’s what they’re hoping for,” Bria offered.
Tavi gasped in faux scandal. “Absolutely terrible.”
Bria started in on a clever retort when a cracking sound rang out across the snowscape.
Two noses snapped toward the southeast as ears twitched.
“Tree sap?” Tavi asked.
“Perhaps,” Bria answered, unconvincing and unconvinced.
Tavi frowned. “Let’s wrap this up and be on our way then,” he said.
Bria shook her head. “We still haven’t found the crate the mayor described. The main reason we offered to come out here.”
“We’ll keep looking then,” Tavi said after a moment, letting out a frustrated huff. “But we leave the entire sled behind at the first sign of Feral—of trouble.”
Bria gave a curt nod. “‘No package nor delivery, no matter how valuable, is worth a Scurryer’s life,’” she recited.
“This is why I haven’t read the handbook,” Tavi said. “You’ve memorized it for the both of us.”
“You haven’t read—“ Bria couldn’t tell if Tavi was teasing or telling the truth, but had little opportunity to question further as the otter bounded towards the source of the cracking sound.
“Well,” Bria said after a spell, “I think we found the source of our noise.”
“Your skills of deduction are truly unmatched,” Tavi quipped.
Before the two, a massive branch lay across an abandoned sled, splintering the back end of top rails and cracking multiple planks on the cargo bed where it had struck the vehicle.
“Looks like a sled the merchants left behind,” Bria said.
Tavi squinted at the damage. “Why would they have done that?”
“The sled is smashed in the front, away from where the branch just fell,” Bria pointed out. “And the runners are cracked there too. I imagine this sled got damaged in the conflict, so the townsfolk consolidated what they could, then took the one remaining good sled back into town—this one we borrowed.” She fell to all fours, her nose quivering just above the snow. “The scent of the attackers is strong here, along with” —*sniff, sniff— “*campfire ash?” Bria gestured towards the branches leaning against trees, along with various scraps of ratty fabric in the area. “This… this must have been the cultist’s camp. The merchants likely drove right through it during the snowstorm, leading to the surprise scuffle—an unintentional ambush and eruption of violence, resulting in…” Bria hopped forward, nose leading, then began sifting splintered debris and canvas from a particularly large pile of wreckage. With a grunt, she pulled back a large, still sealed crate, marked with a merchant’s brand signature on top. “…many goods being left behind, abandoned where they fell.”
“…Your skills of deduction are truly unmatched,” Tavi said with a low whistle.
“I do think this is what we’re looking for,” Bria said.
Tavi skid up next to the crate, squinting at mark on top, and tapping lightly on the heavy wood. “What do you think’s inside?”
“Our job is to deliver packages, not interrogate their contents,” Bria replied.
Tavi held up a finger. “’Addendum: it is within the rights and indeed responsibility of a Scurryer to insure what they transport is not dangerous nor harmful to themselves nor the item’s recipients.”
“You have read the handbook!” Bria beamed.
“Don’t tell anyone though,” Tavi grinned.
Bria resisted the urge to tell Tavi the precise wording was actually not dangerous nor sent with intent to harm. Instead, she said, “The mayor would’ve warned us if it was dangerous. She just said fragile. Let’s get this to the sled so we can get it home.”
“And get back to the fire and those biscuits. It’s freezing out here.”
Bria rolled her eyes as Tavi started pulling the crate through the snow, joining him in shoving the heavy box.
A loud wooden snap stopped them both in their tracks.
“Did you—did we hit a rock? Did we break the crate?” Bria asked, a little frantic.
“I think… it came from inside the crate,” Tavi said.
The two looked at each other, then back at the crate, where another distinct loud snap rang out again.
“Time to do some insuring that what we’re transporting is not dangerous, I think,” Tavi said.
“Or alive,” Bria mumbled.
🐭
End of Chapter 2!
It’s always satisfying to reach an “end of chapter” break right at the end of the week!
Next week, I’ll be picking up with “Chapter 4” to continue the Scurryers arc with Bria and Tavi. The current plan is to write two more chapters following these two to get caught up with the Gruber storyline.
If you were trying to read the story through chronologically, you’d find the next section of novel that comes after the above here. The (retroactive) plan is for the first three chapters I wrote to be 1, 3, 5, and the three chapters I’m writing now to be 2, 4, and 6.
I was chatting with my friend Valya (hi Valya!) about what I call the two different groups in my head as I write. I shared they were “Arcanist” and “Scurryer” chapters in my brain. She said she thought of them as “Sled” and “Ship” chapters (“although I assume the animals will eventually depart from their vehicles”). We both agreed that frog and mouse emojis to mark them for now is pretty great. (And now I’m daydreaming of cute chapter art and icons next to each chapter number in the eventual book…)
Also, boy, I sure hope I don’t discover there’s a third group/perspective to follow as I keep writing this story. (This is a genuine hope. This is not foreshadowing. I have zero plans for a third perspective. This isn’t Game of Thrones with animals. Ain’t nobody need that many characters to follow. …boy I can’t wait for future me to come back to this to see if I stuck to my guns or committed GoT levels of storyline crimes.)
…I should really make a place where subscribers can read the whole story so far in order. What’s that? A perfect segue for a subscription CTA? Oh no wait—
The Answer is Change
To spoil the answer to this week’s post title: the thing that every scene must have, the “atomic unit” or smallest required component that makes a scene function, is change.
The change can be a shift in the driving conflict. An enemy ship catches up to our heroes. It can be internal to the characters. How our protagonist feels about their partner shifts as they learn something about their past. It can even be purely a change in the environment or world, sans any characters at all. In a secret place, hidden deep within the heart of foreboding mountains, a magical clock long frozen in time by powerful binding spells… suddenly ticks to life.
If a scene lacks change, the story does not have the core component needed to progress. When a scene stalls too long without change, a reader might describe that part of a story as “dragging” or having pacing issues. The resultant feeling is often that things are spinning and nothing is really happening.
Hamlet is a fantastic illustration of hinging scenes on powerful change—especially notable in a story all about a character’s indecision and inability to commit to a single act of change! In terms of plot and actions, very little happens in many scenes—but there is a tumultuous amount of change in his perspective, his paranoias, his worries, his emotional state. When folks complain of nothing happening in a story, it isn’t always a demand for more action (or more blood and guts)—it’s a craving of intentional shifts in the status quo, of keeping events and characters off balance to see how they adjust and react to a dynamic series of events or actions that trigger rich, emotional lives.
That’s all for this week. Until next, I’m gonna try to be the change in my life scenes that I want to see. 💙