Master Class 2014 Volume III

So we had a snow week…I hope y’all enjoyed it. As such, you get a couple of extra days to participate in our new Master Class assignment. Last class, Amanda chose the last line from The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. That line was “Never name the well from which you will not drink.” Writers could chose to make it the first or last line of their story. There are four gems to read this time.

Amanda shared an excerpt from her long-time work in progress and used the line in a subtle and unexpected twist with Unnamed Well. Here’s a sample from her fantastic story:

Emelia jumped and cowered as the wall nearest her slowly split open. The cold night air slipped through the opening and danced around her as a familiar form emerged. He smiled softly at her, the stars above dancing in his amber eyes.

Newcomer Tye Owens offered a fantastic mythological story about birds everyone can relate to with The Birds. Here’s a sample from her creative take on the prompt:

Talon broke the rules that day. He broke all of them. Talon had wandered aimlessly out of the main part of the city, into uncharted and illegal territory. He had been hoping to find another bird city, but instead he found himself on the path to The Well. Talon wandered to the edge of the cliff and gazed astonished at what lay before him. An entire empire of fuming, dank smog lay before him. It was spewing out of a gigantic factory chimney. Nothing was gigantic and nothing was vast. Nothing but this… wasteland.

Wisper used the prompt to continue a story previously began by another Master Class prompt with Inferno. Here’s a sample of the decisiveness with which she writes:

He slumped, dangling like a broken puppet in a demented version of Dante’s Inferno.  It was futile.  The chains wouldn’t give.  The ideas were gone.  He was no different than the others.  He’d be stuck here just like the others.

Kelly joined us for the first time as well. Her story about sacrifice and a society trying to revive after war stuck with me. I think it would stick with you too. Here’s a sample of To Grow in Darkness:

The following morning it was the same, the witch teaching me everything she knew about the forest and always admonishing me to remember. And then, just as the sun reached its highest point in the sky, she stopped and gestured. “The Herb of Poison. Do you see it?”

I asked Kelly to open any book and give me the LAST line of the book. She chose The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner. Your prompt for this week is a long one: “He was the only one left to fulfill that contract and try to justify the labor and the harshness and the mistakes of his parents’ lives, and that responsibility was so clearly his, was so great an obligation, that it made unimportant and unreal the sight of the motley collection of pall-bearers staggering under the weight of his father’s body, and the back door of the hearse closing quietly upon the casket and the flowers.”

Because it is a very descriptive piece, I’ll give you some leeway and let you use the prompt anywhere you’d like within your story. I’ll also, for one week only, allow you to use any part of it without using the whole thing, or to share a story that the sentence inspired. Any genre, any length is accepted.

The linkup will close on February 11, 2014 at 9:00 PM EST.

Are you inspired? Ready? Set? Write!

The link up is NOW LIVE!