by Tina Radcliffe from the September 3, 2018 issueTagline: Leslie was suffering from an empty nest, but Sam filled her heart with a new kind of joy.
Observations: This was an adorable story. I, myself, might be facing an empty nest soon. My own two kids are finally taking steps to move out together. I'm excited to have a room to myself and to get rid of some furniture we'd been holding onto in the hopes they'd take it with them, but I will miss seeing them everyday, not to mention the fact that I will once again be doing all the dishes. LOL
It's been a while since I talked about the three-act structure and how it applies even to very short stories like these. If you look back, most stories have a three act structure. This story, however, only has two. In the first act, we meet Leslie and see her in her "ordinary world," a term that comes from Christopher Vogler's A Writer's Journey, a book I highly recommend for fiction writers. We find out all the pertinent information about her--she's single, she has two grown daughters who just went away to college together, she has a crush on Sam the neighbor.
The second act begins the moment Sam appears. This is where we see the two characters connecting in a meaningful way. (Honestly, I wish I had a Sam who lived next door. I have quite a few home improvement projects I'd like to have done, but my dh is not very handy around the house.)
Another thing I notice--and perhaps it's because I am about to become an empty-nester--is that Leslie is very easy to identify with. When you're creating characters for Woman's World, you want to make them likeable. You want to give them traits or situations that the readers and the characters have in common. And on the pages of Woman's World, you also want to make those female characters strong. You'll never see any doormat women in Woman's World stories. No. They're women who set goals, who take action, who are willing to try new things.
Photo credit: Liz West via Flickr cc license
