Let’s hit the ground running and keep going on our story. Here’s where we left off:

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Lemon took the bill out of her pocket and looked at it while she walked. It gave her something to think about. Something other than going in there and talking to mean old Mr. Lamprey.

She tried to see, in her mind, what it would be like to just go in there and buy the milk like everyone else seemed to do.

What she didn’t see was the broken part of the sidewalk in front of her.

When she hit the ground, the first thing she noticed was how her knee felt. It hurt. The second thing was the feeling of grit and gravel dug into her fingers. The third thing was a kind of embarrassing feeling as she imagined what she must have looked like, falling like that. So it was really only when she got to the fourth thing that the situation got more complicated.

The money was gone.

The panic made the pain in her knee fade for a moment, and then the panic and the embarrassment and the pain and the grit all piled onto each other in her mind. Swinging her body around and around, she tried to see where the 10-dollar bill must have landed.

But it was gone.

“How is that even possible?!” she said out loud. She looked again at the bump in the sidewalk. She just wanted to kick it. But instead, she took a breath and stood in front of the bump in the sidewalk and imagined where her hands must have been when she hit it. Walking through her mind, she could see herself almost comically falling forward. And that meant her left hand would have been pointing….

Lemon looked at the ground near the scene of the…crime? It felt like a crime. It was clumsiness, but it felt like a crime. She looked at the ground and a chill wracked her chest.

“No. Not there,” she said quietly. Lemon slowly walked over to the sewer grate and, after a moment’s hesitation, she looked down into the wet, shadowy grave. And then Lemon said a word that not even her mother knew that she knew.

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So, we are coming close to the end of the beginning of the story. We have built in some stuff about the kind of person Lemon is, and we built in some tension around this most recent event.

And here’s a quick word about that: in a previous post I suggested that you don’t solve a character’s problem too quickly; that you should let the tension build.

In this case, the mini-problem is not knowing where the money is. She could have just looked over at the sewer grate right after she fell, and then we would have been off and running with the bigger problem (having lost the money). Instead, we drew it out a bit, building up the tension in order to make the realization that she now had a bigger problem even more exciting. Build and build.

Okay, so next time, our hero is going to have to try some things that she already knows how to do in order to try and solve the problem. It is only when those strategies don’t work that we force her into a new world that will push her to change, in order to solve the crisis.

So that’s it for this week!

Happy writing, young writer.