Let's write!

I'm on a mailing list from that Jerry Jenkins dude, because he sends out great writing advice. He just sent out his "Seven Deadly Sins of Novel-Writing", and I'm going to base the next few challenges on them, where appropriate.

The first sin is "Starting with Throat-Clearing". He writes that "throat-clearing" is "anything that delays the real beginning. Your job is to get on with things, not spend pages describing settings or setting up scenes or unloading a dump truck of backstory."

As an example, for a fantasy story, you could spend three pages describing the kingdom and the castle and the forests, and the marketplace full of people... Or your heroine could be riding home on horseback as fast as she could, thinking about why she was going to be big trouble when she got there while passing the forests, galloping through the farmland, into the capital and through the marketplace. (This, by the way, is the first chapter of Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. Excellent novel.)

For your challenge today, pretend you're starting a novel. Choose a setting - say, Victorian London - and then, have your main character do something and let your description of them doing it paint the setting for you.