Workshop 3

August 11, 2025

Kristina L. Wildes

Set the Mood First

You know now how this starts. Let’s get your blood pumping

Opening Song: “Made for the Battle” – UNSECRET ft. Sam Tinnesz

Turn the volume up. Let it settle into your chest like a storm building beneath your ribs. The energy here isn’t chaotic. It’s controlled. It knows where it’s going. This isn’t a scream into the void. It’s a countdown before the strike.

This week’s shift isn’t loud, but it is irreversible. This is the moment something gives. Whether it breaks, bends, or catches fire is up to you. But once you step into this scene, you won’t be walking back the same.

Where We Left Off

Workshop 1 gave us the spark. A single moment where power was held back and mercy came not from goodness, but from a promise. The villain spared the hero. Not out of kindness, but obligation. That scene introduced tension rooted in restraint. The blade didn’t fall, but it hovered, heavy with intention.

In Workshop 2, we peeled back the surface and explored what your character truly wanted. Not just what they told others or even what they told themselves. We tapped into that raw undercurrent—the desire that twists decisions and ignites conflict. We asked you to write into the hunger behind the silence.

Now we stand at a precipice.

Because no story remains suspended in longing forever. At some point, the tension must shift. Restraint will either snap or be reinforced by choice. Someone is going to speak. Someone is going to act. And whether it’s a confession, a betrayal, or a quiet decision made in a dark room, this is the moment where the trajectory begins to change.

Power moves. Characters evolve. Something breaks.

This is the point of no return.

This Week's Prompt

Write the moment where something changes—and no one can go back.

This is the turning point. The moment something changes and no one can go back.

Your task this week is to write the scene where the balance tips. That change can take many forms. It could be a betrayal that shatters trust, a long-held secret finally exposed, a surge of violence that breaks the calm, or a quiet decision that shifts everything beneath the surface.

It doesn’t need to be loud. But it does need to matter.

The cold war becomes personal.The power dynamic begins to unravel.The promise that once held everything in place no longer means what it did.

This is not just another scene. This is the moment the characters feel it. This is the breath before the spiral. The look they won’t forget. The sentence they regret even as they say it.

Ask yourself:

• Who has the upper hand now?

• What shifted between the protagonist and the antagonist?

• What new line has been drawn?

• Who is going to cross it?

You are writing the scene that will change the course of your story. Let the tension build. Let the characters hesitate. And then let the shift happen. No turning back.

Let It Sink In

When the moment has passed and the consequences are suspended in the air, pause.

Do not rush the reaction. Let your character sit in the weight of what just happened. Let the silence become heavy. Let their heartbeat fill the space where certainty used to live.

This is not about regret or relief. This is about the clarity that comes after everything changes.

Reflective Song: “Bite My Tongue” – Halocene

This song sounds like the fracture line that finally cracked. Like saying the thing you were never supposed to say. Like meaning it, and hating that you do.

Let it play while you sit with the fallout.

Let your character breathe in the moment they just created.

Then write what happens in the silence.

Your Goal This Week

Write three to five pages

Your goal is to write three to five pages, but more importantly, to write the moment where everything changes.

This is not a throwaway scene or a brief pause in the plot. This is a turning point, one your characters will carry with them long after the page turns. Let the weight of the moment show in the way they move, in what they say, and especially in what they don’t say. Let the tension unfold through emotion, through dialogue, or through silence so loud it becomes its own kind of reckoning.

Do not rush through the consequences. Give your characters room to feel them, to flinch from them, to either lean into the shift or recoil from it.

If you’ve been continuing your story from Week 1 and Week 2, this is your first major change in trajectory. The moment that alters the course. The beginning of the unraveling or the rise. If you are starting fresh this week, let this scene be bold enough to set the tone for everything that follows. Let it echo. Let it demand attention.

Craft Focus: Irreversibility

In every powerful story, there is a moment that cannot be undone. A single decision, action, or revelation that alters the fabric of the narrative and leaves its mark on the characters forever.

It does not have to be explosive. Sometimes, it’s a quiet realization spoken out loud for the first time. Other times, it’s the decision to stay silent when the truth would have changed everything. It can be a boundary crossed without thought, a confession made in desperation, or a blade raised out of fear instead of control.

These moments are not just about advancing plot. They are about defining character.

Ask yourself:

• What makes this moment irreversible?

• Who gains something because of it, and who loses something they cannot get back?

• Does this decision break someone open, or make them stronger in a way they did not expect?

• Will it haunt them in the quiet?

• Will they bury it or cling to it?

You do not need an explosion to shift your story. You only need a single moment powerful enough to tilt the world. Write that moment. Let it live on the page. And let your character carry its weight into everything that comes next.

Want to Share?

If you’ve been here since Week 1, you’re building a story. A real one. And it’s growing.

If you’re just joining, welcome to the chaos. We’re writing something worth bleeding for

If this week’s scene made your chest tighten, or if you wrote something you can’t stop rereading, I want to see it.

Email it to author@kristinawildes.com or leave a favorite line or reflection in the comments.

This is a community, not a competition.

Next Week: Workshop 4 Preview

Now that the balance has shifted and a choice has been made, it is time to step back and examine the world around your characters. In Workshop 4, we will move beyond the internal and look at how setting reflects the emotional weight of your story.

This is not about lore dumps or world-building for the sake of detail. It is about how environment becomes expression. How a hallway can feel like a prison. How silence in a kitchen can scream louder than an argument. How light, texture, sound, and space all mirror what your characters are going through.

The world is not just where your story takes place. It is how your story breathes, reacts, and reveals.

Next week, we write the spaces that say everything your characters cannot.

Final Thoughts

Every story has a point where things change. A line is drawn. A boundary is crossed. A truth is revealed and cannot be unspoken.

This week, you reached that place. The moment that shifts everything.

From here, your story will evolve, because your characters have been changed by what happened.

Follow that change.

Let it lead you to places you did not expect.

Keep the pen moving.Keep the heart open.Keep writing.

I’ll see you next week.

Curious What I Wrote?

Date: 14 SEPTEMBER 8032, 1700UT  

Location: Patrol Vessel Kestrel, Outer Sector Fringe  

Reporting Officer: Cmdr. Caelum Nox Mercier  

Subject: Directive 17-S (Cont.) – Hostile Adaptation Observed

The silence wasn’t silence. Not really. It had a pulse. Along with the rest of humanity, even the silence Caelum sought for was never truly quiet. A low, mechanical thrum beneath Caelum’s boots, the groaning of the hull where it had buckled, the whispered hiss of emergency vents still purging toxins that no longer mattered. The kind of sound that drilled through Caelum’s skull, dull at first, then relentless. Saia had engaged containment mode thirty-eight minutes ago. Even she was tired.

Rhydian was ahead of him, crouched near one of the fallen. His gloves were slick with blood again. He didn’t even try to wipe them clean this time. Caelum did not blame him, not this time, everyone and everything was covered in the stench of rotting humans. This was the only mission full of them strictly. No other known species was involved. Caelum wanted to roll his eyes at the audacity humans had. Their superiority complex never ceased to amaze and irritate him simultaneously. Even after countless battles proved humans were on the bottom of the hierarchy scale. Not after the Revelation happened, almost five hundred years ago. 

The tags he pulled from the corpse clinked softly as he added them to the growing chain clipped at his waist. Twenty-four. That made twenty-four names he would be responsible for delivering. And twenty-four families who would never forgive him. Not that he truly cared an inkling about said families. They kept him at arms length and he happily let them.

Caelum didn’t kneel. He stepped around the bodies like discarded tools. To him, they might as well be. He was feared, not respected. Allowed, not accepted. If they wanted to treat him as an outsider, then he would return the favour.

Some of the bodies had been half-charred. Blackened flesh curled from bone like burnt parchment, crackling as it cooled, the air thick with the scent of scorched meat and chemicals. Others were split clean down the middle, peeled like overripe fruit left to rot in the sun. Their insides spilled in thick, gelatinous ropes across the floor, glistening with a wet sheen that refused to dry. One had been fused to the bulkhead, jaw torn from their skull and welded into the wall behind them. The teeth were still intact, caught mid-scream, forever echoing in silence against scorched alloy.

Modified, Vanguard-class, soldiers lay nearby, the enhancements that should have kept them alive now ruptured and mangled. Steel implants torn from muscle. Hydraulic limbs twisted back in ways no metal should bend. Whatever hit them had bypassed every safeguard, rendering their expensive augmentations useless. It wasn’t just slaughter. It was precision. Calculated. Cruel.

One twitching body still clung to life, barely. Their skin was flayed, but the eye still moved, darting.

It was a masterpiece of anatomical violence. A scene no battlefield surgeon would ever forget, and one no surgeon should ever have had to learn from.

The stench was worse than the visuals. Acrid. Wet. Like rusted metal soaked in bile and set on fire, then left to rot. It clung to Caelum’s nasal receptors like tar, sticky and sickening, worming its way deeper with every forced breath. His lungs were beginning to protest now, muscle memory demanding preservation.

He didn't dare breathe too deeply. Not here. He swallowed hard, throat dry, stomach twitching with a warning. He would need to find a clean-air corridor soon, or else vomit the little breakfast he had forced down that morning, a synthetic nutrient square and half a cup of steaming black tea. If he lost it here, the scent would multiply. Blood, bile, and burnt protein. A trinity of filth.

Even for a Liraethan, this was close to unbearable.

“Where’s the core access?” Rhydian called, not looking back. Dried tears glistened on the man's face, Caelum scoffed. What use is it for a High Commander if he could not look death in the face without showcasing his emotion?

Caelum pointed to a collapsed wall panel, jagged where the synthetic plating had been punched clean through. “Behind that. Port side.”

Rhydian stood, every movement stiff. He’d stopped speaking to Caelum like he was a man. Now it was just functional. Cold. A necessity. They will see how long it lasts before the poor sod breaks his tantrum. He started toward the wall, but Caelum didn’t follow. Something else had his attention.

It was small. Barely visible. Clutched in the hand of a body that had been flattened beneath a toppled beam. Burnt beyond recognition. But Caelum saw it. Glinting between two broken fingers. He crouched, brushing the soot aside with one gloved knuckle.

A scale.

Organic in nature but denser than bone, layered with crystalline veins that shimmered slightly under his touch.

-Kristina