Excercise from "Writer Unboxed"

The shape of a story: this link contains the detailed instructions!

1. Once upon a time . . . there was a forrest on the edge of Everroan  in which dwelled many families of brown burrow mice. One of these families was smaller than the rest. It consisted only of a father mouse and a baby mouse--the young mother mouse having made off years before in a fit of youthful exuberance.

2. Every day . . . he would leave his small mousling with a mousesitter toad or his own aged mother so he could go to work and have a normalish life in the wood.

3. Until this . . . one day in early spring when he met and fell in love with a young, strange but gentle hearted wood-troll.
Soon the two were married--much to his mouse family's deep dismay--and the three, mouse-man, mouse-babe, and wood-troll became a still small sort of family.

4. Because of this . . . the mouse-babe was able to live with her father because the young wood-troll mother was there to care for it. The wood-troll, being poorly treated by her mouse-man's family, began teaching the mouse-babe the value of being different and that strange isn't the same as bad. Then the other mice became even more pridful of their own mousy natures and passed further ill judgement on the young wood-troll wife who also belived, perhaps a bit foolheartedly, that there were more important things (like fun) than keeping a tidy burrow beneath the ground roots. Alas, she was a wood-troll raised by wood-trolls and behaved as any wood-troll would. The father mouse very rarely offered any kind of help in the burrow and even confessed to doing a poor job in order to disuade future request with domestic chores. Though the wood-troll eventually took a job to help pay for things, the mouse-man still worked far too much to really spend time with his young family. Unfortunately, the other forrest mice aggreed with his insistance that it was all for his mouse-babe and wood-troll-wife. They did not see the happiness it gave him to be on the job. A happiness which he did not feel at home in his small burrow beneath the greatest forest oak. This upset the wood-troll-wife, and there were many arguments had over this. The wood-troll did her best to be a good wood-troll parent and wife, but any time the wood-troll tried to convince the mouse-father to spend more time with the rapidly growing mouse-babe the bickering would rage again. Over the years, the wood-troll grew angry and sad that she was so alone in the raising of such a young mousling. The other mice were blind to her plight because all they saw was the mouse-father making all the pay grains--which, consequently, made him the only important part of the small strange family in their misguided mousy minds.

5. Because of this . . . the mouse-babe grew up being mentally poisoned by the other mice that scampered across the forest floor and still pointed their thin fingers at the strange wood-troll who made her home in their midst. Over time the mouse-babe became a mousling who, having run away from the wood-troll and having began living with a much-loved-mouse who drank far, far more acorn ale than was wise, also began pointing a slender mouse finger and accusing the wood-troll of being a very bad mouse. No one cared that she was a very good wood-troll. The wood-troll cried over her loss and mistreatment at the paws of so many nosy and egotistical forest mice. The mouse-man and wood-troll stayed together, but still fought about the once mouse-babe. Other mice did not feel the betrayal that the wood-troll had experienced because they were all still mice. They had not raised the mouse-babe. They had not been the target of the babe's adolescent mouse anger, because they had not been parents. But even in the midst of such strife, life on the forest floor carried on.

6. Until finally . . . the wood-troll was told--in a roud-about-sort-of-way--by the mouse-man that she was, in all these struggles and over all this time, only his wife. Of course, she had always known that she was not a mouse, but it still stung to hear. She quieted down for a while and turned inside herself for comfort. Over time the wounds would heal and she would adjust to being a wood-troll wife and nothing more.

7. For every day . . . life carried on just as it always would on the forest floor no matter what color the leaves bore high above. And so the young wood-troll grew old, fat and even more troll-like living in a small but cozy burrow surrounded by pet crickets and bettles below a thick ground root under the greatest oak in a forest full of little brown mice.