Last night during my "Writing the Novel" session I was talking about branches of action, something Adrian Fogelin mentioned at an SCBWI workshop a few years ago. Aka--leaving out boring everyday details and focusing on the parts of your story where characters make definitive choices. I said "'Amanda continued giving her presentation until 7:30' is not interesting, and you could probably gloss over that and go on to the next interesting thing I did. However, 'Amanda suddenly ran from the room screaming' is much more interesting--what made me do that? What happens after that?"

Five minutes later, two of my teens (16-17 year old boys) jumped up and ran screaming from the room. (They came back a couple of minutes later.) It was SO FUNNY. I just kept talking about dialogue and broke for a moment to say--see, THAT's interesting, that's something worth writing about!

I love my teens. :)