Your job, as a writer of short fiction–whatever your beliefs–is to put complex personalities on stage and let them strut and fret their brief hour. To create a perfect loaf, you must balance ingredients baked for the correct amount of time and enhanced with the right polishing glaze.” -Laurel Yourke 3. This process is comparable to producing something delectable in the kitchen–any ingredient that you put into your bowl of dough impacts your finished loaf of bread.
IDEAS FOR WRITING A STORY HOW TO
“It is important to understand the basic elements of fiction writing before you consider how to put everything together. The rest of the paragraph introduces I and an internal conflict as the protagonist debates a course of action and introduces an intriguing contrast of past and present setting. Brown and their two young sons in Duluth. It was very different from living in the duplex over middle-aged Mr. The first time I heard him, I stood in the bathroom listening at our shared wall for ten minutes, debating the wisdom of calling the police. Who is this guy who goes in his shower every day and screams? Why does he do that? What, exactly, is“scream therapy”? Let’s keep reading… The neighbor behind us practiced scream therapy in his shower almost every day.Ĭatches the reader’s attention. Remember that short stories need to start close to their end.ĭry. In today’s fast-moving world, the first sentence of your narrative should catch your reader’s attention with the unusual, the unexpected, an action, or a conflict. He will teach you more than any writing teacher or workshop ever could. If you don’t have time to read all of these authors, stick to Chekhov. Read Raymond Carver, Earnest Hemingway, Alice Munro, and Tobias Wolff. Study them for the underlying meaning and apply them to your understanding of the human condition. Keep the amazing, the unusual, the strange, the irrational stories you hear and use them for your own purposes. Collect stories from everyone you meet.
Sit down and compose sentences for a couple of hours every day - even if you don’t feel like it. Cassill, notebooks are “incubators,” a place to begin with overheard conversation, expressive phrases, images, ideas, and interpretations on the world around you. But simply listing the emotions you experienced (“It was exciting” “I’ve never been so scared in all my life” “I miss her so much”) is not the same thing as generating emotions for your readers to experience.įor those of you who are looking for more long-term writing strategies, here are some additional ideas. (See “ Show, Don’t (Just) Tell.”)ĭrawing on your own real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a “personal essay” topic. (Your reader should care about the protagonist’s decision, and ideally shouldn’t see it coming.)Īn effective short story (or poem) does not simply record or express the author’s feelings rather, it generates feelings in the reader. At the climax, what morally significant choice does your protagonist make?.(We can’t see what our own faces look like, so don’t write “A smile lit my face from ear to ear.”) See Writing Dialogue. Facial expressions of a first-person narrator.Character A telling character B about something we just saw happening to character A.What details from the setting, dialog, and tone help you tell the story? You can usually cut these:.(Will the unexpected consequences force your protagonist to make yet another choice, leading to still more consequences? How does Huck change, first when he teams up with Jim, and later when he realizes how much Jim depends upon him?) What unexpected consequences - directly related to the protagonist’s goal-oriented actions - ramp up the emotional energy of the story?.A short story can’t possibly tackle that kind of character development, but a character who faces internal obstacles and must negotiate messy moral trade-offs is more dramatically interesting than the hero in the white hat who has to use the right weapon to defeat the villain in the black hat.)
Yes, Harry Potter defeats Voldemort, but first he has to mature into a leader with the moral clarity and teamwork skills necessary to defeat Voldemort. (Simply having a rival is not that interesting.
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