Thoughts on How to Create a Story - Salem State University



©Perry Glasser

Writing

Thoughts on How to Create a Story

These are for definitions and an overview: More can and will be said in class about each.

Basics

NEVER think about these things while composing. You need to make a mess, and then clean up your mess. If you think about rules, you will make no mess.

Plot = Conflict: Forces confront character(s) and characters respond. Stories are about characters undergoing stress. Events without stress or consequence are called “anecdotes.”

• character vs. character

o Ahab vs. Moby Dick

• character vs. natural environment

o To Build a Fire – Jack London

• character vs. social environment

o I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Morrison

• character vs. self

o any psychological choice, often calling for an dual-value object—“I love Pat, but if I marry anyone right now, my hopes and dreams for a career are shot.”

Character

“As a writer, you want to know your characters so well that your problem will be what to leave out, as opposed to what to put in.” - pwg

“It takes five real people to make one good fictional character, though three of them can be the author.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Characters move through space for only 3 reasons—note that the character need not be conscious of the specifics, but the writer must be.

• Wants—usually conscious

• Fears

• Needs—often not in the conscious mind of the character

Characters move toward what they want and away from what they fear. They frequently learn what they need because of how they engage the forces that beset them. They may be wrong about their fears and desires, but they nevertheless move because of those motives.

How characters engage the forces that beset them is a function of personality. Huck Finn runs; Jane Eyre persists. Achilles sulks; Odysseus schemes.

Protagonists and antagonists must have choices and options. It follows, therefore, that characters who are victims, that is to say, characters who lack choices, are not fit to be protagonists. (Exception: Comedy.)

Protagonists and antagonists MUST change because of their interactions with the forces that beset them. If they do not change, the story we have read is trivial.

Grace Paley suggests that a story cannot go forward unless the reader is aware of a protagonist’s family background and how they character makes a living, two concepts she calls Blood and Money. You could choose to disregard Grace Paley; you can also choose to wears socks on your ears.

Dialogue

Dialogue differs from ordinary conversation. Conversation is filled with trivia, predictable greetings, etc. Dialogue ALWAYS reveals character and advances plot—otherwise it is just conversation and you may as well get rid of it.

Dialog includes only words and gestures that reveal personality.

Use the word “said.” Readers do not see it. The important part is the attributive (name) so we can keep track of who is saying what.

For Heaven’s sake, learn to punctuate dialogue properly.

Bad:

“Hi,” he essayed.

“Hi,” she responded.

“My name is Mortimer,” Mortimer offered.

“My name is Janis,” Janis said blushingly.

Good:

They introduced themselves. Mortimer lifted his hand and touched Janis’ chin as he examined her critically. “You’ll do,” he said. She dropped her eyes, color crept into her cheeks, and she realized she needed to breathe, but she dared not. Later, she knew she would have to kill him, but that could wait.

Setting & Description:

Readers need to know when and where they are. Roasting and devouring your neighbor is a different proposition if a story is set on a South Sea island in 1745 or midtown Manhattan in 1998.

Select details that reveal character and advance plot. (Writers are the kind of people who open their host’s medicine cabinet.)

Employ sensory detail to render place and character. Humans have 7 senses, and psychologically a reader needs to read 3 to make the reader feel as if the scene is vital—but one of the sense must be sight (Joseph Conrad).

No—that’s not a typo. Seven senses—take the five you know and add kinesthetic sense (where your body parts are in space) and your sense of balance—how you know you are upright. If you think these are unimportant, don’t ever write about characters who do shots Jose Cuervo Gold with beer chasers.

Scene and Narrative

The building block of fiction is the scene: not words, not sentences, not paragraphs—SCENES. The student writer who finds scenes tedious because they take too long to write should consider dentistry. If you are too impatient or too lazy to render life as it is lived, in a manner that reveals profound understanding of personality, why not drill teeth?

Scenes are the moments of a story that advance plot and illuminate character. THIS CONCEPT IS ESPECIALLY DIFFICULT FOR WRITERS WHOSE IMAGINATIONS WERE FORMED BY SCREEN MEDIA, because they are schooled to imagine all moments are scenes. Read a book. Read several. Break a lifetime of bad education that warped your mind. If as a reader you are in the habit of skimming passages of narrative to get to the good parts, at least acknowledge that “the good parts” are scenes. Then ask yourself why you are lazily skipping writing the good parts. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

Scenes are constructed of sensory data and dialogue. They are generally connected by narrative—which can efficiently summarize distance and time, something scenes cannot do. Consider the narrative quality of the first 4 words of the sample below, and how they lead into a scene.

1. Mortimer drove three days to Detroit to find Janis. He limped up the flagstone walk of her parents’ house. When he fell, Janis did not move to him. He struggled, his palms sliding on the newly turned dirt. “Well, will you help me up or not?” he asked. She stood her ground.

Here is what the passage does not say:

2. Mortimer climbed into the driver’s seat of his 2008 car, turned the key, and drove slowly out to the Interstate. He thought of how Janis would be impressed by his near recovery. He found several radio stations he liked and sang along to several old 80s tunes. The road signs glowed green at night, and he never got lost. Three days later, he was in Detroit.

What planet would a reader need to be from to know that a driver sat in the driver’s seat? Where else to drivers sit? Is there is a reader over the age of 8 who does not know that a 2008 car requires a key to start? What is the writer thinking of to not tell us what songs Mortimer is fond of? Is he singing Psycho Killer or Do You Want to Hurt Me by Boy George? Interstate signs glow green at night—there’s news, a detail that seems like good writing to a writer whose imagination has been shaped by screens, a terrible detail for those of us who think literary writing is art.

That is to say, in passage #2, an inexperienced writer is trying to illuminate character with narrative.

Now compare the passages: which one tells you more about character and plot?

Structure

The order of scenes.

While most fiction is told in chronological order, it often happens that the dramatic structure (order of telling) should not be the same as the order of events. Think how the first chapters of Wuthering Heights raise questions…and how we are confident that Bronte will answer them for us.

A ghost? who was it? why does Heathcliff weep for the ghost? Who is this Heathcliff guy, anyway? Where the @#$ are we gonna find a character to tell us what the $%^ is going on??? Get that nurse at center stage right now! By heaven, we need a flashback!!!

Style

Less is more.

Understatement is better than overstatement.

Find the right word instead of stringing together some really cool adverbs and adjectives that are sort of, but not quite, exactly right just because we are intellectual sloths. The road to Hell is paved with adverbs.

In other word: be precise in revision. Flaubert spent time rolling on the floor looking for le mot juste. Who are we to doubt Flaubert?

Traditional Excellent Advice

Start with action—show us characters in stress and what they do about it. Resist the impulse to tell the reader what the reader needs to know to understand your story—that’s the sure sign of an writer uncertain of his abilities.

Show, don’t tell — dramatize, don’t narrate.

Traditional Good Advice

Write what you know. — this is generally a good idea, but the writer for whom writing is discovery, it can be restrictive. It also happens that what we think we know turns out to be false.

Writing nonfiction is hard, arduous and exacting if you want to get it right; writing fiction is akin to opening a vein while swimming across a crowded shark tank on a moonless night with no definite notion of the tank’s dimensions. What if there is no other side?

Point of View

If you’ve got the basics down, you are ready to think about P.O.V. But this sheet is about basics. Trust me, P.O.V. is complicated. It is sure to come up in student work as an issue.

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