In the minds of ESL exam candidates, e ssay writing is one of the most daunting tasks they are required to complete, regardless of the level of the exam, the administering body or the ease with which they themselves use the language. The same applies to students who are asked to write an essay by their teachers at school. In the previous sample essays posted on the blog, the main point I stress is the need to become acquainted with this form of writing (as opposed to writing a letter, review or report, for instance), to get a feel of what authorial voice is and how to organize and progressively express the arguments you wish to make in a coherent manner. Unfortunately, the best way to prepare for exam writing or learn how to write good essays for school is to read as many essays from as many sources as possible, then write as
Stories, or narratives, are a part of several English language examinations such as Cambridge's First for Schools (formerly known as the First Certificate in English or FCE for short), the Learning Resource Network's LRN and the English Speaking Board's ESB.
Apart from exams though, many students are asked to write a short story as a school assignment and find themselves in a bind.
Add to this crowd those who enjoy writing or want to put pen to paper in the hopes of entering a competition or becoming the next book-to-film adaptation tycoons, but don't know where the launchpad is.
Well, this post hopes to get the creative juices flowing.
WHERE TO START
The rubric
If you've been given a specific assignment, for example to write a short story entitled "The Haunted House", you obviously need to come up with ideas related to supernatural phenomena and a story-line that will reflect an atmosphere suited to ghost stories. In such cases, read the rubric carefully and underline key words you will need to fulfill the task.
A typical example other than the "write a story entitled ..." type, is the following:
Write a story for the school newspaper. The story must begin with the sentence:
It wasn’t worth any money after all.
Your story must include:
- a coin
- a betrayal
From this rubric, you should start the brainstorming process by tying all key words together. In this case, the key words are "coin", "betrayal" and "wasn't worth any money". In other words, you might think about linking a worthless coin to a friend's betrayal and start from there.
For those thinking of entering a literary competition or sending their story to a literary magazine, then reading the submission guidelines carefully is a must as it will serve as a rubric. Some publications set a one-word theme like 'justice' or 'chance', 'retribution' or 'delusion' (just take a look at Apparition Literary Magazine's online page where these four themes were taken from).
If the starting point is still to vague, as seen in the previous paragraph with the one-word themes, treat the whole situation as if there's no rubric but simply a single requirement that needs to be met. In this case, move on to the next part of the post to start jotting some ideas down in note form.
No rubric available
If all you've been given are instructions to write a short story, no matter the title, the genre or topic, then you'll need to resort to more creative decisions. Here are some questions to consider which should get the ball rolling:
The ending
- What ending is my story going to have?
- types to select from
- tragic
- funny
- unexpected
- fortunate
- fitting
- just
- shocking
- gory
- disheartening
- inspirational
These are obviously a few examples of how a story can end. To me, it seems that there can be as many endings to choose from as there are adjectives in the English language, so not being able to come up with a story to begin with is something unimaginable.
Story endings can help writers set the tone of a tale in their heads before they start contriving the plot, which is why I find it important to decide first and foremost about a tentative ending, then think about other factors to help you through the creative writing process. I say "tentative" because as you come up with more details about the characters or situation, you might decide to modify the ending to your needs.
The characters
- how many main characters will I create?
- gender?
- age?
- occupation?
- how well developed does each character need to be?
- what are their strong points?
- what are their weaknesses?
- what is the one thing/experience engraved in their memories that made them who they are?
Constructing a successful story lies heavily on the person or people you will have inhabit the story itself. It may be more difficult to develop a character fully if the story you have been asked to write is a short one, or you might not want to focus the reader's attention on the character/characters at all as you feel the action itself should take precedence.
However, knowing the 'players' could help you move the action along or help you decide the outcome of your tale, not to mention that stories are more interesting if more complex characters are part and parcel of the action.
The choice of character will depend on another important factor which we'll discuss further down: the conflicts.
Narrator
Who will tell my story? This is also a crucial question to ask yourself. When you watch a movie, the way a scene is shown impacts you differently. Horror movies usually have a moment where you see what one of the protagonists sees, as if you were looking through their eyes. They might be walking down a gloomy corridor and as they reach the end of it, you see their arm push open a creaky door and the camera shows you the room as if the actor were turning his or her head left and right.
Now imagine how different this same scene would be if the action were presented through two stationary cameras, one placed at one end of the corridor and the other inside the room. They would show the actor walking down a gloomy corridor, open a door and then the other camera inside the room would show you the actor walking in, the look in their eyes or way their whole body would react to whatever they see in the room, which in this case the audience would only partially be able to see based on where the camera is sitting and how wide an angle it captures.
Both cameras would highlight different aspects and both would be useful, so there's no correct or incorrect choice to make, really. What ultimately matters the most is what you find would make your story more compelling and how the position of the 'cameras' would best serve the purpose of the story itself. If we look back at the horror movie example, the first version of the action with the single camera being the protagonist's eyes would create tension as we have a very limited field of sight. Peripheral vision would be partly available when the camera moves left and right. In the second version of the action with the two separate cameras, we'd be able to see what's going on behind the actor's back: one or two doors they pass by as they walk down the corridor slowly open and disheveled heads peer round door casings; an impalpable form on the ceiling creeps towards them from behind. If the scene switched and we were now looking through the camera placed in the room, we'd know what awaits the protagonist once they open the door: a room full of snakes, zombies, or a trip wire ready to send a giant panel equipped with spikes flying towards them.
To translate all this into literary terms, we have the following:
- first-person narration means the story is told from an "I" point of view (through the eyes of the character)
- a third-person narrator will be a bystander looking at the action and saying "he" or "she" did this or that (a camera sitting in a fixed position, or that can move around but can never enter and show what the characters themselves see)
- omniscient narration includes descriptions of the actions and thoughts of all the characters as well as knowledge of the past, present and future of the characters and story-line as a whole (in other words, the camera can show things as they unfold from a static position, or it can move around, following characters and events as they unfold, and it can enter any character at will and show us what that character senses and feels)
Many more types of narration exist, but let's stick to three basic ones for the purposes of this post, otherwise we'd be treading on more specialized literary ground.
Setting
Setting is another crucial point to clarify at the outset of any creative writing journey. The two main things to decide here are the time and place the action is going to occur.
- examples of time
- primitive times
- the19th century
- World War II
- the weekend
- a regular Tuesday afternoon
- two years from now
- today
- Halloween night
- examples of place
- my aunt's backyard
- a castle
- Tokyo
- a friend's bedroom
- an asylum
- the planet Mars
- a street market in Morocco
- a bus
- dystopian community
- inside a dragon's lair
- the Minoan Labyrinth in Knossos
As you can see, you can make the time and place of the action as general or specific as you want. When the setting affects the action, it is said to be integral. A setting that is vague and can suit any story because it's not essential to its outcome or how events unravel, is known as a backdrop. Examples of an integral setting include WWII, the 1960s or even Earth in the year 2777. When these settings create limitations in what can and cannot be plausible in the story they are integral. Backdrops are any settings that are just there and don't affect the action, so the reader doesn't pay much attention to them anyway.
General action
Choose an overall activity that will frame your story appropriately, in other words think about the general situation that will set things in motion. All stories have a sequence of thoughts or events that develop which occur as a result of whatever is taking place around the main character(s). For instance, in Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery, the main event around which events transpire is a lottery; Virginia Woolf's The Legacy (read an overview here) revolves around the reading of an informal will; Elie Wiesel's Night displays the horrors of concentration camp prisoners during WWII.
In short, ask yourself before you start your story, "what sphere will events encompass?"
Focus on a wedding, a school exam, work in the mountains (is anyone here except me thinking of The Shining?), a beauty pageant, a chess tournament and get ideas down on paper as to what will happen is such situations -- this is how you'll easily find a story to tell.
Conflicts
No story can truly be interesting without some sort of problem. If everyone was happy, and everything was running like clockwork, what kind of a story could materialize? It would be a flat sequence of events that would soon tire readers. Life doesn't proceed without hardship, so neither should fictional portrayals of it. To spice things up, therefore, you need to insert conflicts to create compelling action. Here are the main types:
- person versus nature
- this type of conflict involves having the main character (or even other characters in the story) battling the forces of nature. Examples of this would be a fisherman out at sea trying to stay alive in the middle of a storm, or a group of stranded travellers struggling to find food and water.
- person versus society
- here, a character goes against conventions, laws, an entire system. Any story that depicts the suffragette movement is a good example of this type of conflict. A mob rebelling against a totalitarian regime, serfs attacking noble families, a woman breaking through the glass ceiling to become the CEO of a traditionally male-driven company, two young people of different race and social class contemplating marriage in the 17th century are also instances of this kind of conflict.
- person versus person
- this is something we're all familiar with. Whenever you argue with someone, for whatever reason, you're in the midst of a person versus person conflict. Take this idea of bickering and redesign it to fit your story. Luke Skywalker against Darth Vader, David versus Goliath, Hamlet versus Claudius, Javert versus Jean Valjean, the Evil Queen versus Snow White -- the list is endless.
- person versus self
- The most interesting type of conflict, in my view, is when a person is fighting something within themselves. This category creates more complex story-lines and characters as well, which is what makes a story worth reading more than once. In a short story, it is very difficult though not impossible to develop a character well enough to be able to expose inner conflict. Through intimation, Edgar Allan Poe did just that in The Tell-Tale Heart, a story that can be analyzed over and over again without losing its potency. Centering a story on the fight to overcome addiction or low self-esteem would fall under this category of conflict. Monica Wood's Disappearing shows the main character's battle with obesity and an undesirable self-image.
A combination of conflicts is usual as well, so don't hesitate to weave two or more together to increase your reader's level of expectancy. After all, you should never let things stand with one single problem, but ought to aim at adding a second or third complication to your plot to make matters worse before the final resolution.
SUMMARY
Make notes on where, when, who, what, how, ending, conflict first before starting to write.
where = place where the plot will unravel
when = time the action is set in
who = the main character and any other secondary characters required to move the plot along
what = general activity taking place (a funeral, a war, etc.)
how = how I will relate events to the reader what type of narrator will be used
ending = decide how the story will end
conflict = choose one or more and add to the reader's suspense by making a conflict become worse as the story progresses.
And don't forget to let the story carry you at times, instead of forcing it to suit your initial plans. Happy chronicling!
