Story writing 101
You can learn the basics to write good stories, if you have the passion for it. Most novelists don't have degrees in literature. And almost anyone can learn to blog.
Since this is a newsletter about not just Reading, but also Better Writing, let us look at three ways to improve the previous short story ‘Heartache’. If you noticed, the style of writing has been more of ‘telling’ than ‘showing’.
Showing vs Telling
e.g. Telling
She found herself irritable, anxious and losing interest in her other activities.
e.g. Showing
He called after a rough twenty-four hours. April hadn’t eaten much and had chewed off the ends of all her nails.
Showing is better done with Scenes that use Action, dialogue and a sensory description of what the characters are seeing, hearing etc. Scenes are what draw us into the story; a well written scene can make us one with the minds and bodies of the characters making us vicariously experience what they are feeling.
So what is a scene?
Scenes have an action that occur at a specified place and time. None of three is left unspecified.
At a BTS performance, April and Jake had first met. Although none of them was a fan of the band, they had both gone with friends who belonged to the band’s ARMY, or fan club. During the intermission between the songs Butter and Dynamite, their eyes had locked. Her pale blue oval eyes had caught his hazel monolid eyes’ attention, and he had said:
‘Hi. Are you a fan of K-Pop?’
‘No, not really. My friend is a fan.’
“Now there are two of us,” Both of them had a smile.
He had greeted everyone and extended his hand. Likewise, she had grabbed his hand in hers.
(Till here it has been a scene that you can visualize. See how the narration takes a shift from here onwards.)
And that is how they had first connected and exchanged numbers. They started dating in the windy city…
In the vignette above, we can improve the scene by being more specific.
It was the last week of August 2022 at Grand Park, Chicago. It was during a BTS performance there, April and Jake had first met.
And what is a summary?
Summary is a glossing over of events, used to speed up the narration between two scenes covering major events. Summary is the glue that binds scenes and provides the backdrop to the important scenes in your story. Summary sentences are in bold:
After only a few weeks of dating, they had become inseparable.
Their mutual acquaintances gave their relationship their blessing, and a few months later, they met up with each other’s parents. Their connection had reached a whole new level because of each parent’s acceptance. Jake and April met in June, so April had anticipated a Christmas engagement. But no proposal materialised before Christmas.
If you look closely, there is another kind of narrative sentences above, the ones not in bold. They are a third kind of narration, a commentary if you will, called exposition.
And exposition?
Exposition is when the narrator is not taking about events, but what they think or feel.
After only a few weeks of dating, they had become inseparable.
Their mutual acquaintances gave their relationship their blessing, and a few months later, they met up with each other’s parents. Their connection had reached a whole new level because of each parent’s acceptance. Jake and April met in June, so April had anticipated a Christmas engagement. But no proposal materialised before Christmas.
In the next post, we will put all three building blocks of fictional storytelling into action and rewrite Heartache. (1) Scene + (2) Summary + (3) Exposition
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