In this post, one of our writers, Kate, has written a short piece about writing and the inspiration for her story.
I have wanted to do a creative writing course for a while now. I love reading and am an avid reader but until a couple of years ago had never thought of being able to write; in fact quite the opposite. When I retired, I did some volunteering as as part of that project, ( to restore the old Carnegie library I used as a child) I wrote a couple of stories and even had the opportunity to read them aloud, during open evening events, in the local community. The experience gave me a tremendous sense of achievement and was a big boost to my confidence. I would like to be able to write about some of the experiences I have had in life and to express it in a way that really connects with people. My mother was very ill when I was young and for some of my primary school years, my sister and I were in care. This had a huge impact on my life. From my professional life, I know only too well how being in care affects young people and the repercussions on their life chances. When I was four, my family moved to Liverpool from Australia and then my mum became ill. My memories of my primary school years are inconstant but I know at one point, my sister and I were in a home somewhere on the Wirral. Over the years, when I thought about it, (I had no real idea of where this home was), I had some vague notion of it being in either Hoylake or Heswall.
Photograph courtesy of Paul Doleman who has given his express permission to use it.
In recent years, I remarried and have moved to the Wirral, from Wales. Shortly after starting this course, and in one of those strange coincidences that life sometimes throws up, I discovered a picture of my sister and I sitting on the lawn, of a children’s home in Hoylake. My story is about that experience and reclaiming some of my childhood memories.
Some of the contributors to our anthology of short stories to commemorate VE75
All good things must come to an end, and what an end we had to our VE75 Creative Writing Workshops in partnership with Trafford Libraries and thanks to funding from Arts Council England. Earlier this month we held an online book launch of our VE75 Anthology where a number of new writers showcased their work by reading out extracts of their own story.
This project began over the summer of 2020 when we ran three courses, each lasting for 8 weeks, with the good people living in Trafford, guiding them on the basics of writing and with an outcome to write a short story along the theme of World War Two to commemorate the 75th anniversary of VE Day.
And the long and the short of it is that 23 new writers have now been published for the first time in our anthology. Not only have they received a free copy but copies will also be added to the catalogue of books at Trafford Libraries.
We have now have new stories about war, friendships, families, regrets, hopes and memories of that era. Some of these stories are based on true life family accounts, some are based on stories they were told as children and some are completely fictional.
Copies of the Anthologies
It was lovely to meet up with everyone again and listen to their stories come alive. But there is no full stop for these new writers. To the contrary, they are simply turning the pages over and looking at new stories to write with a proposal to set up a writers group and, for some of them, to continue writing stories.
Well done everyone, you made me very proud, as you should be too.
Actually, I am not too sure if this was said by the great author but it certainly gives an impression that editing your story must be taken seriously.
We should be rightly proud of our creativity and our hard work in finishing a story. However, do not get too proud that you think your story is ready for publishing into a best seller just yet.
Sometimes we can get too close to our work to miss glaring mistakes, continuity issues or even whether the story is compelling and exciting.
The best ways to solve this is to:
Leave the story for say a few days or even a week. Focus on something else, another story or another hobby but then re-read your story slowly and carefully and check that:
Does the plot run coherently?
Have you described and explained everything – people, settings, emotions adequately?
Is it too complicated?
Would your characters really say those words?
Are you happy with the start, middle and ending?
Is it lean? Quality over quantity?
When you leave your story for a few days and go back to it, you are reading it with fresh eyes and it is easier to find the issues mentioned above.
I have gone back to some of my stories and after a period have no worries over deleting sections of it if I feel that it is useless, rubbish or is just excess baggage to the story. Alternatively, I have used the power of copy and paste to move paragraphs somewhere else or simply added a new line or paragraph to help the story along.
If you can, ask someone to read through the story and advise on:
What they think happens in the story?
2. Can they imagine the story in their head? What did the characters look like to them?
3. Did they find the story believable?
It is probably best to ask someone who does not really know you. Although a compliment should be well received, we want a positive critique of our story as if a person has picked up your story in a book shop.
Agatha Christie
Once you have received the feedback it is up to you to decide whether you wish to change it or not. It is your story after all.
Do not take the critique personally – it is meant to be positive.
Always remember that the stories you see in books were probably redrafted and edited over 20 times before they reached the publisher who then read it with a fine tooth comb and probably suggested further edits.
Figurative language is not just for Lord Byron and the romantic poets. Using it, in your stories, can help you add to the mood you want your readers to experience.
Moreover, many sayings, which are examples of figurative language, are common now and this means that using them can add to a sense of real life to your story, in particular its settings or its characters and not only how you describe them but also what they say in dialogue.
Thinking of, say a new metaphor or simile, can be hard. Do not despair, using common or garden sayings in dialogue or in a first person story can add to your character’s personality. Going further, the use of mixed metaphors and malapropisms can add more depth and a hint of comedy or even tragedy.
Using figurative language can make your sentences bounce along and feel alive and make your reader enjoy the story even more as their imagination, as they read, expands.
What is figurative language?
Literal language uses words exactly according to their conventionally accepted meaning.
Figurative language, however, uses words in a way that deviates from their conventionally accepted – or literal – definitions to heighten their effect and appeal to your readers senses.
It can often be created by presenting words in such a way that they are equated, compared, or associated with normally unrelated meanings.
The primary function of figurative language is to force readers to imagine what a writer wants to express. Figurative language is not meant to convey literal meanings, and often it compares one concept with another to make the first concept easier to understand. However, it links the two ideas or concepts with the goal of influencing your readers to understand the link, even if it does not exist.
Writers use this technique to bring out emotions and help their readers form images in their minds.
Example: “the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling,” from the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Exercise: We are going to contrast using literal and figurative language. Here describe what you can see in the picture in a literal sense using all the senses to help you. Later on, after looking at some literary devices to help you with figurative language I will ask you to come back to this photograph and use some figurative language to help describe it too.
There are many literary devices that fall under the bracket of figurative language. We are only going to look at the following during this session: some are more common than others, but all are useful to know to help enrich the language of your stories.
Simile
Metaphor
Hyperbole
Allusion
Oxymoron
Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that makes a comparison, showing similarities between two different things. Unlike a metaphor, a simile draws resemblance with the help of the words “like” or “as.” Therefore, it is a direct comparison.
Similes are so common that we use them every day without thinking.
Example: As busy as a bee.
In such a short sentence we can evoke in our readers a sense of how hard a character could be working. We could spend a whole paragraph telling our reader what sort of work they got up to, or we can simply use the above simile and without much fuss, your reader will appreciate how busy they are.
Two examples of literature:
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” by Wordsworth.
“As cunning as a fox, recently appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University.” Blackadder Goes Forth.
Using a simile can appeal directly to the senses of your readers and encourage their imaginations to understand. By comparing something to something else it can bring a life like quality to how we set our scenes, describe our characters and how they speak to one another.
Metaphor
A Metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things that are unrelated, but which share some common characteristics. In other words, a resemblance of two contradictory or different objects is made based on a single or some common characteristics.
It is different from a simile in that you do not use “like” or “as” to compare. However, like similes, using a metaphor in our stories can appeal to our readers senses.
Examples:
He was a dinosaur.
He is a greedy pig.
Rollercoaster of emotions.
Example from Literature
“All the world’s a stage,” As You Like It, Shakespeare.
Be aware that some similes and metaphors can be tired and cliched. If you use them then this could affect what your reader thinks of your story. However, as stated above, you can use them in terms of your characters when they are speaking.
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a figure of speech that involves an exaggeration of a statement for the sake of emphasis and is used in every day speech.
Examples:
The whole world watched as England won the World Cup.
“I’ve told you a million times not to do this.”
“I am so hungry that I could eat a horse.”
The box weighed a tonne.
Example in literature
“Well now, one winter it was so cold that all the geese flew backward, and all the fish moved south and even the snow turned blue.”
Babe the Blue Ox by Paul Bunyan.
As well as emphasising a point, the above example shows that hyperbole can make a statement extraordinary, and so capturing your reader’s attention, at once unbelievable but also perfectly understandable as well.
Allusion
Allusion is a brief and indirect reference to a person, place, thing, or idea of historical, cultural, literary, or political significance. It does not describe in detail the person or thing to which it refers. It is just a passing comment and the writer expects the reader to possess enough knowledge to spot the allusion and grasp its importance in a text.
The verb form is to allude. Using it allows us authors not to have to write paragraphs on what a character is like. From alluding to someone famous, a simple line with explain all you need to your reader.
It is common for authors to allude in their works to the Bible and Greek or Roman mythology as well as other famous texts or people.
Examples:
“He is the local Romeo.”
“Stop being such a scrooge.”
“Stop playing God with people.”
“He’s a right little Hitler.”
Oxymoron
Oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two opposite ideas are joined to create an effect.
The word is derived from two ancient Greek words: oxys, meaning “sharp,” and moronos, meaning “dull” or “stupid.”
Examples:
The silence was deafening.
“These cakes are awfully good.”
He suffered from ill health.
McDonalds opening their restaurants was old news.
We should be able to tell when someone has used an oxymoron in their writing, and it can provoke (or wake up) the reader and make them think about what the effect means in terms of the story.
Exercise:
Let us go back to the photograph above and see if we can use figurative language to help describe the scene.
Just word of warning, I would not entirely exchange literal language for figurative – more use a fusion of both. Whilst figurative language is an excellent way to make your stories better for your reader to understand, using too much of it can sometimes lead to confusion.
We want our stories to be “page turners” and we have looked at ways of keeping a reader interested already by looking at making the character believable and have our readers show empathy for them and their plight.
Another way to keep your readers interested is to add suspense and tension.
Adding suspense and tension can be used in all sorts of genres and they are handy to keep your readers glued to the story from the start.
In this post we will look at several tips to keep the suspense and tension up in your stories using examples from literature and film.
Put your characters into jeopardy / let your readers understand what they are going through
Essentially, here you are putting a character – it does not have to be the protagonist – into danger pretty much right from word go.
Brighton Rock, 1948
How about this from the very start of Brighton Rock by Graham Greene:
“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.”
This first sentence is a fine hook to the story. As your readers read it, they begin to think, who means to murder Hale, why do they and what has he done?
As well as putting one of the characters into jeopardy at the start, this paragraph also sets the scene of the book very well.
A more subtle approach is to introduce your characters and let them know what is worrying them. Can the reader identify with a problem or struggle that they are facing? If they can then readers will want to see how the character overcomes their issues.
By giving your character a little problem or concern to sort out at the start of the story can give an indication of their personality too.
Sometimes a change can add to the tension of a story, taking the character from their normal day to day life and seeing how they react. Does their reaction cause more tension to themselves or others? A lot of stories concerning World War Two will have characters taken from their ordinary lives and placed elsewhere whether it be joining up and going to war to being evacuated from their homes as children and taken to somewhere new.
Rebecca, 1940
You want your reader to be concerned whether your character will get what they want. If readers do not know what the character wants, then they will not become concerned with whatever is happening. Can you tell from an early stage what your character wants, what is stopping them from getting it and what terrible consequences will occur if they do not?
Use less action or violence
Suspense is the anticipation of what is going to happen. The action is the end result. Yes, it is nice to have action sequences but the gaps in between these moments of action must contain information, or a promise, that something dreadful will happen later in the story.
Suspense should build as danger gets close. When your character is in peril then the reader will experience apprehension. An amazing writing device to get your readers apprehensive is called foreshadowing.
The easiest definition of foreshadowing is that it is where an author gives us a warning, a hint, a clue or a tip-off about something which is going to happen later in the story.
In our children’s workshops, when the children plan and write ghost stories, I will ask them to mention something in the first paragraph or two to keep up the suspense. For example, when we do stories of having a sleepover in school it might be best to mention that the school is haunted rather than later, just writing about a ghost who jumps out and goes BOO. By mentioning this in the first paragraphs the children are giving their readers the anticipation that a ghost will appear.
Make sure that a ghost does appear, or you will have let down your reader.
The tension in your story should escalate until it reaches a good conclusion. At the end, the stakes must be more imminent, personal, and devastating. If all the big stuff happens in the early parts of your story there will be no more suspense in it and you may lose your reader.
Worry = Suspense.
Example: Jaws by Robert Benchley.
Appeal to reader’s fears and phobias.
Bizarrely, some people enjoy reading or watching things that make them scared or worry.
In the children’s workshops we look at 54 things which other children have voted are scary. They range from death, the dark, spiders, heights to teachers. A lot of these can be shared with adults. Having this knowledge allows the children to think about what things they could use in their own spooky stories.
For adults we could add the worry of being a parent. Even if you are not afraid of something, knowing what people are scared of or fear can add tension if you use it in your stories.
You might not capture everyone with this. Personally I like reading about ghosts but do not wish to even think about spiders.
Vertigo
Twists
By bringing an unexpected turn of events, you can keep your story strong and your reader unsettled and interested. As a writer you should always appreciate your reader. A twist works best if there are some clues along the way (eg using foreshadowing) to allow readers to wonder or work out just what is exactly going to happen in the end. Just changing something out of the blue works less well.
The Others, set during World War Two
Example: The Others (film)
Describe the setting of the climax before you reach that part of the story.
Let your character visit it earlier so readers can picture the scene without having to have it described during the racy, tense ending. The readers should already know what it looks like in their head so they can get on with the ending.
Isolate your main character
In most stories your character will have some tools or friends to help them along. By removing these aids, tension can be added as your reader will think, without these, how will the main character survive and win (unless, of course, it is James Bond when the gadgets come out at the end!!)
Example: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Make it personal
If something horrible is going to happen to someone make it be someone close to the main or secondary characters. Reader’s empathise with people!
There are many examples of where a secondary, and much loved character dies in literature.
Example: Boxer in Animal Farm
Example: Sirius Black and Dumbledore in Harry Potter
Dialogue is essentially a conversation in our stories and is an especially useful tool to use. Not only does it give voice to the characters but is also helpful at many other levels.
In today’s blog we are going to look at why using dialogue is a good way of progressing our stories and developing the plot and our characters.
A major feature of dialogue is that it moves the story forward in a straighter way than a narrator’s explanation.
Characters can also evolve through dialogue. When we looked at characters, in an earlier workshop, we discussed showing a person’s personality through a conversation with another person.
Dialogue increases the story’s pace and makes it more dynamic. It will always be heavier going to read a whole paragraph on which the narrator explains step by step what dialogue can transmit in a few lines.
Dialogue, instead of telling us what is happening, shows it: It vividly portrays a scene and breathes life into the characters. A good dialogue engages our attention very quickly, as it lacks value judgments or lengthy explanations by the narrator. Dialogue enables us to have first-hand experiences, to be direct witnesses of what is happening in the story and to draw our own conclusions about it.
Dialogue is one of the methods used to depict characters and the way they relate to each other: What they say, how they say it or the tone in which they speak provide us with lots of information about them. It can provide information that the reader senses, often unconsciously, about the relationship between the characters, their personalities, their mood, etc. Apart from that, it gives specific data about the plot.
Firstly, we are going to look at the basic rules of writing dialogue.
The Golden Rules of Writing Dialogue Speech marks at the start and end of what is being spoken (What is in the speech bubble) Capital letter at the start of the speech Punctuation inside the speech marks New speaker, new lineDo not forget those commas – before the first OR the last speech mark
Example
“What time is the creative writing workshop today?” Simon asked.
“It starts at 10.00 this morning,” replied Lotte.
“Oh,” said Simon, “I better get some biscuits.”
Different ways of saying said
A verb is a doing or action word. The main verb in dialogue is said.
Example:
“Please open the door,” said Lotte, “I want to come in.”
There are two sides to the argument about what verb to use. Some authors maintain that said, says, whispers, shouted are simply fine as your reader will understand what sort of mood they are in from the text. Some authors will use different verbs instead.
You can develop your character and the story by using lots of different other verbs to describe how they speak.
Adverbs also help us to understand how things are said.
Example:
“I like sweets,” she said shyly.
“I like sweets,” she said greedily.
“I like sweets,” she said enviously.
The adverbs are describing how she said, “I like sweets” and can help develop your character for you when writing the story and for your reader to understand them better.
As stated earlier in this blog, there are three main ingredients which all authors need to consider when writing their novels: setting the scene; characterisation and what will be the plot (or plots) used in the story.
A story must have a scene, it must have at least one character and something must happen, which is the plot.
Plots
According to Christopher Booker there are 7 basic plots to all stories. These are:
Overcoming the monster: the protagonist defeats an antagonist who has threatened them or their family / home or something else. If the antagonist is rich, strong, and powerful then this could be a David and Goliath story. The monster could be a person; a government; a company or a movement.
Rags to riches: The protagonist, from being honest and good, gains a new life. Alternatively, they can obtain things such as power, wealth, and a mate, lose it all but then gains it back whilst growing up as well.
The Quest: The protagonist and friends set out to win an important object or arrive at a location facing many obstacles on the way.
Voyage and Return: The protagonist goes to a strange land and after overcoming threats, returns with experience
Comedy: A funny character and a story with a happy and cheerful ending (though sometimes with a battle over a baddie too)
Tragedy: The protagonist is the villain who falls from grace. A tragedy can also be when the hero does not heed what they have learnt.
Rebirth: An important event or events forces the protagonist to change their ways making them a better person.
The above is a very general list. A story will usually contain more than one of these plot types. You might think of a whole new idea for a plot but, given the very general nature of this list, you may well be able to pigeonhole it into one of the above. Do not despair and do not think these basic types are cliched, they have been used for thousands of years, are still being used today and will continue in the future.
Dilemmas
A story should contain a problem or dilemma which the main character must face. Without such a dilemma, the story will not grip the imagination of the reader. The most common problems or dilemmas in stories are:
Our main character against another (see overcoming the monster).
Our character against himself.
Our character against nature.
In bigger stories there can be many dilemmas. A dilemma could be something gargantuan or something minute, as long as it affects the protagonist to the story. Like in real life, some must be sorted straight away, some can be parked, and some will stay with them forever.
Once we have decided on a dilemma, we need to think about how we are going to overcome it too, if at all. This is called the resolution. In most cases a resolution can be a bit more than simply beating the baddie.
A dilemma can sometimes not be as simple as a monster attacking your town Sometimes our character can face a moral dilemma too where they must choose between two courses of action either which can transgress a moral principle.
Sometimes the only options open to people are not exactly enticing. But some people love these scenarios, they want to know what the character will do, will they side with your character, will they empathise with their decision? That is up to you and your story writing.
Last week we looked at how to start a story by thinking of where our story should take place. When you introduce a new scene into your story, you should always take a little time to describe it so your reader can visualise, in their mind, where your main character is.
Which, neatly, bring us onto creating characters for your story. Actually, you only need one, but most stories will have at least two. Without a character, nothing of interest will happen in your story. In an empty setting, the only things that will happen, for example, will be the weather and/ or dust falling.
You are human and your readers are human too. Readers like to know what happens to another person, whether they be heroic and super brilliant or whether they are just a normal person, an everyman.
It is up to you who your main character is and what happens to them.
Characters – usually people but it can also be animals, toys, robots or indeed aliens *– are the driving force of any story. A one-person story (i.e. with no one else involved) will tell a tale from their thoughts and their actions. Having more than one person and a story will develop from people’s interactions with each other.
Thinking about the main character is a really good idea at the start of your story. Having a multi layered character with a personality can make your story more believable, drive the story along and make it unique.
There are lots of different ways to think of a main character. You can even base the main character on yourself or someone close to you. A lot of my characters, even the baddies, have elements of me in them, such as a bit self- doubt (especially at the start) and fearing the dark!
This is called being an author surrogate.
Example: James Clavell’s character Peter Marlowe is a prisoner of war during WW2 in the book King Rat. Clavell himself was a prisoner of war in the same camp as his fictional character.
Example: Michael Crichton’s character of Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) in the film Jurassic Park is used to express Crichton’s own views on the flaws and immorality of the Park.
Some authors take elements of themselves but add extra dimensions to their characters from other people they know.
Example: Ian Fleming’s most famous character, James Bond, works for MI6 and was previously in the Royal Navy. Fleming himself worked in Naval Intelligence during World War 2 and used that experience to create the character of 007 and some of the stories in the books. A lot of Bond’s personality: the drinking; smoking, gambling and eating is said to come from Fleming himself but the action and derring-do parts of his personality are said to come from real life operatives he knew from World War 2.
You can take can source a character from literature, tales, and legends as well as actual people such as politicians, war heroes, sports people and so on.
Lastly, you can write a story based on the life of a real life person, whether famous or known only to a few such as your family (be careful not to offend anyone living!)
*In most stories, non-humans such as animals etc are given human characteristics, think Wall-E or the characters in Toy Story.
Building a Character for your story
When you first introduce a character you need to explain, at least, what they look like. In this way your reader can imagine this in their head. Sometimes what people wear, look, and hold themselves can give an indication of their background and personality.
Writers are all different in how they approach this – there is no right or wrong answer.
Example: Scrooge from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
How would you introduce this man or any of the other characters in the photographs into a story?
Can you describe what they look like (e.g. looks, age, clothes).
What does their appearance tell you about them and their personality?
Default Mode
There is no fine line as to how much detail you should go into. In a short story try and not waste too much time on this. I would advise that you do not need too much detail right from the start: you want to get your reader hooked as soon as possible so do not slow a story down by description. One way of doing this is to describe the character as they do something, e.g. the sun glistened on her long dark hair before she jumped into the car (obviously what type of car can also show a character’s personality and background too).
Too little description however can lead your reader to make their own assumptions up on what the character looks like and what their personality is. I call this default mode. They will simply reach into their minds and find someone they think matches the character in your story: real; imagined or (in)famous. This is not a bad thing, however.
Delving Deeper
Regardless of what hairstyle or what they wore, can we be guilty of judging a book by its cover? Can we make assumptions about someone and then discover we are completely wrong?
Making similar wrong assumptions is commonplace in fiction too. Being fooled by a smooth talking, well-dressed man, thinking negatively of someone with an accent or scruffy clothes. These can help your plot.
But how can we show, early on, to a reader what your character is really like?
There are several ways of doing this:
Let their thoughts pour onto the page as they go about their business;
Let them have a conversation with someone;
Put them into a situation early on where their character (or lack of) comes to the fore.
Characters should develop as stories push on e.g., they can become more confident or more sympathetic.
Interesting and well-rounded Characters
There are stories with colourful, extraordinary characters and others with “everyman” type ones. With the former, your characters can be whatever you want them to be: invincible; magical; immortal for example. In the latter ordinary people face sometimes extraordinary situations. People like these stories because they want to imagine what it would be like to have to face something similar. Will the protagonist succeed?
A lot of stories can concern “everyman” type people pitted against extraordinary events. Readers like to see how such characters, out of their depth, fare. In World War 2 there will have been a good many real life instances of this.
Sometimes a story can be driven because of the background and status of the character. Harry Potter being a wizard is an example of this. A doctor might have to face a lifesaving procedure which us, mere mortals, could not.
No matter what genre you write about, in some instances it will be important to make your character human. As mentioned above, even robots and animals are given human characteristics in stories. People seem to like this. They want to know what other people feel in such situations: sadness; elation; despair; hope and love. Is there a backstory you can use to explain your character?
During weeks 2 to 4 we are guiding new writers into the very basics of what they need to consider in their story: a setting; a character and a plot.
In this post we are looking at how we can set the scene for our stories. Everyone’s story must start somewhere. Some stories start with a question or a hook. Using these devices can help draw people into your story. Some start straight into the action – or at least – something exciting. All well and good.
On our VE75 writing course, we advise to set the scene to allow a reader to understand where the story is set, give them some description so that, in their mind, they can picture the scene and settle in before the main action starts. Writers can certainly add a hook to their story, and we look at this in another post.
Here is an example (albeit from a book about World War One).
Example: A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.”
How writers can do this
We need to remember that a reader of a story could be anywhere: a bus, in their home, on holiday or simply in a library. It could be sunny, rainy, warm or freezing. The aim of setting the scene is to transport them, in their imagination only, from wherever they are and into your story.
One way to start this off is to quickly mention the weather and even the season it begins in. If you like, writers can show how this affects the people and location that the story is set in.
Example: It was a windy autumn morning and the leaves scattered across the road.
Everyone should be able to picture this scene and so you are beginning to draw them into your story.
Now writers will want the audience to picture where the action will take place. In a basic story the story will take place in one place, but there is no real limit.
Writers need to describe not only what can be seen but what can also be smelt, heard, touched – essentially using all the senses. They do not need to be exact or give every little detail, they could be here until kingdom come if they did, but they want to give their reader enough that they can not only picture the scene but feel that they are too. They are connected to your story. Triggers such as certain smells or noises can stir someone’s memories of a similar place that they may or may not have been to previously.
Think about what is there: what can you see, what are people, if there are any doing? Can what these people are doing add to those triggers?
Example: The screeching seagulls swooped and tried, and very often succeeded, in pinching the salt covered, freshly fried chips from the hands of the once eager, but still hungry, diners.
As a rough example of connecting someone to something through words or speech, have you ever had a conversation about food and then felt hungry? Using triggers can really help bring your audience into the scene and have them standing right close to the main character.
During our workshops we asked our writers to set the scene using either of the two pictures in this post.
This is just a snapshot of the course material. In the next blog we will be looking at building characters for stories.
For this beginner’s course, we are looking at writing what is called a narrative story.
At its most basic it is a chain of events that begins in one place and ends at another. Mark Twain said, “that a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.”
Where it begins and where it ends is up to you.
In more detail, the story follows one, or perhaps more, characters through a series of events. It should end by fulfilling the reason for having been written.
Most stories can be called a narrative. A narrative might not be more than a sequence of things that happened, one after the next.
I did this. Then I did this. Then this happened.
If a narrative is basically what happened, a story takes it to the next level. It creates a structure to seek and hold far more significance. We can make the story have a meaning, a meaning that others, your readers, will want to know and understand.
A story with meaning can help us make sense of the world, of how people interact with each other (and by and large all stories are basically about people). As the author, we can shape our own story, we can select things that can link chosen events into it.
During the course we look at this more.
What can your story be about?
The basic answer to this question is anything if it has some connection with World War Two (“WW2”).
World War Two was one of the most devastating modern conflicts in living memory in modern history, and the tragedies and triumphs of the war years have been inspiring novelists ever since. Readers seem to be equally fascinated by this period of history, whether it be about, for example, the actual war itself, the rise of the Nazi party, the lives of people on the home front and so on.
WW2 affected everyone alive at that time. Sometimes war can be the principle matter in a story, sometimes it can be going on in the background but act as a parallel story to our main narrative. Sometimes what happens in stories set in WW2 do not, really, have any relevance to fighting at all.
Examples of Stories
Where Eagles Dare by Alistair McLean
Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.
Foyle’s War by Anthony Horowitz
In our next blog we shall look at how we can set the scene for our stories.
VE75 Creative Writing Workshops with Trafford Libraries 