Today’s prompt is a guest post from StoryADay founding participant, Marta Pelrine-Bacon. I’m thrilled to share this complex and fruitful exercise for you this week. And do yourself a favor and check out Marta’s writing and art in the links at the bottom of the page.
Write a scene or a short story.
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] A Rewrite Game from Marta Pelrine-Bacon”
Are you holding yourself back? In this episode, I look at three events that have me thinking about what we all have to gain from doing our creative work with integrity, tenacity and bravery.
This month at StoryADay we’re going to focus on dialogue.
Gripping, realistic dialogue can bring a story and its characters to life. Writing great dialogue, however, takes practice.
Write A Story Told Almost Completely In Dialogue
Post your goals for this month and let us know how you got on with last month’s goals.
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.
And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!
Download your SWAGr Tracking Sheet now, to keep track of your commitments this month
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Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends!)
Completing our month of character-focused prompts, I have a doozy for you this week 😉
Write a Story About A Character Who Does and Says Things You Never Could
This is for everyone – whether you wrote or you didn’t. If you wrote in a previous year; if you wanted to write but couldn’t make it; if you wrote one story; if you simply read and enjoyed someone else’s.
This is our chance to celebrate, and boost both the short story and our friends in StoryADay.
StoryFest is a weekend when the stories take over StoryADay.org.
On Jun 29, the front page of StoryADay.org will change to one dedicated to you and your stories. It will be full of links to your stories, online, until June 30
It’s our end-of-year party, our recital, our chance to share our work with readers.
(It’s also my birthday month, so consider your participation as your birthday gift to me!)
Simple.
Be ready to supply your storyaday username, your real name or psuedonym, a link to the story you’re nominating, its title and a summary, a link to a story by someone else (optional but karmically recommended).
Deadline: Thursday, June 27.
This gives you a few days to pick your story and possibly polish it a bit. If you can get it to me before the deadline I’ll love you forever, though, as it’s going to take me a while to organize all the submissions.
Does my story have to be online?
Yes. We want to create a reader fanbase for you. Stories must be posted somewhere online, in full.
Is it OK if my story is on my personal blog (or other site).
Absolutely. Just supply the link.
Will it be considered published?
Your story is not being published by StoryADay, but you should be aware that some editors still consider a story that has been posted online, as having been previously published. If you think this is your last good story ever, by all means guard it with your life. Or, if you plan to submit it to a publication in its current form, you may not want it posted online. Otherwise, I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about this.
Does It Have To Be A Story I Wrote During StoryADay?
Yes. I’ll have to trust you on this. But it can be a story you wrote in a previous year.
Why Do I Have To Select A Genre Label?
Try not to agonize over this. I know most fiction is really cross-genre. It’s just short-hand for readers. I know I’m more likely to plump for a Speculative/Sci-Fi story or a mystery before I will read a fantasy story. As a reader, you don’t want to scroll through a long list of stories with no clues as to which you might prefer. Genre labels simply help readers make a quick decision, rather than being paralyzed or overwhelmed and not clicking on anything. Just think like a reader, grit your teeth and pick a genre.
Can I Submit Erotica/Horror/TheWierdStuff?
Um, okay. But I’d appreciate it if you’d label it as such, so as not to scare the grownups.
Can I Revise My Story?
Absolutely. Polish it up, shine its little shoes, put a bow in its hair and send it into the world looking its best. But don’t take too long! And remember, you’re unlikely to ever be 100% satisfied. Polish it a bit, then let it go.
Today we’re going to play with making your characters sound distinctive.
Write A Story With Lots Of Dialogue That Teachers Us About Your Characters
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Your Character’s Voice”
Readers can’t love your story if they don’t love your character.
LINKS
https://storayday.org/creating-compelling-characters
Plot happens outside, but story happens inside
Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction
For people to love your story, they need to love (or love to hate) your character.
The most beautiful writing in the world, the most exciting action sequence in history, neither of these will make people love your story.
But a compelling character will steal their heart, sneak into their memory, and make them come back to your writing over and over again.
How do you make your character compelling without spending too many words tracing their inner thoughts? How do you balance character growth with action?
None of us step out into the world in the morning as a fresh new creation.
We walk out of the door with hang ups and passions and prejudices and ingrained behaviors, all of which come from a lifetime of having experiences and reacting to them.
Lisa Cron, in her excellent book Story Genius, talks about this brilliantly:
You have to know your character’s childhood damage, she says, and the protective behaviors they created. If you can set your story at a point in their life when those behaviors no longer serve your character, you have automatic conflict built into your story (and conflict makes stuff happen!)
Top Tip: do some ‘discovery writing’ about your character before you ever try to write the actual story. It will make your first draft go soooo much faster.
Resources:
In our quest to make readers love our protagonist, we can forget to give them flaws.
But how do you give them a flaw, without making them unlikeable?
The best resource I’ve come across came from the podcast Writing Excuses, where they talk about playing with three different characteristics as if they were sliders on a mixing board. Your character can be competent, proactive, and sympathetic, but they can’t be 100% (or 0%) of all three at the same time.
Contractors say, “You have have a job done well, fast, or cheap. Pick two.”
At any one moment in a story, a character can be extremely competent, extremely proactive, or extremely sympathetic. Pick two.
And then play with those levels throughout the story. (Think about how Hermoine Grainger changes over the course of the first Harry Potter book. At the start she is the most competent and proactive of the three friends, but nobody likes her. By the end, she has given up some of that proactivity and learned to lean on her friends. She acknowledges that Ron is more competent at wizard chess, and lets Harry be the one to face the last big challenge…and we like her a lot more, for it.)
Top Tip: Playing with character competencies is a great way to make them more or less sympathetic without having to give them a ‘tragic flaw’.
Resources:
In critique groups I usually hear two opposing critiques of character, depending on the writer’s natural tendencies:
Whether you naturally write lots of action, or spend a lot of time dwelling on inner feelings, a good writer needs to be able to balance action and inner conflict, to create compelling characters.
One of the best ways to do this is to turn off the inner dialogue and show your character taking actions or interacting with physical objects that
For example, in the beginning of the movie Die Hard, a watch-word for action-based storytelling, John McClane picks up a picture of his happy family from a desk in his wife’s office…and winces.
In that moment (right before he gets embroiled in the explosions and flying bullets) the viewer remembers that this is not just a wise-cracking action hero. He’s a man who is losing his family and isn’t sure how far he’s willing to go, to put it back together.
That’s the question the rest of the film answers.
And it’s the reason we, as viewers, care.
Top Tip: Turn off the inner dialogue and give us a moment, filled with all five senses, where your character demonstrates their emotions, on the outside.
Resources
All of this kind of craft-based instruction is useful for developing your writing…but only if it doesn’t slow you down while you’re creating first drafts.
If you’re writing the first version of a story do not stop to worry about ‘showing not telling’ or whether your character is sufficiently proactive in this moment.
All of this can be fixed in the rewrite.
And one of the best ways to figure out what’s working and what still needs work in your story, is to show it to other readers.
Perhaps the idea of a critique group terrifies you. Or maybe you’ve been in groups in the past that were frustrating, or just ‘meh’.
If that’s you, I have a gift for you: a free guide to critique groups, including:
Don’t waste time being afraid of feedback, any longer. It’s the single most important thing you can do to get your writing closer to the point where you can really begin to delight readers and build a raving fanbase.
Short stories don’t have a lot of space for non-main characters, but if you’re going to include a best friend or comic relief, make sure they earn their word count!
Write A Story That Gives Your Secondary Characters Something To Do
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Secondary & Background Characters”