Session 2: Wrap-up

Getting Started & Story Mechanics

Short Feedback about last session's writing exercise

We noted that the 'write a paragraph without the letter 'e'' exercise was frustrating and slow, which was in part due to the lack of words available for use, and partly because writing in a second language can be challenging.

Doing these kinds of exercises are good because they help with distracting yourself from the fear of starting. At least you’re annoyed and not apprehensive!

1. Getting started

Ways to hack into your story, post-freewriting (or in place of freewriting)

• Write your character backstory. This could be anything from picking a year in their life—age 10, say—and profiling what their favorite things were, what they looked like, where they lived, pets, how they got along with their siblings, or doing a broader comprehensive profile (pretend you’re writing their match.com bio…) or something a little less flashy, like writing their CV

• Day in the life of your MC. What’s a Saturday like? Or Monday? How do they celebrate a particular holiday, or what would they do on their birthday?

• Write the weather report for your primary location/setting and/or a news report about something happening locally

• Dialogue practice. (write a conversation between your MC and... Dentist/boss/daughter/lover)

• The what-if game. What if your MC got fired/adopted a stray/won the lottery. What if your setting (the city/planet/etc) flooded/got bombed/hosted the Olympics?

• Pick a headline from the newspaper that corresponds to your setting and timeline and write a scene about your MC’s interaction with or reaction to it.

• Draw a storyboard or draw characters or scenes.

For nonfiction, particularly, it can be effective to write where you’re starting the chapter or essay and where you need to end up, and then listing all the things you want to include between those two points.

Chronology

In finding your way into the story, you’ll start to figure out whether you prefer to 

• write in order, from the start to finish of your work, or 
• jump around to the scenes or sections that are working for you, and then piece it all together later

Scope

You may also notice your limitations, i.e., how much you can write, or the length of story that feels comfortable for you.

Some writers feel 1,500 words (a short story) is their length. Some novelists feel they can't hold more than 65K words in their heads, whereas others will easily work with 120K words.

You may also become aware of how much time you think the story ‘deserves’ because—don't forget—this is about how much time the reader is willing to give to the writer!

2. Story Mechanics

Theme vs. Plot, Idea vs. Action 

In fiction and narrative nonfiction alike, there’s what happens to the characters, and what the characters do in their world (the action), and then there are the subjects or the ideas that the action represents or evokes (the theme). The theme gives meaning to the action.

We started by looking at a worksheet which allows us to break these threads down.

We looked specifically at Star Wars Episode 4 (fiction), and Into Thin Air (nonfiction).

Action or Idea Worksheet can be downloaded from Libby's website here.

We also talked about part of a chapter of The Lighthouse (literary fiction by Virginia Woolf), and discovered that in 3 pages of text, there were many ideas around the THEME of marriage, but the only pieces of ACTION were: 1. Mrs Ramsay looks at her husband; and 2. Mr Ramsay walks past his wife. (Yeah, not really in the action genre!)

Example: Man vs. nature

One common example across both genres is man vs. nature. (In fiction, think Jaws or Moby Dick.)

How it works in nonfiction:

Wild, A Walk in the Woods, Into Thin Air are three movies about hiking or mountaineering in which the characters set a challenge for themselves and set out to tackle it. Thus, the subject and theme are very similar.

Versus a different manifestation of man vs. nature in which the human character is confronted by nature imposing itself and he must rise above to survive. The Perfect Storm is a nonfiction example but this is also very popular in fiction (Jaws, Moby Dick), and Hollywood (natural disaster movies). Notably though, every title mentioned here has been adapted to film, and I like to think it is because the narrative ad thematic structures are so strong.

We talked about how the theme and subject matter of these hiking books were all similar; where it gets interesting, to me at least is what differentiates the. The characters and their motivations vary dramatically (a woman/former addict/divorcee hikes the PCT in search of healing (Wild) an aging writer and his friend attempt to complete the AT in defiance of their age and in search of natural beauty (Walk in the Woods) a writer accompanies an expedition to summit Everest with catastrophic results (Into Thin Air).

So not only are we in search of the representative idea of 'what happens,' but also who is performing this action, and why?