Guest Post – Hank Quense – Getting started with a story

Let’s assume you are a teenager who wants to write stories but are more than a bit mushy about details. You probably know that creating a story requires a great deal of work and thinking. You may not know that the work involved is the same whether you are creating a short story, a novel, a play, a script or even a memoir.

“How can that be?” you ask. Simply because a novel, a script, a memoir, a play, a short story are all stories. And no matter what type of story you have in mind, each requires a number of common elements such as characters, plots, scenes, settings, character arcs and more.

The only difference between these types of stories is the output. What the manuscript looks like, in other words. The manuscripts for a novel and for a play will look very different, but the process of creating those manuscripts is exactly the same.

Let’s put that issue aside and discuss a different topic. Stories are the result of three separate creative processes:

Ideas

Story design

Storytelling techniques

Let’s discuss each one of these processes.

Ideas

A mistake many teenage writers make is to start writing a story when they have only a single idea. While a single idea can be the genesis of a story, no story can be written from a single idea. A short story needs perhaps dozens of  ideas while a novel requires  hundreds of ideas. The writer needs ideas about the character development, plot events, the setting, the character arc and the scene designs. To gather all these ideas requires time and a great deal of thinking. This is where a notebook (a real one or a digital one) comes in handy. You never know when a great idea when pop into your head.

2. Story Design

What is story design? It’s the process of developing all the story elements such as characters, plot events and so forth. To put it another way, story design is the where the writer incorporates all those ideas into the story. elements

I’m a planner (as opposed to a panster) so I spend a lot of time on story design before I attempt to write the first draft. In most cases the story design process for a novel consumes three months or more. A major portion of this time is spent on determining the scenes I need to get the characters from the start of the story to the climactic scenes at the end.

3. Storytelling

No matter how great your ideas are and no matter wonderful your story design is, if you don’t have the storytelling skills to hold the reader’s attention, your story is doomed. Storytelling involves the use of a number of techniques that include point-of-view, foreshadowing, show-don’t-tell, stimulus & reaction, dialog vs exposition among other topics.

I believe that once a writer understands the creative processes required to produce a story, the work can go forward more easily and more smoothly.

This article is based on material in my book Creating Stories.

Thank you so much for sharing your insight, Hank. I appreciate your words and think my audience will as well. 

Views expressed in this interview/guest post do not necessarily reflect the views of this blog host.