Creative Writing, Story Development, Story Structure, Narrative Science
Category Archives: Creative Writing
Need inspiration or a cure for writer’s block? You’ll find it here. This category focuses on the creative process from organizing your writing time to developing your ideas and finding your author’s voice.
Browse through the list or use the search box at the top of the page to find just what you are looking for, and may the Muse be with you!
I’ve been teaching creative writing now for more that twenty-five years, and here are my best tips for starting your new writing year:
First, schedule your writing time like you would a dentist’s appointment. Why? Because as Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate writing; I love to have written.” We all hate going to the dentist, and most of the time, we also hate writing – coming up with words for the page is like pulling teeth. But after we’ve gotten the gumption and gotten it done, the afterglow of the results ranges from satisfaction to ecstasy.
So put it down on your calendar. And then, as soon as it is over, schedule your follow-up visit before you leave the office or you’ll never get around to it.
Next, during your writing session, don’t sit in front of a blank page trying to come up with something to say. Rather, let your mind wander to favorite memories, favorite subjects, or even to problems, worries or fears, and just write about them. Consider it a warm-up exercise before you get your game on.
As you warm-up, you’ll find that your mind naturally begins to feel its way around the subject you intend to write about. And at some point, you’ll come up with an idea on that topic that is so logistically important or emotionally powerful to that you find you’ve already started writing about it instead of the warm-up topics.
Third, never try to force the Muse to work on a story problem. Cut her free. By nature, she is full of boundless energy and wants to explore your creative mind with reckless abandon. Try to shackle your Muse to the task at hand, and she’ll balk. But if you let her run wild, even if it is WAAAAY off topic, it is like another warm-up exercise in the middle of the long routine of writing. Every once in a while you need to come up for air, feed your head, and give your heart some candy. In short, don’t feel that once you start working on your actual story that you can’t diverge whenever the Muse stands at the door with her leash asking to go for a walk.
Fourth, write about what you love. Sure, we all have dreams of writing a great novel or script, and perhaps we will, but don’t let that make you choose a less epic topic because you think it has the potential to be more noteworthy. In fact, the odds of writing something truly meaningful go WAY down if you don’t write about what moves you personally.
But here’s the rub – this is a real pisser for me personally… The kinds of stories I like to read are not the kinds of stories I’m very good at writing. Man, that gets stuck in my craw! I want to write sci-fi-ish action stories of great adventure, incredible discovery and amazing tales of triumph over unbelievable odds! But every time I try it is all mechanical, stilted, or (worst of all) completely lame.
Yep, I’d also like to be a pastry chef, but I’m good at making sauces. I’d like to be a chess champion, but I flub it all up, yet I can triumph in checkers or tic-fracking-tac-freaking-toe. My private horror (don’t tell anybody): what I’m good at is this. Yes, this. Writing inspiring articles so others can write all the wonderful things I’d like to write. What manner of hell is this?
Not to worry, though. I’ve just started a new novel, and for the first time it is something I really, really, really want to work on. I’m actually enjoying the writing of it and can’t wait until the next session – not like a dentist’s appointment at all: more like an ice cream social.
Yep, that happens too. But not often. So don’t wait for it – do the other stuff I’ve mentioned and get things “wrote” in between the rare bromance with a flirty story you just can’t resist.
Well, I’ve come to terms with it. That’s why you’ll find literally HUNDREDS of articles on story structure and storytelling here and also on my writing tips web site at Storymind.com [Self Serving Plug Alert]
I eventually came to the conclusion I’d rather write what comes naturally than get perpetually stuck trying to write what I like to read. If I want that other kind of story – the one I’m no good at – I’ll read somebody else’s. So, I’ve finally embraced the awful, yet sobering and even somehow calming notion that it is better to be a carefree pianist, bringing music into the world with little effort at all, than a continually struggling trombonist, blurting out a few stilted notes and never affecting anyone nor even finding satisfaction in my own work.
Summing up then my tips for you new writing year…
I urge you all to set up that time where you are forced (by resolution) to do nothing. And from that nothing will rise your Muse like a Kraken of Creativity, snarling out its arms to embrace every shiny, beckoning or threatening notion within its horizon, consuming it, and spewing out prose of a grand and powerful ilk upon the world, upon yourself, upon your soul.
May God have mercy upon us all, for we are writers.
Now get Kraken in this new year, for God’s sake (and for your own)!
Drudge people. You see them every day. On the news. In your town. Outside your window. Perhaps, even in your own home.
You can easily recognize them as they have lost their tales. With no tale, they are directionless, shuffling endlessly forward with no destination.
How did they become Drudge People? They were not born that way, oh no! Each and every one came into this world as we all did, with a curious mind and an inquisitive spirit. Life seemed an endless wonder and full of opportunities to explore. Each new discovery was a tale to tell – a eureka moment so powerful that we ran to share it with our loved ones and friends, lest it burst within us before we could release the pressure of epiphany.
And then we started school. Suddenly, there was regimen. Conformity was rewarded, individuality punished. Oh, not in in such direct terms (that would be abhorrent to our democratic ideals in these United States.) And yet, we were all gently guided away from enthusiasm and into the soft protective embrace of routine. Layer by layer, responsibilities, obligations, social sensitivity, compromise and procrastination became our shellac and armor in what we were constantly reminded was a cold and dangerous world.
Our education ended when we were fully indoctrinated, inoculated, and insulated from any original thinking and targeted instead on whatever mindless task was placed before us. In short, we were ready for the work place. And it was here the alchemist’s art of turning students into automatons was refined into the science of creating a population of robot-slaves.
In a technically savvy world, the shackles must be so subtle as to be invisible to all except the jailers – the emperor’s new closed mind. No tangible restraints can be seen. But for those with a keen eye and a little patience, you can identify the Drudge People in our midst. If you suspect someone, ask yourself, “When was the last time (Person Z) bolted into my cubicle aglow with something (he or she) couldn’t wait to tell me?” When was the last time they posted something original on Face book, other than their new high score on some life-eating game or a link to someone else’s pictures or a re-post of someone else’s thought or (most telling of all) simply clicked the “Like” button without writing anything in response? You see, when you lose your tale you have nothing to say. The Muse has run out of you and your creative juices have crystallized in your veins.
We become infected whenever we consume rather than create, when we opt for a virtual experience instead of an actual one, a recorded adventure as a safer substitute for the real thing. The more we show up right on time for our daily coat of varnish, the less it becomes our shield and the more it serves as our prison. After years of build-up, the constraints have become so thick that one may become wholly beyond redemption.
But there is hope for some of us, my friends. If your eyes have been opened and you can now (perhaps for the first time) see the glossy membranes that are hardening around you, there is still a chance to avoid permanent incarceration. You need to re-grow your tale. This will not be easy. Through atrophy, it has likely been almost wholly absorbed back into your system and re-tasked as raw material to be added to your casing.
Begin as thus: seek out original thinkers – those few individuals whose clarion voices resound out above the din of the mindless masses. They are they outcasts, perhaps even the outlaws in our civilized society. Listen to their call, but not too long, for it as easy to become lured by the siren song as it is to become deaf to innovation.
Take in these new voices just long enough to resonate within yourself – to build up a sympathetic vibration that begins, ever so gradually, to create cracks in your full mental jacket. Then funnel the energy of those maverick rants into your core – recharge the cells at the base of your tale until, through the synthesis of many alternative ideas you begin to form one of your own.
All it takes is a single concept – something you’ve not thought or heard before. Take note – this is a delicate and crucial time in the clockwork of your escape! Do not let that concept simply fade away as you are distracted by the next mind-numbing diversion that drifts upon you from the mill of collective mundanity. Nurture that embryonic thought, feed it with research and water it with conjecture. Allow it to place roots in your mind, so strong that it will not be scoured from your consciousness by the next brisk breeze of life. Grow it stout and tall until it bears fruit. And as it expands, it will poke out through one of the cracks in your cage and you will find that your tale has begun to grow again.
But tales are not self-sustaining, they must be exercised regularly if they are to become and remain the rudder of your life course. This can only be accomplished by putting them into action – wagging your thoughts. And you do this just as when you were a child – you run excitedly to your loved ones and friends to tell them of your wonderful new experience or discovery.
You can do this in fiction. You can do it in fact. You can do it in music or pictures or words. You will find that it quickly burns within you – an intensity of life you had either forgotten or perhaps not ever experienced. And the more your engage it, the more brightly it shines, as do you.
And finally, when you are a self-starting engine of creativity, when life has become both raw and meaningful again, perhaps you will take a moment to cast a life line to another who is still not wholly beyond hope. A life line such as this article I’m throwing to you. But, for the love of God, don’t just post a link to this or simply “like” it without any original comments of your own, or you may be truly lost and doomed to remain one of the Drudge People forever….
There are two ways to approach the craft of writing. The first is to step into the role of each character and write it very personally, as if you were an actor portraying a part. The second is to consider what each character must do to fulfill its purpose in the story, then orchestrate their interactions as if you were directing a movie or stage play.
Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s explore them one at a time and then see how we can use them both to make our story at compelling as possible.
The Writer-Actor
On the plus side, the Writer-Actor exudes passion. His or her characters are alive with a personal perspective with which the reader or audience can instantly and deeply identify.
Each character is seen through the eyes of all the others, so the reader/audience feels as if they come to know the characters, not just as players in the Big Picture, but as real people who not only love and hate, but are loved and hated as well.
This creates a rich emotional fabric to a story. But the benefits of being a Writer-Actor don’t stop there. Indeed, even the narrative itself benefits from this approach. Small experiences and individual observations illuminate the environments through which the characters pass.
A Writer-Actor’s narrative is likely to be filled with sensory descriptions as to the temperature, background sounds, colors, textures, tastes, and smells that are present in each scene. In this way, not only do the characters feel real, but so does the world in which they move.
But what about the downside of such a personal approach? The greatest danger of allowing oneself to actually become a character while writing is that one loses site of the needs and structure of the overall story.
Characters tend to take on a life of their own and almost demand that they move in certain directions, even if those are in conflict with the purposes of the story at large. In addition, the benefits of some unifying overview are often lost in the cacophony of individual voices.
Having briefly explored the pros and cons of the Writer-Actor approach, let’s examine some of the benefits and drawbacks of the Writer-Director’s method.
The Writer-Director
In the plus column, the Writer-Director produces a vision. The characters take on a grand importance as pawns in a larger scheme, a greater meaning.
Each character is seen as a cog in an elegant machine, inexorably moving forward like clockwork toward a specific purpose which will ultimately be revealed. The natures of their interrelationships are discovered and defined as understandable threads in the tapestry of the tale.
In addition, characters are tied directly to plot, theme, and genre, integrating them into the story as a whole, illustrating their interdependence with the forces that shape their world and, by inference, ours as well.
But in the negative column, a Writer-Director tends to objectify characters, leading them to come across more as puppets than people. All the beats of character growth are precisely hit, yet the overall flow can feel forced and formulaic.
What’s more, the stage on which the characters strut can seem more Machiavellian than organic, and the story plods along in some sort of Calvinistic pre-destination rather than an unknown realm in which anything might happen.
If you have begun to think that perhaps neither of these approaches, by itself, is sufficient to the task of creating a passionate story that leads to a well-defined message, you are correct.
And that is the point of this exercise. By nature each of us tends to be one of these two kinds of writers. As a result, we excel in half of what readers/audiences are craving, yet fall short in the other side of their needs.
The solution, of course, is to learn to employ tools in the areas in which we do not have natural ability or inclination. That is, in fact, the concept behind learning the craft of writing. We study and exercise not to make ourselves more talented, but to supplement our effectiveness in those areas in which we are not as innately gifted.
So, the first step of the task at hand is to identify which kind of writer you are. The second step is to practice writing with the other method as well.
Here’s a handy method for finding out which kind of writer you are naturally:
1. First, sit down to create a character from scratch. Pick a name, a gender, an age, a job or vocation and a problem or goal that is their biggest concern in their lives.
2. Based only on that limited information about that character try to put yourself in the character’s shoes. Imagine you are them, they are you. See if you easily get a feel for them or can even make yourself feel as if this is happening to you.
3. Now see if you can come up with a description of how the problem or goal affects their lives and what they are thinking or doing about it. Who are the other people in their lives, and how are they affected at a personal and/or emotional level by the problem and by the potential solutions?
If you found that exercise easy, perhaps even fun, then you are a Writer-Actor by nature. If you found it tedious, uninspiring, and fruitless, you’re a Writer-Director.
Now, to be sure which kind of writer you are, try the other method:
1. Start with the same bare-bones information about the character, their problem or their goal and ask yourself what you want them to do about it.
2. List some other characters you want in your story and describe how you want them to help or hinder your character.
3. What kinds of character conflicts do you wish to explore, which characters are they between, and how are these resolved?
If this was the easier one, then you are a Writer-Director without doubt. You see, both approaches are trying to get to the same place, but they come to it from a different creative mind set. And in so doing, they miss different things along the way.
In summary then, to enhance your abilities as a writer, you need to be fluent in both the Writer-Actor and the Writer-Directory approach, using them in a complementary fashion to fully ignite the fires of passion within a solid logistic framework.
But how can you accomplish that? How can you develop your skills in both areas?
Here are two methods to get you going. Well call this strategy, “Hats and Charts,” and again, we’ll explore them one at a time:
Hats (for developing Writer-Actor skills)
A surprising number of authors actually wear different hats while writing different characters. I’m not speaking metaphorically here, they actually wear physical hats. This helps them imagine themselves as a given character, such as a cop or a chef.
Not surprisingly, the extension of this is to wear costumes – the clothing you expect your character might brandish. It can be as simple as a scarf, the way you comb your hair, your make-up, perfume or cologne, or all the way to a full wardrobe.
It is really not as silly as it sounds. Do you not feel differently depending upon the kind of clothing you wear on a given day? Does not a uniform influence the way a person thinks? It is not any less true that a writer’s work will very depending upon what he or she is wearing while creating.
Try music that a character might play, put on a television show or movie your character might watch. Tack pictures your character might have in their home to a cork board in your line of sight as you write. Perhaps add pictures that seem like the realm in which they move – a desert island, a ship, the dark dungeons below the Vatican.
All of these ideas grow from the “Hats” concept. You can and should give some time to thinking about other similar ways of making yourself feel like your character feels.
Charts (for developing Writer-Director skills)
To become a better Writer-Director, you need a completely different plan – “Charts”. The idea here is to objectify your characters – to see them as components in the store, elements with which you will build the tale.
You can begin my making a chart of each character and listing as many details about them as you can. For example, where did each character go to school? What hobbies does each have? What are their religious affiliations, if any? To what political party do they belong? How strongly do they subscribe to the philosophies in these groups? What are their physical abilities/disabilities? What are their hair colors, skin texture, skin color, weight?
Create a time-line graph for each characters’ emotional journey through the story. Use different colors for different moods or feelings and plot the intensity of those emotions. By examining these passions analytically, it helps you see patterns and uncover skipped or missed beats in the flow.
Using index cards and colored yarn show all the relationships among your characters including familial, professional, historical, philosophical, and so on.
Try writing a description of each character as if you were a private detective hired to follow them for a day. You have no personal interest in the character, but your job is to document everything they do (and even how they act) in as much detail as possible.
Each of these exercises helps you step out of a character’s shoes and see them in a functional manner, both as themselves and also how they interact with others.
Hats and Charts together:
As you have no doubt surmised, the perspectives of the Writer-Actor and Writer-Director are so divergent that it is virtually impossible to do both at the same time. In the writing process, therefore, you should use them in succession.
Begin with the approach to which you are naturally inclined for this will provide you with the greatest raw inspiration. When you have finished a section or your Muse comes up for air, use the opportunity (which would otherwise be wasted down-time) to apply the exercises from your secondary approach to the material you have just written.
By revisiting the material while it is still fresh in your creative spirit, but from an alternate point of view, you can reprocess the material and fill in the gaps left by your initial creative burst.
Once you have finished the complete story, go back and run it through both approaches again to ensure that not only do the individual scenes sing like a Spring bird, but that the entire work unfolds smoothly, like the passage of a fine season.
In the end, if you take the time to learn, practice and employ both methods of developing characters, your stories will be far more powerful, well rounded, and well received.
Just a reminder, you’ll find both of these approaches are integrated into my StoryWeaver Story Development Software that takes you step by step from concept to completed novel or screenplay through a path of more than 200 interactive Story Cards.
Click here to learn more or to try it risk free for 90 days!
Having a core concept for your story before you write will provide you with a creative beacon – a lighthouse by which to guide your creative efforts so they stay on course to your ultimate purpose: a completed novel.
While this seems fairly simple, it can be a lot harder than it looks. It is the rare writer who has a focused concise story concept right from the beginning. Many discover the essence of their novel during the development process or even as they write.
At the beginning of the story development process, many writers find themselves with a collection of story elements they’d like to include but no overarching concept.
Without a core concept, the first inclination is to try to pull all the good ideas into a single all-encompassing story. Problem is, people think in topics more easily than they think in narratives. And while all the material may belong to the same subject matter category, more often than not it doesn’t really belong in the same story.
Still, no one likes to abandon a good idea – after all, those aren’t that easy to come by. And so, writers stop coming up with new ideas as their attention turns more and more toward figuring out how to connect together everything they already have.
This can create an every growing spiral of structural complexity in the attempt to fit every notion and concept into a single unifying whole. And before you know it, your inspiration and enthusiasm have both run dry to be replaced by creative frustration with a candy coating of intellectual effort that is not unlike trying to build a single meaningful picture from the pieces of several different puzzles.
To determine the central vision for your novel try these techniques. First, shift your focus from what your story needs, and ask yourself what you need. More precisely, consider why you want to write this story in the first place. What is it that excites you most about this subject matter? Is it a character, a plot line, a thematic message or topic, or just a genre or setting or timeframe or…?
Create a list of all the elements you have been pondering to possibly include in your story – put it on paper so you can easily see them all at once. Next, considering your own personal interests, prioritize that list,putting the items you most want to include at the top and those less compelling ones at the bottom.
(Tip: sometimes it is hard to pick the most interesting and it is easier to start at the bottom of the list with the least interesting and work up!)
Now, block the bottom half of the list to see only the top items. These are the aspects of your story that are most inspiring to you and represent the heart of your story. Think about them as a group and see if you can perceive a common thread.
This common thread is called a log line. Log lines are like the short descriptions of a program you see in cable or satellite television listings. As examples, here are the log lines for two stories of my own:
Snow Sharks (Don’t Eat Red Snow) – A group of rich teenage ski-bums are terrorized by escaped sharks that have been genetically altered by the U.S. government to act as mobile land mines in potential arctic wars.
House of W.A.C.S. – In 1942, this cross between Animal House and The Dirty Dozen follows one of the first groups of young women in the newly created Women’s Army Corps as they learn to work together as a team to thwart a Nazi fifth column and protect a crucial war factory.
The top two examples are plot-oriented, but many novels may be much more concerned with character growth or a thematic message or even both.
For example, the log line for “A Christmas Carol” might be:
An unhappy and miserly man has isolated himself from an emotional connection with the suffering of humanity as a shield against his own childhood pain, but through the intervention of three ghosts who force him to confront his past, present and future, he ultimately see how he has victimized both himself and others, repents, and seeks to make amends.
Naturally, you don’t have to stick to one sentence in your log line – that could be an exercise in futility and put your attention more on form than purpose. The point is simply to boil down the heart of your story to its essence with the least possible number of words.
In this manner your collection of potential story elements begins to take on a unifying identity – a sense your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them and what it all means – all at a high-level overview.
If your material is too limited or sketchy to get a grip on it, just describe what excites you about your potential story, rather than what’s in it, such as:
“I’m fascinated with the notion of an archeologist finding a modern device embedded in the ruins of an ancient civilization.”
You really don’t need more than that to center yourself on what you’d like to write about and, so armed, you will much more easily be able to pick and choose which ideas to include and which to exclude from your novel in progress. And, it will also inform your Muse as to where future inspiration should focus.
If, on the other hand, your wealth of story ideas is so wide-ranging or diffuse to easily see the thread, gather these ideas into groups organized by having a common connection and put each on a separate sheet of paper.
Then, try writing writing a separate log line for each group. Each of these sub-log lines will help focus a different part of what you’d like your story to be. So, rather than trying to find the core directly from your original list, try to see the central concept outlined by your collection of log lines – essential a master log line that takes all the sub-lines into account and finds an overarching concept in them as a collection.
By applying some or all of these techniques, you’ll should be able to define the essences of your story sufficiently to pick and choose which inspirations and concepts to include or exclude and to direct your ongoing story development so all the elements work together and generate in the reader a sense of a unified whole.
This technique is one of the first steps in my StoryWeaver software. Click the ad below to learn more…
One of the most powerful opportunities of the novel format is the ability to describe what a character is thinking. In movies or stage plays (with exceptions) you must show what the character is thinking through action and/or dialog. But in a novel, you can just come out and say it.
For example, in a movie, you might say:
John walks slowly to the window and looks out at the park bench where he last saw Sally. His eyes fill with tears. He bows his head and slowly closes the blinds.
But in a novel you might write:
John walked slowly to the window, letting his gaze drift toward the park bench where he last saw Sally. Why did I let her go, he thought. I wanted so much to ask her to stay. Saddened, he reflected on happier times with her – days of more contentment than he ever imagined he could feel.
The previous paragraph uses two forms of expressing a character’s thoughts. One, is the direct quote of the thought, as if it were dialog spoken internally to oneself. The other is a summary and paraphrase of what was going on in the character’s head.
Most novels are greatly enhanced by stepping away from a purely objective narrative perspective, and drawing the reader into the minds of the character’s themselves.
Over the course of the story, your reader/audience has come to know your characters and to feel for them. The story doesn’t end when your characters and their relationships reach a climax. Rather, the reader/audience will want to know the aftermath – how it turned out for each character and each relationship. In addition, the audience needs a little time to say goodbye – to let the character walk off into the sunset or to mourn for them before the story ends.
This is in effect the conclusion, the wrap-up. After everything has happened to your characters, after the final showdown with their respective demons, what are they like? How have they changed? If a character began the story as a skeptic, does it now have faith? If they began the story full of hatred for a mother that abandoned them, have they now made revelations to the effect that she was forced to do this, and now they no longer hate? This is what you have to tell the audience, how their journeys changed them, have the resolved their problems, or not?
And in the end, this constitutes a large part of your story’s message. It is not enough to know if a story ends in success or failure, but also if the characters are better off emotionally or plagued with even greater demons, regardless of whether or not the goal was achieved.
You can show what happens to your characters directly, through a conversation by others about them, or even in a post-script on each that appears after the story is over or in the ending credits of a movie.
How you do this is limited only by your creative inspiration, but make sure you review each character and each relationship and provide at least a minimal dismissal for each.
Some writers tend to create characters that are more or less the same age as themselves. Other writers populate their stories with characters of all ages but have them all act as if they are the same age as the author. On the one hand, this follows the old adage that one should write about what one knows. But on the other hand, while such characters may function well enough, somehow they don’t ring true.
In real life, we encounter people of all ages in most situations. And while every individual is unique, there are certain attributes common to broad age groups that need to be built into your characters if they are come across as real people.
In this writing tip we’re going to uncover a variety of traits that bear on an accurate portrayal of age, and even offer the opportunity to explore seldom-depicted human issues associated with age, be it young or old.
Introduction
People in general, and writers in particular, tend to stereotype the attributes of age more than just about any other character trait. These broad stroke qualities include the physical aspects of age, ranging from size, smoothness of skin, strength and mobility to the various ailments associated with our progress through life as well as the mental and emotional qualities that we expect to find at various junctures.
While these may be accurate in general, they are all rather superficial. In reality, the process of aging involves quite a number of subtle components that need to be woven into a character’s tapestry for them to take on the human quality of the people we know and love (or hate) in our own lives.
Anatomical vs. Chronological age
Before examining any specific age-related traits, it is important to note the difference between anatomical and chronological age. Anatomical age is the condition of your body whereas chronological age is the actual number of years you’ve been around. For example, if you are thirty years old, but all worn out and genetically biased to age prematurely, you might look more akin to what people would expect of a fifty year old. Nonetheless, you wouldn’t have the same interests in music or direct knowledge of the popular culture as someone who was actually fifty years old.
When describing a character, you might choose to play off your readers’ expectations by letting them assume the physical condition, based on your description of age. Or, you might wish to create some additional interest in your character by describing him as “A middle-aged man so fit and healthy, he was still “carded” whenever he vacationed in Vegas.” Such a description adds an element of interest and immediately sets your character out at an individual.
Jargon
Far too often, characters speak in the same generic conversational language we hear on television. In other words, characters speak as if they all think alike, even if they were brought up in completely different eras. But aging is an ongoing evolution of culture, rooting the individual into thought patterns of his or her formative hears, and tempered (to some degree) by the ongoing cultural indoctrination of a social lifestyle.
For example, my grandmother was born in 1902 and lived to see the coming of electricity in her home, the first airplanes and cars, the first radio programs, two world wars, suffrage, prohibition, home computers, man on the moon, and color TV. Society changed, culture changed; science, industry, medicine, politics, and entertainment changed. An though my grandmother still had roots to her childhood, all these innovations and alterations were part of her essence as well.
Characters, therefore, tend to pick up a basic vocabulary reflective of both their early identity AND their current world. For example, a black man who fought for civil rights along side Dr. Martin Luther King, would not be using the exact same jargon ad a black man advancing the cause of rights today. And neither of these would use the same vocabulary as a young black man in the center city, trying to find his way out through education. And yet, some of what they say will be nearly identical in content and even in terms of buzz words, as it is the current topic, but the context, perspective, references and specific jargon cannot help but be tempered by their eras of their lives.
Sure, we all learn to drop some of the more dated terms and expletives of our youth in order to appear “hip” or “with it,” but in the end we either sound silly trying to use the new ones, or avoid them altogether, leaving us bland and un-passionate in our conversation. Both of these approaches can be depicted in your characters as well, and can provide a great deal of information about the kind of mind your character possesses.
Outlook
Speaking of characters’ minds, we all have a culturally created filter that focuses our attention on some things, and blinds us to (or diminishes) others. Sometimes, this is built into the language itself. When it is hot, the Spanish say, “hace calor” (it makes heat). This phrasing is due to the underlying beliefs of the people who developed that language that see every object, even those that are inanimate, as possessing a spirit. So, when it is hot, this is not a mindless state of affairs due to meteorological conditions, but rather to the intent of the spirit of the weather. Of course, if you were to ask a modern Spanish speaking person if they believed in such a thing, you would likely receive a negative reply. And yet, because this concept permeates the language (such making everyday items masculine or feminine), it cannot help but alter the way native speakers of the language will frame their thoughts.
As another example, the Japanese population of world war two was indoctrinated in the culture of honor, duty, and putting the needs of society above those of the individual. Although most countries foster this view, in war-time Japan, it was carried to the extreme, resulting in an effective Kamikaze force, and also in whole units that chose a suicidal charge against oncoming forces, rather than to be humiliated by defeat or capture.
Corporate Japan was built around these Samurai ideals, and workers commonly perceived themselves as existing to serve their companies with loyalty and unquestioning obedience. But when the economy faltered, those who expected to remain with their companies for life were laid off, or even permanently fired. This led to a disillusionment of the “group first” mentality, especially among the young, who had not yet become settled in their beliefs. So, today, there is still a gap between the old-guard corporate executives, and the millions of teenagers to whom they market. Age, in this case, creates a significant difference in the way the world looks.
Continuing with the notion of generation gaps, I grew up when the rallying cry was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Of course, now we’re all in our sixties, so we are forced to admit that we, ourselves, have in fact become “the Establishment.”
But that is what is visible and obvious to us. The real difference between my generation and the post Yuppie, post GenX, GenY, Gen? Millennial Generation is far more foundational. In conversations with my daughter some years ago, I discovered that while I see myself on the other side of the generation gap, she does not perceive a gap at all! This is due to in part to the plethora of high-quality recorded programs, which capture so many fine performances and presentations from decades ago when the artists and great thinkers were in their prime. We live in a TV Land universe in which no great works ever die; they are just reborn in streaming media.
To my daughter’s generation, it is only important whether or not you have something worth saying. How old you are has nothing to do with your importance or relevance. In short, the difference between my generation and the younger generation is that we perceive a difference between the generations and they don’t!
In summary then, the age in which you establish your worldview will determine how you perceive current events for the rest of your life. When creating characters of any particular age, you would do well to consider the cultural landscape that was prevalent when each character was indoctrinated.
Comfort Symbols
We all share the same human emotional needs. And we each experience moments that fulfill those needs. Those experiences become fond memories, and many of the trappings of those experiences become comfort symbols. In later life, we seek out those symbols to trigger the re-experiencing of the cherished moments. Perhaps your family served a particular food in your childhood that you associate with warmth and love. For example, my mother grew up during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Her family was often short of food. So, as a snack, they would give her a piece of bread spread with lard and mustard! Now the thought very nearly sickens me, but she often yearned for that flavor again, as it reminded her of the love she received as a child.
Once we have locked into symbols that we can use to trigger emotional experiences, we seldom need to replace them. They are our comfort symbols upon which we can always rely. This has two effects as we age: One, we latch on to performers and music, as an example, that age along with us. We recall them at their prime when we first encountered them, and also have spent years aging along with them. This leads us to suddenly wake up one day and realize we no longer know who they are referring to in popular culture magazines and entertainment reporting televisions shows. In other words, the popular culture has passed us by. Two, we see many of our symbols (favorite advertising campaigns, a restaurant where we went on our first date, etc.) vanish as they are replaced with new and current concerns. So, the world around us seems less relevant, less familiar, and less comfortable, just as we seem to the world at large.
When creating characters, take into account the potential ongoing and growing sense of loss, sadness, and connection between characters and their environment. And don’t think this is a problem only for the elderly. My son laments that there are kids growing up today who never knew a world without personal computers! He says it makes him feel old.
Physical Attributes
Babies have a soft spot on their heads that doesn’t harden up for quite a while after birth. Cartilage wears out. Teens in puberty have raging hormones. Young kids grow so fast that they don’t have a chance to get used to the size and strength of their bodies before they have changed again, not unlike trying to drive a new and different car every day. I can’t remember the last time I ran full-tilt. I’m not sure it would be safe, today! Point is, our bodies are always changing. Sometimes the state we are in has positive and/or negative qualities – other times the changing itself is positive or negative.
When creating characters, give some thought to the physical attributes and detriments of any given age, and consider how they not only affect the abilities and mannerisms of your characters, but their mental and emotional baselines as well.
Conclusion?
Sure, we could go on and on exploring specifics of age and aging, but since it is an omnipresent human condition, it touches virtually every human experience and endeavor. The point here is not to completely cover the subject, but to encourage you to consider it when creating each of your characters. It isn’t enough to simply describe a character as “a middle-aged man,” or “a perky 8 year old girl.” You owe it to your characters and to your readers or audience to incorporate the aging experience into your characters’ development, for it is inexorably integrated into our own.
A common misconception sees genre as a fixed list of dramatic requirements or a rigid structural template from which there can be no deviation. Writers laboring under these restrictions often find themselves boxed-in creatively. They become snared in the Genre Trap, cranking out stories that are indistinguishable from a whole crop of their contemporaries
In fact, genre should be a fluid and organic entity that grows from each story individually. Such stories are surprising, notable, memorable, and involving. In this article, you’ll learn a new flexible technique for creating stories that are unique within their genres.
How We Fall Into the Genre Trap
The first step in escaping from the Genre Trap is to understand how we fall into it in the first place. Consider how wrapped up you become in the details of your story. You slave over every plot point, struggle to empathize with every one of your characters, and perhaps even grieve over the effort to instill a passionate theme.
The problem is, you become so buried in the elements of your story that you lose sight of what it feels like as a whole. So while every piece may work individually, the overall impact may be fragmented, incomplete, or inconsistent. To avoid this, we fall back on “proven” structures of successful stories in a similar genre. We cut out parts of our story that don’t fit that template, and add new sections to fill the gaps. We snip and hammer until our story follows along the dotted lines.
And lo and behold, we have fallen into the genre trap – taking our original new idea and making it just like somebody else’s old idea. Sure, the trappings are different. Our characters have different names. The big battle between good and evil takes place in a roller rink instead of a submarine. But underneath it all, the mood, timber, and feel of our story is just like the hundred others stamped out in the same genre mold.
A New Definition of Genre
Rather than thinking of your story as a structure, a template, or a genre, stand back a bit and look at your story as it appears to your reader or audience. To them, every story has a personality of its own, almost as if it were a human being. From this perspective, stories fall into personality types, just like real people.
When you meet someone for the first time, you might initially classify them as a Nerd, a Bully, a Wisecracker, a Philanthropist, or a Thinker.
These, of course, are just first impressions, and if you get the chance to spend some time with each person, you begin to discover a number of traits and quirks that set them apart from any other individual in that personality type.
Similarly, when you encounter a story for the first time, you likely classify it as a Western, a Romance, a Space Opera, or a Buddy Picture. Essentially, you see the personality of the story as a Stereotype.
At first, stories are easy to classify because you know nothing about them but the basic broad strokes. But as a story unfolds, it reveals its own unique qualities that transform it from another faceless tale in the crowd to a one-of-a-kind experience with its own identity.
At least, that is what it ought to do. But if you have fallen into the Genre Trap, you actually edit out all the elements that make your story different and add others that make it the same. All in the name of the Almighty Genre Templates.
How to Avoid the Genre Trap
Avoiding the Genre Trap is not only easy, but creatively inspiring as well! The process can begin at the very start of your story’s development (though you can apply this technique for re-writes as well).
Step One – Choosing Genres:
Make a list of all the Stereotypical Genres that have elements you might want to include in the story you are currently developing. For example, you might want to consider aspects of a Western, a Space Opera, a Romance, and a Horror Story.
Step Two – Listing Genre Elements:
List all the elements of each of these genres that intrigue you in general. For example:
Western – Brawl in the Saloon, Showdown Gunfight, Chase on Horseback, Lost Gold Mine, Desert, Indians.
Space Opera – Time Warp, Laser Battle, Exploding Planet, Alien Race, Spaceship Battle, Ancient Ruins.
Romance – Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, Misunderstanding alienates Boy and Girl, Rival for Girl throws out Misinformation, Last Minute Reveal of the Truth leading to Joyful Reunion.
Horror Story – Series of Grizzly and Inventive Murders, The Evil Gradually Closes in on the Heroes, Scary Isolated Location, Massive Rainstorm with Lightning and Thunder.
(Note that some genre elements are about setting, some about action, and some about character relationships. That’s why it is so hard to say what genre is. And it is also why looking at genre, as a story’s Personality Type is so useful.
Step Three – Selecting Genre Elements:
From the lists of elements you have created, pick and choose elements from each of the genres that you might like to actually include in your story.
For example, from Western you might want Lost Gold Mine, Desert, and Indians. From Space Opera you might choose Spaceship Battle, Exploding Planet and Alien Race. Romance would offer up all the elements you had listed: Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, Misunderstanding alienates Boy and Girl, Rival for Girl throws our Misinformation, Last Minute Reveal of the Truth leading to Joyful Reunion. And finally, from Horror Story you might select Scary Isolated Location, Massive Rainstorm with Lightning and Thunder.
Step Four – Cross Pollinating Genres:
From this Master List of Genre Elements that you might like to include in your story, see if any of the elements from one genre have a tie-in with those from another genre.
For example, Indians from the Western and Alien Race from the Space Opera could become a race of aliens on a planet that share many of the qualities of the American Indian. And, the relationship between the boy and the girl easily becomes a Romeo and Juliet saga of a human boy colonizing the planet who falls in love with an alien girl.
Step Five – Peppering Your Story with Genre Elements:
Once you’ve chosen your elements and cross-pollinated others, you need to determine where in your story to place them. If you are stuck in a Genre Trap, there is a tendency to try and get all the genre elements working right up front so that the genre is clear to the reader/audience.
This is like trying to know everything there is to discover about a person as soon as you meet him or her. It is more like a resume than an introduction. The effect is to overload the front end of the story with more information than can be assimilated, and have nowhere left to go when the reader/audience wants to get to know the story’s personality better as the story unfolds.
So, make a timeline of the key story points in your plot. Add in any principal character moments of growth, discovery, or conflict. Now, into that timeline pepper the genre elements you have developed for your story.
For example, you might decide to end with a massive spaceship battle, or you could choose to open with one. The information about the Alien Race being like the America Indians might be right up front in the Teaser, or you could choose to reveal it in the middle of the second act as a pivotal turning point in the story.
Because genre elements are often atmospheric in nature, they can frequently be placed just about anywhere without greatly affecting the essential flow of the plot or the pace of character growth.
As you look at your timeline, you can see and control the reader’s first impressions of the story genre. And you can anticipate the ongoing mood changes in your story’s feel as additional elements in its personality are revealed, scene-by-scene or chapter-by-chapter.
What about Re-writes?
Not everyone wants to start a story with genre development. In fact, you might want to go through an entire draft and then determine what genre elements you’d like to add to what you already have.
The process is the same. Just list the genres that have elements you might wish to include. List the elements in each that intrigue you. Select the ones that would fit nicely into your story. Cross-Pollinate where you can. Pepper them into your existing timeline to fill gaps where the story bogs down and to reveal your story as a unique personality.
Summing Up the Sum of the Parts
Genre is part setting, part action, part character, and part story-telling style. Trying to follow a fixed template turns your story into just another clone. But by recognizing that genre is really a story’s personality type, you can make it as individual as you like. And by peppering your elements throughout your story’s timeline, you will create first impressions that will capture your reader or audience and then hold their interest as your story’s one-of-a-kind personality reveals itself.
The whole thing to keep in mind is that the passion and the structure of stories work in tandem, but not as partners. Like our own reason and emotion, sometimes they agree, sometimes they are at war, but mostly they hold to an uneasy truce built on a compromise that is unsatisfying to reason and unfulfilling to emotion.
Because they are not the same, reason and emotion can never fully line up. When they match in one place they must, by their very natures, differ somewhere else.
The real key is to become wise in the ways of giving each its due and knowing where to do it. Where is it more important that things make sense? Where is it more important to let feelings run like the wind?
If you would like a general rule of thumb that will get you most of the way there, it is this: Let reason rule the plot and passion rule the characters. You plot is the most logical part of your story and your characters the most human. So let you plot always make sense and your character always ring true.
Before you write your first chapter, ponder your opening sentence, or jot down a single word, there’s one step you should always do first, no matter your genre or style.
First, the problem, then the solution:
When you first come up with a concept for a story your head begins to fill with ideas for it – the genre, setting, year or historic era, a concept for a main character or an intriguing subordinate one, a few twists for the plot, a few examples that illustrate your theme and/or support your message, and many, many more.
Before long, you have hundreds of notions running around in your head bumping into each other. You don’t want to forget any so you either keep revisiting them over and over again or you jot them down on napkins, sticky notes, or even index cards.
At the same time, you are trying to figure out how to make all these mosaic pieces fit together into the single image of your story, and that just adds to the chaos going on in your creative mind.
You might as well admit it – it’s a mess in there. And the problem is that there is so much going on you don’t have room to stand back and see the big picture much less space to come up with new ideas either. This leads to gridlock, anxiety, and frustration, all of which are the breeding ground for writer’s block.
That’s no way to start the story development process. It might even stall you out before you really get started.
So here’s the solution:
The moment you decide you have enough ideas that you’d like to develop them into a story, sit yourself down and do a “core dump” of everything you already have rattling around in your head.
Just start jotting it all down with no rhyme or reason – every character trait, storytelling trick, plot twist, genre element, dialog or style notion that you are juggling in your mind.
This isn’t the time to try an organize it or make sense of it or try to make it all work in concert. This is just the time to clear you mind by getting all the ideas into one place, safe and saved in a document.
There’s no limit to how long or short your list of ideas needs to be. You write them down until you run out of them. And there’s no rule about how to format them – it can’ be in a list, a series of sentences, or even short descriptive paragraphs that really capture the flavor of what you have in mind.
The magic happens when you are finally done and the myriad of creative notions you’ve been entertaining are all in front of you in one place. Then, you can finally clear your mind, stand back, and see the big picture.
Just in looking them over you might see connections among the concept that never came to mind before because you’d never been able to directly bring two ideas together in the ongoing stream.
And you also will be able to see where you have lots of development and where it is thin or even missing. For example, you may find you have a really well delineated plot but only a couple of characters and no message.
It will be different every time you do this for every story you write. But once your mind is clear and you can get that overview and also start playing one idea against others, you’ll find that from that point forward your story development takes off like a rocket.
This method is SO important that we made it the first of more than 200 steps in our StoryWeaver Story Development Software. You can try it risk-free for 90 days on our web site at Storymind.com where you will also find hundreds of original articles on writing, free writing classes in streaming video, and much more.
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