ReBlog : How to Write Better Stories

Ten Secrets To Write Better Stories

by Joe Bunting (@joebunting) | 33 Comments

Writing isn’t easy, and writing a good story is even harder.

I used to wonder how Pixar came out with such great movies, year after year. Then, I found out a normal Pixar film takes six years to develop, and most of that time is spent on the story.

How do you write a story, and more importantly, how do you write one that’s good?

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Everything I Know About How to Write a Story

Since I started The Write Practice a few years ago, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this question, how to write a good story. I’ve read books and blog posts on writing, taken classes, asked dozens of authors, and, of course, written stories myself.

The following ten steps are a distillation of everything I’ve learned about writing a good story. I hope it makes writing your story a little easier, but more than that, I hope it challenges you to step deeper into your own exploration of how to write a good story.

1. Write In One Sitting

Write the first draft of your story in as short a time as possible. If you’re writing a short story, try to write it in one sitting. If you’re writing a novel, try to write it in one season (three months).

Don’t worry too much about plotting or outlining beforehand. You can do that once you know you have a story to tell in the first place. Your first draft is a discovery process. You are like an archeologist digging an ancient city out of the clay. You might have a few clues about where your city is buried beforehand, but you don’t know what it will look like until it’s unearthed.

All that’s to say, get digging!

2. Develop Your Protagonist

Stories are about protagonists, and if you don’t have a good protagonist, you won’t have a good story. The essential ingredient for every protagonist is that they must make decisions. Victor Frankl said, “A human being is a deciding being.” Your protagonist must make a decision to get herself into whatever mess she gets into in your story, and likewise, she must decide to get herself out of the mess.

To further develop your protagonist, use other character archetypes like the villain, the protagonist’s opposite, or the fool, a sidekick character that reveals the protagonist’s softer side.

3. Create Suspense and Drama

To create suspense, set up a dramatic question. A dramatic question is something like, “Is he going to make it?” or, “Is she going to get the man of her dreams?” By putting your protagonist’s fate in doubt, you make the reader ask, What happens next?

Note: To do this well, you need to carefully restrict the flow of information to the reader. Nothing destroys drama like over-sharing.

4.  Show, Don’t Tell

Honestly, the saying “show, don’t tell” is overused. However, when placed next to the step above, it becomes very effective.

When something interesting happens in your story that changes the fate of your character, don’t tell us about it. Show the scene! Your readers have a right ro see the best parts of the story play out in front of them. Show the interesting parts of your story, and tell the rest.

5. Write Good Dialogue

Good dialogue comes from two things: intimate knowledge of your characters and lots of rewriting. Each character must have a unique voice, and to make sure your characters all sound different, read each character’s dialogue and ask yourself, “Does this sound like my character?” If your answer is no, then you have some rewriting to do.

Also, with your speaker tags, try not to use anything but “he said” and “she said.” Speaker tags like “he exclaimed,” “she announced,” and “he spoke vehemently” are distracting and unnecessary. The occasional “he asked” is fine, though.

6. Write About Death

Think about the last five novels you read. In how many of them did a character die? Good stories often involve death. Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Charlotte’s Web, The Lord of the Rings, and more all had main characters who died. Death is the universal theme because every person who lives will one day die. Tap the power ofdeath in your storytelling.

7. Edit Like a Pro

Most professional writers write three drafts or more. The first draft is often called the “vomit draft” or the “shitty first draft.” Don’t share it with anyone! Your first draft is your chance to explore your story and figure out what it’s about.

Your second draft isn’t for polishing, although many new writers will try to polish as soon as they can to clean up their embarrassing first draft. Instead, the second draft is meant for major structural changes and for clarifying the plot and characters of your novel or the key ideas of your non-fiction book.

The third draft is for deep polishing. Now is when everything starts to gel. This is the fun part! But until you write the first two drafts, polishing is probably a waste of your time.

8. Know the Rules, Then Break Them

Good writers know all the rules and follow them. Great writers know all the rules and break them. However, the best writers don’t break the rules arbitrarily. They break them because their stories require a whole new set of rules. Respect the rules, but remember that you don’t serve the rules. You serve your stories.

9. Defeat Writer’s Block

The best way to defeat writers block is to write. If you’re stuck, don’t try to write well. Don’t try to be perfect. Just write.

Sometimes, to write better stories, you have to start by taking the pressure off and just writing.

10. Share Your Work

You write better when you know someone will soon be reading what you’ve written. If you write in the dark, no one will know if you aren’t giving your writing everything you have. But when you share your writing, you face the possibility of failure. This will force you to write the best story  you possibly can.

What are your best tips for writing good stories?

PRACTICE

Do you have a story to tell?

Write the first draft in one sitting using the tips above. Then, share a few paragraphs of your practice here in the comments section. And if you share your practice, be sure to leave feedback on a few practices by other writers, too.

Good luck!

Repost: How to Write a Short Story No One Else Can

How to Write a Short Story No One Else Can Write [interview with Danielle Lazarin]

by Joe Bunting (@joebunting) | 49 Comments

Today, I’m talking to Danielle Lazarin about how to get your short story published by a literary magazine, how to know when your story is finished, and how to write stories no one else can write.

Danielle has a forthcoming story in Glimmer Train, and has published in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, and onFiveChapters.com. She received her Masters in creative writing at University of Michigan. She knows her stuff.

You can check out Danielle’s website and follow her on Twitter (@d_lazarin).

Let’s jump into the interview!

Danielle, you’ve written for some of the most competitive literary magazines around. How long had you been writing before you had one accepted?

I began submitting stories to literary magazines in college; my first story was accepted by Michigan Quarterly Review shortly after I finished my MFA in 2007. Time wise, that’s well over a decade. But of course the quality of the stories I wrote in high school and college are vastly different than what I was working on in graduate school and am now.

How many short stories did you write before you were able to get that first one published?

That kind of counting doesn’t end well, in my experience. Let’s just say enough to know that that particular story was ready to be out in the world in ways that most of the others were not.

Do you know why that first story was chosen and not all the others?

I think the other stories I had sent out were simply not ready, for various reasons. Oftentimes when I got rejections they were unsurprising; I felt not sadness but relief, because I knew in the back of my head that there was still more work to be done on the story, and now I could do it.

I’m still working on being patient with myself and my work. The plan is to build a career, to write till I can’t type, or mind-meld, or however we’ll be using technology to tell stories in fifty years. I want every published story to be one I can stand behind for a long time. Some of those stories I sent too soon have since been published, but after much revision. Some are still in revision.

Generally, though, it’s really hard to say why one story is published after many rejections or never at all or quickly, why some stories win contests or don’t. I always try to remember that a reader is subjective. Pick up any story collection or literary magazine and it’s clear that the world is full of stories with engaging character and strong arcs and beautiful prose. But that doesn’t mean that each of those stories are amazing in my eyes; it might not get me as a reader.

When it comes down to it, for publishing purposes, you are speaking to a small group of readers, and your story just might not connect with them. Before that, of course, you have to be sure that you have done all that other work, that you have satisfied all your criteria for characters and arc and sentences.

What do you enjoy about writing stories? What do you hate about writing them?

I love living inside the suspended disbelief of stories, of the act of writing when you feel like you are reporting rather than inventing, when the stories you are telling feel so true to you you forget that you are indeed making them up.

I love when I am out in the world living my life, on the way to the playground with my girls or catching a bus, and something comes to me in a flash—a detail about a character, or a plot point, and that rush to write it down, that hunger to sit down with the newfound knowledge and see where it takes me, how those little details open up portals.

Having those tidbits stored up is exciting. I ride on that excitement, as the time I have to write is not as much as I’d like it to be, as I’m home with my kids, who are not in school full-time yet.

I hate the feeling of missing puzzle pieces. Of having a story be almost there, and knowing there is something wrong with it, but being unsure what it is, or even if I know what the problem is, not knowing how to fix it.

I’ve had a number of stories where this is true, and I tried various revisions, but they weren’t working, and I felt as though I was spinning in circles. I put both of those stories away for some time, till I felt I had shaken their familiarity out of me.

Then I went back when I started thinking about them again. One of them was published by Five Chapters and the other won the Glimmer Train contest.

What are three things a writer can do to write publishable short stories?

1. Find a few good readers.

By a good reader, I don’t mean someone who loves your work unconditionally. I mean someone who adores your work as a whole, but who is also serving its greater purpose, who is not afraid to give you criticism and from whom you can hear and use that feedback. It can take a while to find that reader. I have a few friends from graduate school and college whose feedback is invaluable to my stories.

2. Hone your own editor.

This perhaps contradicts number one, but you also have to gain a sense of what youwant out of your stories.

Sometimes the most useful feedback I’ve received from other writers or teachers has been things I’ve disagreed with, someone telling me that an element doesn’t work at all, and my knowing that that non-working component is vital to the story I’m trying to tell. And then I have a burning desire to make that line or sentiment or secondary character work, to make that reader understand how vital it is.

Often in workshops people tell you to cut what isn’t working, but I think first you have to check and see if you want it to work. It’s a different way of listening to feedback, of understanding your goals for your story.

3. Write a story that no one else can write.

I spoke of this some in my essay for Glimmer Train: I believe you have to claim your territory through specific details, through a sense of ownership of a kind of character or experience.  You do this by tapping into your own history, the places and characters you know most intimately.

I took a workshop with Julie Orringer some years ago and she asked us to write from an area of our own expertise—to draw on a narrow experience, such as being a competitive piano player, or the daughter of a mother in a wheelchair, or spending summers in a particular town or house.

When I teach, I use a variation of that exercise, and it always generates the most vivid, confident stories, far more interesting than students trying to think of a wacky or surreal set of circumstances in an effort to stand out. Those stories often read as inauthentic because it’s so outside their experience that they look in at their characters rather than see from inside of them.

If you feel connected to your work, if a character reminds you of a place or person you are connected to emotionally, that will come through and give you a sense of stake in your stories.

What’s your favorite story you’ve written?

The one I’m working on now, if, of course, I’m not struggling tremendously with it that day. I feel very connected to each of my stories, or I wouldn’t spend so much time with them. But once they are done, I move along to the next character or idea. They’re like students, really. I want to see them do well in the world, but if I spend too much time admiring them and looking after them after they’re gone I can’t move on to what’s next; I can’t fall in love with some other story enough to write it all the way through.

I am not a fast writer; many of my stories take years from draft to final version, as I find I need to put them down for a bit when I get stuck and focus on a different story. I move forward bit by bit on a number of things at one time, and I need the promise of something new just ahead or I just stay stuck.

Right now I’m working on a novel, which is a different kind of beast, but it has a multi-character point of view, and so that keeps it fresh; if one character is giving me problems, I just ditch them and hang out with someone else for a while.

And yes, I do think of it as hanging out with my imaginary friends.

Thanks Danielle! Writers, don’t forget to check out Danielle’s websiteand follow her on Twitter to get updates about her latest stories. 

If you want to learn more about how to write a publishable short story, check out Let’s Write a Short Story, an ebook about the art and science of writing and publishing short stories.

PRACTICE

I love the idea of “drawing on narrow experience” that Danielle mentioned. You have experiences that make your life unique, whether it’s your childhood memories, your work experience, your travels, or your relationships.

Write about your narrow experience. Be as specific as you can.

Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section.

And if you post, please be sure to comment on a few posts by other writers.

Happy writing!