Tips on Writing a Story
Ernest Hemingway once challenged himself by writing a short story with only six words. He wrote, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That story, which doesn’t have plot or characters, works largely by implying conflict. Most stories, though, take advantage of the full resources of the craft, developing plot, characters and tone. Your own story can be set in any time or location or grapple with any theme, with the only necessity that you engage a reader with a compelling narrative.
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Crafting Plot
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The plot of a story often involves a conflict, internal or external, and follows that conflict through a period of time. The conflict might change shape or significance throughout the story’s plot and is often shaped by the point of view. In fact, a single plot might be transformed depending on the perspective. For instance, a plot about a man divorcing his wife might be radically different from the point of view of the man, the woman, their child or the neighbor. Sometimes, the conflict within the plot remains unresolved.
Creating Characters
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Readers often find it easy to identify with characters such as Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," or Shakespeare's Hamlet. Create your characters as either passive or aggressive to the challenges they face, but you should develop their personalities and make sure their actions and decisions are consistent throughout the story. Rather than depicting a character’s personality by explaining it, you can give small details that illustrate their internal conflicts. For example, in Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” the protagonist empties his pockets and then picks through them. This indicates the character is searching for meaning, even in his pocket lint.
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Establishing Tone
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Once you’ve decided how the story will be told, begin to establish tone. You can surprise your readers by telling a seemingly tragic story with a comedic tone, or vice versa. Perspective can radically change the tone of the work. As the comedian Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." You can establish tone by choosing words and metaphors that reinforce the humor or the gravity of the situation. The perspective of the story will also help establish tone.
Choosing Genre and Medium
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After you’ve developed some of the basics of the story, choose a genre or medium. The medium might be a play, a movie, a novel, or another form. You might choose to write the story as a comedic play, as a romantic screenplay, or as a tragic novel. You should be familiar with the conventions in the genre you choose to write the story in by studying other examples of the medium. Each genre and each medium has special expectations for how to show character's personality and show conflict.
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