The Art of Story Creation
Let’s assume you are a new (or inexperienced) fiction writer. You probably know that creating a story requires much 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 a memoir.
“How can that be?” you ask. Simply put, a novel, a script, a memoir, a play, and a short story are all stories.
No matter what type of story you have in mind, each requires several 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 precisely 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, and storytelling techniques.
Let’s discuss each one of these processes.
1. Ideas
A mistake many rookie 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 a dozen ideas, while a novel requires more than a hundred.
The writer needs ideas about character development, plot events, setting, character arc, and scene designs. Gathering 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 will 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. In other words, story design is where the writer incorporates all these ideas into the story.
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. Most of this time is spent determining the scenes I need to get the characters from the story’s start to the climactic scenes at the end.
3. Storytelling
No matter how great your ideas are and how excellent your story design is, your story is doomed if you don’t have the storytelling skills to hold the reader’s attention. Storytelling involves using several techniques that include point-of-view, foreshadowing, show-don’t-tell, stimulus & reaction, and dialog vs exposition, among other topics.
One storytelling skill that isn’t discussed much in writing books is developing a writing voice. Writers can’t tell a story using their speaking voice; they must build a separate and distinct writing voice. The reason for this is that our speaking voice tends to be boring. Very boring. Want proof? Eavesdrop on the conversation between a few strangers.
I’ll bet you it won’t hold your interest for long. So imagine trying to read a story written in a speaking voice.
Once a writer understands the creative processes required to master the art of story creation, the work can proceed more efficiently and smoothly.
This article is based on material in my book Creating Stories.
