Six word story.

Following a discussion on another board, here's a quick writing challenge:

Write a story in six words.

It sounds insanely difficult (well, it isn't easy, I'll admit that) but it is a really useful task. I think we're all guilty of using ten words when one will do, as you will no doubt be able to tell from my previous posts, but the professionals have the skill and confidence to hint at ideas rather than just tell us.

A big problem in writing is over-explaining as it takes away the aspects most likely to hook your reader: exploration and discovery. So why not give it a try?

Here are some famous examples:

Ernest Hemingway - Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.

Joss Whedon - Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.

Stan Lee - Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.

Margaret Atwood - Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

Anyway, have a go - and feel free to post your stories on the comments!

The Hook - how to open your article.

Following on from the last post, looking at a useful structure for writing articles, I’m going to take a quick look at the “hook” paragraph. This is, as we all have drummed into us at school, the opening and introduction to your piece. It is, after all, the first impression you give of yourself and your ideas. Still, it’s easy enough to say that, but how does that work in practice? What is right and wrong? Is there even a right and wrong?

Well, what I come across quite often (I’ll admit it right now, cards on the table, I am an English teacher by day) is an overly formal, formulaic style to these openings. This is possibly a carry-over from essay and report writing structures from other subjects (History, I’m looking at you), where a formal setting out of goals and targets is suitable for an opening.

But it is not useful for magazine articles. Not at all.

What you do want to do is grab people’s attention and illustrate your key idea(s). Not everything you want to say but what you have decided are the most important aspects.

Now, how to grab people’s attention? Should it be linguistic? Should it be through tone or imagery? Should it be through a fact or a key piece of information? Hey, it could be any of those approaches and it’s really dictated by your point of view and what you want to say.

So, we’re looking at 2-3 sentences that need to make an impression. I always consider the impression you give to your reader to be like the impression you want to give to an employer at a job interview. Instead of a suit and tie, we have ideas and our writing style, but it works the same. Like an interviewer faced with a shabbily dressed applicant, decisions are made by the reader within those first few lines and you won’t win them back after that – largely because they will have skipped over to the next site…

Anyway, so you need to think about the key information for your story an how you’re going to convey it. In this way, it is story-telling and the best articles are written by authors who aren’t so quick to draw a dividing line between genres.

For this example, I’ll use The Butterfly and the Bell Jar by Jean-Dominique Bauby (check out the details on wiki, if you’re interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly ).

So it’s an autobiography written by the former editor-in-chief of the French Elle magazine who developed locked-in-syndrome after a massive stroke. So the facts are striking and the subject needs to be dealt with sensitively, but there’s a lot of information to work with.

With Locked-in syndrome leaving the author unable to speak, or move anything except his left eye, the writing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is as much a reaffirmation of the human spirit as it is an impressive piece of literature. For, as painfully honest and wonderfully written as it is, one cannot but keep returning to the life that birthed the story and reflect on all that was lost. Surely, it must be said, the sign of a successful autobiography.

Ok, so I went for an opening with the most important bits of information: Locked-in syndrome, what that actually means, the autobiography that came from it, and why we should all read it.

You can get a feel very early on for what you want to say, so there is value in listing off the key elements before knitting them together in one efficient sentence. Of course, it can feel a little overloaded and that is for you to judge and edit accordingly. It can be at that point that you trim back, leave a little more for the second sentence or the later paragraphs.

I could have approached it with a colder definition for Locked-in syndrome, giving a bit of distance before we get to know the man. I could also have started with a quote, maybe from the author, possibly from the text, or maybe by anyone with something valuable to say about the themes of the text.

All I am saying really is that there are many ways to get started. There aren’t set rights and wrongs, only your instincts. The instincts come from practice and looking at alternatives. Early on, it would be sensible to try out two or three different ways of introducing your piece before choosing the best one. With practice you will find the right path more instinctively but, until then, you can only plan and practice.
Have fun and get writing!

Tips and structures for writing articles.

Journalism is a difficult career to get into, but a rewarding one. Certainly starting your own blog and writing regularly is the first step – it may feel like you’re working hard and getting nowhere but, if approached in the right way, it should be developing your technique and voice. This is alongside, of course, the undervalued skill of producing material regularly and to tight deadlines. People often slip up by waiting for inspiration to strike them, but that is not a luxury that a blogger or a professional writer has. 

The only way to improve is to read regularly and write continuously. You learn by just doing it. Sure some of the first articles might be weak, but so what? The next ones will be better. The worst thing you can do is fuss too much over the initial pieces – you won’t be learning to write to time and you won’t be getting the practice in.  

If you are looking to get writing and want a helpful structure for writing then Labov and Waletzky’s analysis of the links between oral storytelling and newspaper formats is a good start. It was originally based on conversations, but I think it is a helpful guide for writing articles…

The structure they defined was as follows:

1)      Abstract – This provides the “lead” or “hook” for the story. By that I mean, you are not formally summarising everything that happens, instead you are offering up the interesting POV/take on the story. It needs to be concise (don’t go for more than 2-3 sentences) and well-written. Why should your audience read on?

2)      The Orientation – The who, when and where. This sets the scene for what has occurred.

3)      The Complicating Action – This addresses what actually happened that has made this a story in the first place. Quite often the information in 2 and 3 can be merged but, even if they are in one paragraph, they do tend to work in this order.

4)      The Evaluation – This answers the question – so what? Here you are highlighting the importance of the event/occurrence – quite often by using quotes from people who have experienced the events (along with 2 and 3, this will be the longest section of the newspaper article).

5)      The Resolution – How was it resolved? What might be happening in the future?

6)      Coda – A signing off (less likely in written form of news) – but it is often seen in the form of a paragraph that wraps it up neatly, quite often an aside or tangent to the rest of the piece.

If you’re not sure about this, grab a newspaper and try dividing up the section – you’ll see the boundary points, even if they overlap a little at times. You’ll also notice how, for example, you will start to get the evaluation roughly two thirds in, with all the quotes from witnesses and comments from experts. Once you start applying that template, you’ll see how prevalent it is in writing.

Anyway, if you’re having trouble getting started with writing articles there are plenty of ways to approaching them. This isn’t the only way but it is one way and it might be helpful.

My thought is, when faced with a difficult task, to always divide and conquer; breaking it down to a number of small sections to write is easier than sitting down to one big piece. As such, it can be helpful to use the above as sub-heading to structure your writing whilst you’re getting used to it (delete them out before you post!).

Using story arcs to write a novel

Story arcs are the series of little beginnings, middles and ends that, put together, will build your story. Now that’s straight forward enough, and people get taught that in school, but the part that’s important for writing your novel (or even your short story) is how you build and control the development of a series of strands of information.

For example - the main story might be how the character, we will call him Dave, forms a band and finds fame. I know – great story, it practically writes itself...

Anyway, that’s the main story arc. It requires, for the success at the end to be fulfilling, that it seems unlikely at the very beginning and that challenges are met along the way. So this really dictates how you open the story or write the first chapter - you need to establish the contrast with how you want to end the story.

I’m going to stop right here and offer up a link that might be helpful (http://www.writersstore.com/narrative-structure-and-infinite-creative-possibilities/ ). Well explained and some top tips – certainly worth a look!

Getting back to our story of Dave the Musician, because he is clearly a man defined by his role, another story arc within that might be dealing with a difficult relationship with his father (we'll call him Ed the Father). So Dave the Musician is on his way to fame, but along the way he needs to resolve his relationship with his father, Ed the Father. Clichéd, I know, but just to illustrate a point.

Even that doesn’t really feel enough; your readers are greedy (if they’re anything like me) and they want more to work with. Each story arc offers another puzzle and another opportunity for the reader to feel that they own the story for themselves. Done subtly it engages because they’re always working and joining the dots to understand the characters. Not only that, thinking along these lines help you to work out the character’s motivation and you start to understand them on a deeper level.

For example, returning to Dave the Musician here and his Father (Ed the Father), that flippant comment I made about him being defined by his role has suddenly got me thinking… OK, his self-worth is entirely dictated by his status. He is a man who doesn’t operate on a level of individuality – instead, needing to be understood and perceived a certain way. So does that mean that he accumulated possessions, experiences and friends that will reflect on him in a certain way? He is the sum of the parts of his life… so a series of sub-arcs (or sub-plots if you prefer using actual, real phrases) would help to slowly build these elements of his life and allow them to contribute to your story… Suddenly you find your way to an interesting aspect of the character and you can launch off from that (it’s a good way of forcing writing when you have writer’s block, I must admit).

Really, this needs us to look at character mapping, and I'll do that in a different post. However, when you do have your character traits all set, all mapped out, then you can pace and control how you introduce these ideas. For example, Dave the Musician is selfish in his relationship with Sue the Girlfriend (no doubt because he chose her on the basis of what she says about him) - but how do we show that? How do we pace this revelation?

A good exercise is to list what Dave the Musician could do that was so selfish (Cheat, never clean the house, never ask about work, take her to a certain restaurant becuase he like the food (when she didn't), make excuses and disappear when her family come around...) Anyway, when that'd done I would work the list into an order from subtle selfishness to really obviously a so-in-so. This can give us an order of approaching it in the story. Leap in with the obvious stuff too early and the rest of it becomes redundant ("Yeah, I get it: he's not nice. Get on with it!"), slowly build and the reader starts to suspect there might be something wrong before it's signposted and then feels pleased with themselves when they find out the truth. It also means that the earlier events have reinforced the believability of his later actions.

I hope you don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying that every novel should be densely plotted, but they should be densely layered with information. Even if it’s controlling a slow release of information about a character’s perspective, even if it’s controlling tone, then it all needs to feel purposeful for the reader to trust you and continue reading.

I think there's a danger in wallowing too much in one aspect of a character. It doesn't help you to convey their depth and it leaves the reader tuning out or, worse still, putting down the book. It's like someone taking 45mins to tell you that their boss is awful with one anecdote that made the point in the first minute, or someone taking 700 words to talk about managing sub-plots... uh...oh dear. This is kind of awkward.

Beside the River - by Ben Allan Watkins

I've published an e-book collection of my short stories called "Beside the river" so, if you link any of the free samples on this site, why not give it a go? Any feedback would be welcome too...

It forms a series of interrelated stories set in a small fictional town of Ashwater. All connecting, they aim to build a picture of the community by exploring a variety of relationships, whether within families, amongst friends or between partners.

US purchases: http://www.amazon.com/Beside-river-Stories-Ashwater-ebook/dp/B00AUHY4GE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368871383&sr=8-1&keywords=beside+the+river+ben+allan+watkins

UK purchases: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beside-river-Stories-Ashwater-ebook/dp/B00AUHY4GE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368871271&sr=8-1&keywords=beside+the+river+ben+allan+watkins