Valley Byliners

A writer’s support group in the Rio Grande Valley...

Your lifetime contains a wealth of experiences from which you can draw on to write a story. You may say, but my life just goes on and on, day by day, seemingly with no end in sight. Where’s the story in that? You would be correct. Good stories don’t drone on and on. They need some kind of catalyst to create a beginning, middle, and an end. The catalysts can be individual or combinations of experience, but they all contain the same ingredients: Conflict, Character, Plot, and Scene. There are other components to a story such as Theme, Point of View, Dialog, Motivation, Climax, Ending and Revision. Numerous books are available that deal with each of these subjects in a surprising depth. With our limited time, we will deal, briefly, with Conflict, Character, Plot, Scene and Research.

 

 CONFLICT:  In fiction, stories without conflict are usually quite dull. Without problems, troubles, opposition, there is no suspense; without a sense of what will happen next, a reader won’t keep reading. Once you have created a main character that’s interesting and appealing, the reader will care for what happens to this person. Therefore, conflict is the struggle of your leading character against opposition. That could be a person’s struggle against nature, or against him/herself, or against another person.

 

Let’s assume your Mom forbade your teen-age Self to date a certain person. You disobeyed and snuck out of the house, figuring your Mom would never find out. But, she does. What happens to you next? Two good examples of tortured young love are Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. When the lovebird’s disobedience is discovered, all hell breaks loose.

 

Take it further. Your lead character is in deep trouble. (Do you remember a personal deep trouble situation?) Each effort to get out of the troubling situation only mires your character deeper and deeper. Each new obstacle gets bigger and bigger. When things look bleakest, and your character is a goner, somehow, with intelligence and ingenuity, your character manages to get out of trouble through his/her own efforts. (How did you manage to get out of your troubling situation?)

 

CHARACTER:  Character and conflict are intertwined. Without a character, you have nothing to write about. Without a conflict, the story will be quite dull. Stories are usually about people, or if you are a sci-fi or fantasy fan, your characters could be machines, fairies or monsters. Regardless, you need to make your character do something. What should the character do? That depends on what kind of situation you placed your character in. Is he strapped to a rocket sled? Is she submerged in a baptismal pool? Is he or she in the situation against their wish? Probably, yes. The next question is why.

 

Does your character owe money? A gambling debt? Did your character witness a murder and what must the character do to avoid paying the ultimate penalty? What would you do if you were in your character’s shoes? Here is where you draw on your lifetime experience, either an actuality or a vicarious one, such as what is learned from a book or motion picture. For instance, most of us can’t go to Paris and drive a get-a-way car on the Champs-Elysees. Your character can, because from stories and motion pictures, we get a pretty good idea of what the traffic is really like.

 

Characters need to relate and respond to other characters. While it is possible to write a story with mainly one character (Tom Hanks in “Castaway”), most stories have at least two –a protagonist and an antagonist, simply said, a good guy and a bad guy. Here again is the “opposition” needed for conflict.

 

PLOT:  Plot is simply what happened first and then what happened next. Knowing that a villain will pay for his misdeeds and the hero/heroine will be rewarded for their perseverance and forbearance is not the reason that people read stories. It is how the characters arrive at their various fates that compel our attention…it is the series of startling incidents in the various chapters that entertains and amazes, all the twists and turns, and emotional sensations. That is why one reads a novel…not to discover how it ends, but to enjoy the strange and exotic scenery along the way. (Amanda Quick in “Wait Until Midnight.”)

 

The creation of a

plot from lifetime experiences may seem more difficult than any other aspect of writing a story. How many “startling incidents” or “twists of fate” do we actually experience? Unless you are a CIA agent, probably not too many. Another definition of plot may help provide an answer. According to Lee Wyndham, author of “Writing for Children and Teenagers,”… plot is a plan of action devised to achieve a definite and much desired end – through cause and effect. In a plotted story, “cause” sets your main character to take certain action to solve a problem, get out of a situation, or reach a certain goal. The “effect” is what happens to this person as a result of the action taken.

 

The prime test of a story is its “explosion”: something that explodes and changes the status quo. The lives of the characters are jolted from their everyday rhythm and chaos is produced. Then you, the writer, must create or suggest a new order from the old.

 

Plot and character are hard to separate because a character needs action for a story to take place. Wyndham says further, Character plus meaningful, directed action toward a previously planned desired end…is the meaning and purpose of plot. The desired end is what the character wants.

 

Note the word “planned.” Many writers know already how the story will end. The trick is planning a route to get there. Some like to plan every step of the way; others just let the whim of the moment determine the course of the story – but always with a definite goal or end in mind. So what does your character want? A diamond ring, which she cannot afford? A lost gold mine in the Sierra Madre? A lady-love bewitched by a 500 year old family curse? A means to an end? A way to go home? You, the writer, must decide, and this is where you can have fun with your story. When Dorothy and Toto travel the Yellow Brick Road you can throw in any variety of obstacles or situations that they must overcome before reaching the “Wizard of Oz” in Emerald City. You can reprise obstacles based on your experience, or make them up out of thin air. It’s your story. Make your characters do their utmost to overcome.

 

 SCENE, sometimes equated with SETTING: Your story must have a sense of place in which your character is. For instance, James Fennimore Cooper wrote vivid descriptions of verdant forests, tall trees and wild Indians in his “Leather Stocking Tales” about Hawkeye and Chingachgook. They were best sellers at the time because most of our thirteen colony ancestors did not know what our new country was like beyond the western frontier – not the West of today’s cowboy era but the West beyond New York or Philadelphia or Colonial Williamsburg.

 

Contemporary stories don’t have their characters spending a lot of time in long evolved descriptive scenes, such as wandering through the village he lives in, or reminiscing about what she had for breakfast. The scenes are more likely to be sensual and are part of the plot. For instance, your character, wearing shorts and sandals with no socks, could be in a citrus orchard about to fill a bucket with fruit. Instead, she steps on a grapefruit that fell from a tree. The scene would include the sound of squish, the smell of rotten grapefruit and what a spurt of spoiled juice feels like trickling down a leg. If your companion also stepped on a rotten grapefruit, you might get an unpleasant squirt in the eye. Do you remember the sense of “Yuk!” when you stepped on a rotten fruit? Now substitute the fruit with – say, doggy-do…better yet, a decomposing body. (Something that happens often in this area.) Now, you have the “explosion” that changes the status quo. You have just created the problem as you introduce the first indications of your story.

 

Another aspect of “plot” is movement from one scene to another, and movement within each scene. Just as a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, a scene requires the same three elements - a beginning, a middle, and an end. Otherwise , your scene ends up as a static still life. Scriptwriters create story boards that visualize the character’s action in a scene. Writers create essentially the same thing by using index cards or blocks of paragraphs to summarize a scene. Either way, the boards or paragraphs are the building blocks that tie together the scenes in a running story.

 

Scenes are flexible. You don’t have to start at a beginning – you can start at the middle, where the real action is, and then go back to the beginning to round out the scene. For instance, many CSI TV shows begin in the middle of a situation for dramatic impact, then flash back to an earlier time so the viewer can make sense of what happened. This dramatic aspect is known as the “hook,” and is used to hook you into the story. For instance, going back to the body in the orchard, your scene might begin in the middle of the action as your character steps on the victim’s arm. After the first Yuk the reaction would be to call 911. A host of investigators would arrive, frustrate your attempts to pick any fruit, and during an interview, your character would probably relate a back story, or the actual beginning of the scene, to explain why you were in the orchard in the first place.

 

RESEARCH: If your story occurs in a medieval village that’s just been gutted by a Mongol warlord, you must create a historical setting the reader will accept as accurate. Such a setting would include, clothing, food, speech, transportation and a host of other aspects specific for the time period. At the same time, Eric Von Daniken cautions you, the writer, in his three basic premises for all research, that no matter what fascinating material the research reveals, the human element, problems, conflicts must be your first and foremost concern in your story. Your research should make itself part of the plot, and must not at any point jerk the reader out of the story and make him realize that he is being, not entertained, but taught. [His three premises include 1) freedom of thought. 2) A gift for observation 3) and a sense of connections. (Consider the amount of research needed to write his Chariot of the Gods series.)]

 

CONCLUSION: To sum up, there are three basic elements to a story and numerous sub-elements. Plot, character and conflict are the basic three. Each is difficult to describe as a separate entity because all three are entwined with one another. Only two sub-elements are presented here – Scene and Research. I consider them sub-elements but in reality they are entwined with the three basics. Soon, you will discover yourself asking, is this aspect essential to the plot? How does it keep the story moving? What would I do in this situation? Did something like this ever happen to me or any of my friends?

 

Such is the nature of writing fiction. Have fun with it.

Each of us is unique. From the time we are born, our experiences through life mold us and define who we are, what we think, what we like or don’t like, and how we relate to the influences that surround us. Many times an experience is shared but our perception of the experience remains unique. A good example is witnessing an auto accident. Each witness sees the accident from his or her viewpoint. Any police officer will tell you that when all the witness statements are processed – say, ten in number – you end up with ten different versions of what happened.

USING PERSONAL EXPERIENCES IN WRITING YOUR STORY