|
Fiction and Screenwriting Neil Workshops Story Ingredients Just one. There can be other people in the story, but the story needs to focus on one person in particular. Not getting this right is the first place people go wrong. It doesn't mean you can't have more than one person in your story, or even two people of almost equal importance. But making one of them your main character, will help you tell the story. Trust me. A problem That person, your central character, needs to have a problem to deal with. The problem needs to be something that can't easily be fixed, because once it's solved the story is over. It needs to be the kind of problem that looks really tough, but your central character - perhaps with the aid of other people - can solve it if they really try. And try. And try. Your character's efforts to solve the problem are what creates the story. In fact, your character's attempts to solve the problem and their final success in doing so, is the story. And if it looks like they're going to solve things too easily, one little trick you can use is... Set-backs Just when it looked like everything was working out OK, the wild tiger was back in its cage, the lost girl had found her way home, the vital missing clue to the dastardly crime had been unearthed, etc... a new set-back emerges to force our hero/heroine to struggle again and to wrack their brains for a new solution. When you're writing a story, you the author have to judge when it's the right time for your central character to get to the finishing line. And if you think they're getting there too quickly or too easily, dream up something else to set them back. Why? Because what ultimately makes the ending satisfying is the amount of effort it takes your central character to get there. If they get there too quickly and easily, it's a disappointment. That's what makes it a STORY as opposed to some boring old anecdote about how you went to the shop, where you spent the weekend, or what you ate for breakfast. Good endings If you read a book, what's the last bit you read? The ending, of course. Unless you're very weird and you read books backwards. If the ending is good, you will remember it. If it's bad you might also remember it briefly - just long enough to vow to yourself never to read another book by that author. If the ending is good, you'll probably remember the title of the story too and tell all your friends they should read it. You might even remember the name of the author, and want to read more by them. Good endings are REALLY important. Start at the end Don't just start writing and hope you'll come up with something satisfying when you reach the last page. You need to think hard, early on, about what would be a good ending. Once you know what your story is about and how you want it to begin, think about how it could end. What would be a really good ending? There's probably more than one possibility. If you can think of several, consider them each on their merits and choose the strongest. Once you've got an idea about that, think about what you would have to put your central character through to make that ending happen. And what would you need to do to make the impact of that ending as powerful as possible? The impact of stories and their endings is maximised by... What's at stake? If your heroine has fought off a deadly gang single-handed, then climbed the exterior of a precipitous skyscraper, just to retrieve a balloon that happened to be blowing down the street, we probably think that's a lot of effort to go to, for something so trivial. And we don't really care whether she reaches the balloon or not. But if the balloon belonged to her best friend who happens to be very ill in hospital, on a life-support machine and, before it was accidentally released by a nurse opening the window, the balloon, given to the ailing girl by her grandmother, had become a symbol, a talisman she associates with her hopes of recovery... then the efforts of our heroine start to mean something much more. And we care about whether she succeeds. Anything else? What keeps us reading? My best advice to you as a writer is - when you are reading a book you're enjoying so much you can't put it down, ask yourself what it is that's making you love that book so much. Maybe the central character is unlike any character you've ever encountered before. Or maybe you recognise something of yourself in them. Perhaps it's the surprising twists and turns the story keeps taking. Or it might be the compelling hooks at the end of each chapter that make it totally impossible for you not to turn the page and see what happens next. Make yourself think about it. And, whatever it is, once you've worked out what's making you keep reading, see if you can work out how to do that same thing with your own story. If you can, chances are, it'll make others want to read your stuff too. |
|
homepage
|