Category: On Writing
What is Conflict?
In a previous investigation I talked about what a story is and I defined thirteen potentially essential elements of a story; that is, thirteen things that every story must have. But there was something missing, a driving force that may not exist in the most mundane story, but should be present in any good story. That force is conflict.
January 3, 2016
Character Development Web — Part II
I’ve been toying around with my character development web, or character chart, a sort of visual character sheet to help me quickly identify the key attributes of a fictional character.
December 31, 2015
Themes to Write On
I like to write down themes in my writing journal so I can refer to them later when working on a new story. The following are some themes I wrote down yesterday along with a brief note on thought.
December 22, 2015
Character Development Web
I will be going into whether Character is an essential element of story or not in a followup entry on “What Is a Story?” but for now, since I know for sure that all of the stories I will be writing will contain characters, I have started working on a “character web” which allows me to determine the basic attributes of any character I write about.
December 20, 2015
What Is a Story?
When trying to define something, one is categorizing it, taking a set of elements which are present in one or more things and grouping them with a label. So in order to define what a story is, I must uncover the set of elements which are present in all stories, from the daily stories we tell ourselves and others to professional stories.
December 18, 2015
What Is a Sentence?
Today I would like to build on my investigation into what a word is by trying to answer another deceptively simple question: What is a sentence?
December 15, 2015
What Is a Word?
Today I want to investigate a deceptively simple question: What is a word?
December 11, 2015
Behind the Story: Evening at the Bus Stop
Yesterday I posted a story sketch “Evening at the Bus Stop” about an old man and a distressed woman having a conversation in which both are unable to really listen to each other. Today I want to go over some of steps that I took to complete that sketch.
December 10, 2015
Why Do We Tell Stories? – Part 2
Yesterday I spent some time on the question of why we tell stories. I started by going over the functions of story outlined by professor Harvey. Today I wanted to break from her list and start listing some functions of story that I observe, note any overlaps, and examine these functions more closely. I would also like to try and identify which functions of story are most important for socially impactful creative writing, since this is what I am most interested in.
December 8, 2015
Why Do We Tell Stories?
“Let’s start at the very beginning / A very good place to start”
—Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music
December 7, 2015