The following is my response to today’s Daily Writing Prompt: “A bobblehead collector is talked out of suicide by a member of his collection.” Saul burst into his home office and slammed the door so hard that all of the bobbleheads, occupying the nine shelves of the three bookcases lining the wall opposite of his desk, began wagging their heads. Although he was no longer crying, his labored...
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. Conflicts drive a narrative forward; they are the challenges...
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. This is a work in progress and I will continue to add, remove, and rearrange items as time goes on. You are free to use this character chart in your own storytelling process. Please leave comments below or on...
The following is my response to a writing prompt from the book 642 Things to Write About: “Describe something you wanted badly and, once you got it, never used.” I’m not promoting this book at all. I got it for Christmas from my wife, so I figured I would put it to some use. I hope you enjoy! When I was fifteen years old, all I wanted was a smartphone. I had these grand ideas...
The following is a story sketch I wrote up in response to a writing prompt I got out of the book 642 Things to Write About. I wrote the whole first draft in two hours and spent only enough time editing and cleaning up to make it readable. I don’t want to present these sketches as finished pieces, but as they are: rough sketches done for practice. I hope you enjoy the sketch. If you like...
Yesterday, after taking a break from Christmas shopping for my wife, I stopped to grab a bite at a Mexican food restaurant. After, I wrote down the following story because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This isn’t a story sketch so much as a recording of this event so I can reference it for future stories. I do this whenever something happens to me that sticks in my head...
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. Themes to write on: The role of the teacher Tolerance as an intellectual covering for intolerance Division as conflict: as long as there is a division between observer and observed, there is division...
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. This character web, or...
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. Like songs, stories are easier to recognize than to define...
The following is an observation I jotted down in my Evernote after witnessing an intriguing family at the grocery store. This entry is direct from my personal journal.
