Basics of story writing

There are some essentials of story writing. From my point of view those are change, loss, love and hate. But what does that mean?

Stories usually start because of a change. Now, life is full of changes, from the everyday ones like night and day to the slow ones like youth to old age. So what does it mean when I write ‘stories usually start because of a change?’

Every story revolves around a ‘hero’ of some sort. It doesn’t have to be a classical hero, the hero can just as well be an everyday person. But this person will start a voyage. It might be a trip from Paris to L.A. or just a mental trip from the well-known beliefs to strange ones. The voyage might take place in a fantasy world, in a historic place, in space or just inside someone’s head. But to make the hero undertake this voyage, a change is needed. The situation must change and ‘force’ him or her to make the first move.

When Luke Skywalker leaves his aunt’s and uncle’s home to follow the droids and find Obi-Wan, the change starts. When he comes back and has to realize that there’s no way to return to his old life (because the farm is destroyed and his relatives are dead), the change is complete and he is forced to move on.

When Harry Potter finds out he is a wizard and will be allowed to study magic instead of going to a local school while his cousin will attend a boarding school, his life changes. He knows what really happened to his parents, he know what they were and what he is. This kind of knowledge can’t be ‘undone’ in some way. It’s there and it forces a change.

There are loads of other changes in novels, in movies or in comic books. Frodo’s life changes when he learns the truth about the Ring. He can’t go back to the life he had before he knew. Jonathan Harker can’t simply ignore the knowledge he’s gained about Dracula, he can’t simple let the count run wild in England.

There’s a saying stating that “You can’t cross the same river twice.” This might sound stupid (and seems not to fit very well with the rest of this post), but it is true. Between the first and the second time you cross a river, the water molecules will have moved, the animals and plants in the river will have grown older. Everything has changed since the last pass, you will never cross the same river twice.

Now on to the next basic ingredient: loss. Loss often comes with the change, in a way the change always means loss – the loss of the established situation. But loss in a story usually goes even further. It’s the loss of home, the loss of loved ones, the threatening loss of life. Loss is motivation. The change forces a movement, but the loss directs the direction.

The loss of his aunt and uncle makes Luke Skywalker follow his first mentor, lets him reach the rebellion and become a member of it.

The loss of friends and the threatening loss of more friends motivates Harry Potter to fight Voldemort instead of simply running and hiding.

You can play this ‘loss’-game with any number of stories, if you want to. It may be a very minor loss, but very, very often there is a loss in the life of a character destined to be a hero. That might also be the reason why most classic heroes are orphaned.

Love and hate, although complete opposites, are in truth two sides of the same coin. Both are strong emotions that drive people to do great things – wonderful or terrible. Love can turn to hate and the other way around, because the emotions are so similar in many ways. But for a story, love and hate bring more motivation.

A hero might do something for love or because of hate. A hero might undertake a voyage of a thousand miles on foot to seen the woman he’s in love with. He might undertake the same voyage to find the person he hates most of all. A person might risk everything, including their own life, to save a loved one – or to destroy a hated one.

This can also be coupled with the loss: the fear to lose the loved one can turn a humble nobody into a hero (or a hero into a villain, see Episode 2 and 3 of “Star Wars” – in essence it is the fear of losing Padmé like he lost his mother that will turn Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader). The hate of the person responsible for the loss can also turn a peaceful village dweller into a terrible warrior.

So, four basics of storytelling are change, loss, love and hate. There are many, many more, but there will be other posts for them.

Effective work

There probably is a rule for perfect and absolutely effective work. I just haven’t found it yet. I’m not writing full time (unless I’m unemployed, but even then looking for a new job is more important than writing). I can’t spent the same amount in front of the keyboard each and every day. And even if I could, I wouldn’t work with the same efficiency every day.

So when I read a book title like “First Draft in 30 Days,” I wonder. I know Robert Louis Stephenson wrote “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in three days (then burned the manuscript, because it spooked his wife, and rewrote it in three more days). I’m sure I could technically write those 80 pages of text in three days as well – provided the ideas keep flowing and I have the time to spare.

But that’s the catch, isn’t it? Do I have the spare time? And if I have it, do the ideas keep flowing?

Maybe I’m just not organized enough, but I don’t really want to write a first draft in 30 days. Well, if I were paid for it, if it were, for instance, for publication in a pulp magazine, I might try to do it like that.

As I’ve written in this blog before, writing is an adventure. Cutting it short with absolute efficiency would be pretty much the same thing as booking a tour instead of trekking through the savannah on your own. You get to the same places, but it’s only an adventure if you’re doing it on your own and with all the risks included.

Maybe one day I will develop the efficiency of writing a first draft in 30 days. Maybe I will like it then. But currently, I’m glad I’m not 100% efficient.

Writing as a hobby

One thing is strange, at least if you’re a hobby writer and live in Germany. (I don’t know whether it’s the same in other countries.) People don’t take your hobby seriously.

If I were writing poems instead of prose (but I don’t have the talent for poems – or maybe I simply don’t like them enough), everybody would be very understanding about me not getting any money for my ‘hobby.’ It’s well understood in Germany that people who write poems don’t get paid for them. There simply isn’t a big market for them.

But I’m writing prose, short stories and novels (well, I’m struggling with my second novel right now, the first one was published in chapters on FictionPress.com), so people don’t think I have any talent for it, because I don’t get paid for them. I do share them with others (eventually), but I haven’t sold any of them up until now.

To me, writing itself is the adventure. It’s a quest I embark upon whenever I sit down in front of my keyboard and start to form words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters out of the 26 little symbols we call letters. It’s not as dangerous as, for instance, finding the Lost Ark. It’s not as rewarding as making your first million dollars (at least, not financially). But it’s an adventure, nevertheless.

Will I ever turn from a hobby writer into a professional writer? I hope so. But even if it never works out, I still do have a great hobby.

On information

Even though writing is about your own ideas, your imagination and your creativity, there’s still something no writer can do without: information.

When I was younger (around eleven or so, when I started writing as a hobby), I thought I could do without it – or with the little bit of information I had gathered through reading stories.

As I grew older, I also grew wiser. Today I know I need to get information about the main topics of a new story. Sometimes that means a long session in front of the computer to search the net for it (praise to the internet for making all that information available to anybody with a computer and a connection!). Sometimes that means long sessions with a load of heavy books. Sometimes it means talking to someone who has the necessary information. Sometimes the information comes from my everyday life (in this blog, in certain areas of life). As I grow older, I also gather experience – and that’s information, too.

While it might not hurt your story not to have any real information at your disposal, there will always be one reader (or two or ten or one hundred) who knows all about the subject. And while this reader might forgive you minor mistakes, major mistakes will make him or her angry. They will not like the story and they will not think high of you any longer.

In addition, it’s quite often crucial to the story and its development to know what you’re writing about. Information means you know what might happen. And that means you can make it happen in a story.

Still, nobody can know everything and that means only going into detail as much as necessary – and gather all information you need for this level of detail.

Information equals power, in society, in politics and in writing.

On discipline

Discipline is something any writer desperately needs. I’m sometimes lacking it – both at the keyboard and in my life. I get easily sidetracked – which isn’t a good thing, most of the time.

At the same time, writing has helped me to gain at least some self-discipline. I have learned how to refocus on something after I’ve gotten sidetracked. That has been a big help in my life already, so don’t try to tell me writing stories without getting published is a useless waste of time.

Discipline is what gets me to the keyboard every evening (with very, very little exceptions) and discipline is what makes me stick on to a story until I’m really, really, really stuck (or absolutely sure it sucks).

When I was younger, I always thought discipline was something that would diminish or even destroy my creativity, now I know it’s not. It helps me to direct the creativity in a way that actually makes my ideas come true.

Discipline is necessary for a writer – but you can have too much of it, too, I guess.

First steps

My first steps into the world of writing were done even before I could write, when I would tell my stories to other people. However, as I was around five then, they weren’t all that good.

I tried to write the first story when I was around seven. I was having a nice summer holiday with my parents and – having learned about writing in the previous, first school year – I thought I was all set. Needless to say, though, I never finished my first story. Somewhere on page three or so the ideas left me. It’s one thing to have ideas for topics by the cartload, it’s a completely different thing to weave them into a story.

Around eleven I got a diary, but I never became a real writer of diaries (until my first blog, that is). I always thought I should only fill it with what happened during my days. After we came back from our vacation that year, my days weren’t that interesting. I mean, what was I supposed to write? I got up, I went to school, I came home, I did my homework, when I’m finished with this, I’ll go to bed? Had I realized then that a diary could (and should) also contain my thoughts, dreams and ideas (and the many things the teenager I was about to become could get quite angry about), I would have been a fabulous diary writer. I might also have spent quite less time grumbling under my breath in the years to come, because I could have written my anger down – as I do today.

Around thirteen I bought myself a simple blank book (with lines, though) and started writing my own stories. They are not very good, from today’s point of view, but they at least had a real finish.

My first computer didn’t come with any games, but it included a word-processing program (“Works,” then). I invested into a needle printer (deafening, whenever I was printing something) and started writing for real. I’ve worked with various word processors by now (and have currently stopped at MS Word) and they can keep up with my thinking – without me having to stop because my hand hurts from all the writing. (Funny thing: I took a typewriting course when I was in fifth grade and failed it with abysmal marks, now I’m writing with ten fingers blind and pretty fast.)

I wrote my first story with more than one hundred pages while I was already studying (started it on a small, blue book and finished it on some leaves taken from my notepad for university, because the book ran out of pages, just as the big showdown between the hero and the villain was coming up).

Sometime later I discovered the internet with loads of stories that were not published the normal way (like the “Black Widower” series). And I discovered that this way I, too, could publish my work. That was when I started also writing stories in English, having read English novels for years.

Blogging has by now provided another way for me to polish my writing and give shape to my thoughts. It’s not the same thing as writing a story – there’s a lot more polishing to do with a story for one thing.

(German keyboards suck, by the way, if you’re trying to write an English text. As the Y is used a lot less than the Z in German, the two letters are switched on the German keyboards. Every time I try to write a word with Y, I’m in danger of hitting the “windows” button instead.)

I’m over the first steps by now, but the first line of every story and the first word every evening when I start working on a story (whether it’s a new one or one of more than 100 pages already) still is a first step for me.

On reading

It’s absolutely true: you can’t be a good writer without being an avid reader.

I’ve always been an avid reader. I used to visit the public library of my hometown with my father even before I was old enough to read. We’d go there on a Saturday (because my father didn’t have to work on Saturdays) and he’d pick up something for himself to read, something to read to me and, sometimes, a picture-book for me as well.

I was very proud when I was seven and got my own library card. And well into my teens I used it very regularly – on every second Saturday, when I didn’t have to go to school, and even more often during holidays. Then my ideas of a good novel started to differ from the ideas of the library and, by the time I started studying literature, I had other libraries to choose from (including my ever-growing personal library).

Nevertheless, I was – and still am – a person who wasn’t as much reading books as wolfing them down. I can read very fast (more than 600 pages a day, provided I have a good book and the time for reading) and am fluent in two languages: German (my native language) and English.

My own personal universe of stories expanded while I grew up. From the average children stories of my time to the first crime stories (I discovered “Sherlock Holmes” around eleven), the first horror stories (“John Sinclair,” a German pulp magazine), Science Fiction (both “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” novels) and fantasy (Robert Asprin’s “Myth” novels). I also always liked to read non-fictional works about ghosts, sharks, crimes and criminals, the supernatural as a such, aliens, society topics and, of course, media of any kind (books, TV-series, movies, whole genres).

I never shied away from getting to know new writers or genres, but I’ve never been one for tragic romance novels or big melodramatic stories.

Usually, when I discover a new writer I like, I try to get a handful of books written by him or her and read them in quick succession. The last writers I did that with were Jeff Lindsay (4 “Dexter” novels) and Cleo Coyle (her “Coffeehouse Mysteries”).

My ability to concentrate grew as well, because I used to read novels during breaks at school – and it takes a whole lot of concentration to read in a room with about thirty classmates. Today I can read almost anywhere and at any time – provided there’s enough light around, of course.