Story Telling For All

Over the Easter weekend I've seen a lot of family, with more family visits to come this weekend. I've heard about new jobs and new hamsters and the prospect of wedding bells next year. Negotiations have already started about Christmas...

I've been struck how much we all tell stories - especially on a rainy Bank Holiday Monday. The stories may not be of earth shattering significance but they are part of the glue that binds us together, those tales of the rabbits eaten by foxes, the hamster that drowned in the loo, the horse that was nearly bought. 'Do you remember the day Dad did this? Do you remember when you went there? When I was young I loved to do that.' Story telling is part of our DNA, both telling them and listening to them.

As writers we can be comforted by this. Readers want our stories, however small. All we have to do is write them with enough truth, enough detail for the reader to visualise the story world and make it their own.

And if you're ever stuck for a story to tell, try sitting in front of the page and start writing the words, 'I remember...'

But It Really Happened - The Perils of Writing Real Life Events as Fiction

At some point in every term I know someone is going to give the feedback that an incident in a story is unbelievable, at which point the writer will say, 'But it really happened.'

The fact that something is true doesn't automatically make it believable. Firstly, truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction. Weird coincidences happen. People behave dramatically out of character. Chance strikes families for good or bad. Life is random.

Secondly, if it really happened - and to someone you know, or even yourself - then the chances are whatever you write will be coloured by your knowledge of the ins and outs of the character details, the location the event takes place in, the effects and repercussions that are relevant to the story today. You will probably write something that is utterly clear to you, but lacking in the information that will make it live for a complete stranger.

We need concrete detail. It's not enough to say Uncle Bob's house, because that means nothing. We need inter-war semi, chocolate box cottage, country mansion. We need to know if it's crumbling or in perfect order. What is it made of - brick? stone? What are the windows like? Do they let in much light, or are they small and dirty? We need all the information that we might use if you were making Uncle Bob's house up.

We also need meaning. Yesterday I was talking with my mother about Call the Midwife. I knew that my mother had trained as a midwife in Edinburgh after the war and wondered what her take on the programme was. It turned out she hadn't bothered to watch, so that was a bit of research lost, but she told me a story about going to a home delivery and, on her way back to the hospital, leaving the placenta on the bus, and having to collect it from Lost Property. Great story - to me, because it's my mother, because I've heard it before, because it's family history.

It's a lousy story, actually, because nothing happens. She just collected the placenta from a mildly startled Lost Property man and took it back to the hospital. There's lots of meaning for me, but none for you. If you were to fictionalise it, you'd have to find a meaning somewhere - perhaps she learns to be more confident, perhaps she learns the dire consequences of being forgetful, perhaps she falls in love with the Lost Property man, perhaps she's mistaken for a mad axe murderer, perhaps she's blackmailed by Satanists looking for suitable material.

Which leads to the next problem - inhibitions. You may be reluctant to embroider a story that features a real family incident starring a real member of your family. You may not want to tread on toes. You may feel that it's cheating, somehow, to alter the facts. And above all, you may not realise that what's a great story to you (because it really happened to you or someone you know) might not be a great story to me (because I have no connection with it).

So tread carefully round the truth. It's almost certainly unbelievable, but not necessarily in a good way.

Anticipation is Crucial for Story Telling

At the weekend I saw two films, War Horse and Iron Lady.  War Horse I had neither read the book nor seen the stage play.  Iron Lady I knew the story well, as it was the story of my own life as I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s.  So, which was the story that had me gripped, the one where I knew the plot or the one I didn't?

Iron Lady was the answer.  War Horse was so filled with cliche that you knew what was going to happen at every turn, and your anticipation was never wrong.  Will the horse and his boy ever meet again?  Well, what do you think?  I don't want to give the plot away, but every plot question was answered in exactly the way you expected.

Iron Lady, on the other hand, had the clever device of switching between Margaret Thatcher in the present (elderly, with the onset of dementia) with her incredible history.  You may have known the history, but you didn't know the present, nor when there were going to be parallels between the past and the present, nor when the switch was going to happen. 

When we read, we often anticipate the ending - the guy gets the girl, the murderer is uncovered, the jewels are found and restored to the rightful owner.  Anticipating the ending doesn't matter; in fact, we'll be disappointed if we don't get the answer we expect.  What we enjoy is not going the route we were expecting, but still ending up in the right place.  That's the trick of story telling: giving us what we expect but not in the way we expected it. 

Keeping the Story on the Right Track

I met a pilot recently, and he told me that planes don't travel in straight lines. You may think the journey from, say, London to Paris is a direct one, but actually it isn't. The pilot sets the course and they start, but soon the plane is wandering from the true course and the direction has to be corrected. Then it wanders again, and again is corrected. We may think we've travelled in a straight line, but in reality we've zigzagged across the Channel like this:

London /\/\/\/\/\/\ Paris

I thought it was a good metaphor for writing: A series of adjustments and corrections on the way to a finished piece of work.

It does of course help if you know where your final destination is. For a short story I would say it is essential because there isn't the space to make long deviations from the direct line, but a novel can be written without knowing the exact final destination, so long as you know roughly where you're heading.

So, as a writer/pilot, your job is to keep an eye on the final destination as you write, always nudging the story back towards it but being quite relaxed about not actually travelling in a straight line. Sometimes the adjustments and corrections are huge (I speak as one in mourning for 20,000 words just cut), but so long as we get there in the end, who will ever know? Only the pilot.

Arbitrary Stories

All stories are what you, the writer, make of them. If you give the bare bones of a story to different writers, they will choose different elements to add, different voices to work with, different styles, different tones, different settings, different everything! The same story can be compelling or dull, depending on how you tell it.

With an arbitrary short story, you get supplied with the bare bones of a plot to which you then add the details. I love doing this in large groups and seeing all the variations that emerge from the different imaginations. Here's one we did in class last week...

Read 1, and write a paragraph. Then read 2, and write another paragraph following that direction, then 3 and so on.

1. Someone is on their way somewhere.

2. A form of transport goes by - they get on.

3. They see someone - describe this person.

4. They find something in their pocket.

5. It makes them remember something.

6. They reach their destination.

7. They change their mind about what to do next.

All story telling is about going from A to B to C to D, what matters is how we write the journey.

Object Impossible

I settled down to watch Mission Impossible III with my son the other day, thinking it would be a nice bonding sort of thing to do. OK, so I haven't watched MI I or II but I hoped it wouldn't be too hard to keep up. I needn't have worried because There Is No Plot.

Somebody has taken an object called The Rabbit's Foot. It's never established what it is, why anyone wants it, who the baddies are or what they're going to do with it should they get their filthy mitts on it, but hey that didn't bother the film makers. Instead there's an awful lot of running around waving guns, gadgets, explosions, people looking at computer screens with narrowed eyes, fast cars and slinky women in dresses with no backs, but - Oops, they forgot the plot.

Well, actually they didn't. At the very end, someone says cheerfully, oh yes, what is it we were trying to do? and some one else equally cheerfully says, it doesn't matter and they all go off and live happily ever after. So the film makers knew all along there wasn't a plot and didn't care, even pointing it out in a post-modern ironic sort of way. Something similar happened in the most recent James Bond film: lots of big bangs, oil tankers going whoosh, Daniel Craig without a shirt, the usual - but there wasn't a story.

Stories are not collections of random events, they are linked and have meaning for the characters. Cinderella searches for love, and finds it. King Arthur learns that even the best can be betrayed by those closest to them. The third little pig learns that persistence and diligence pay off, and the first and second little pigs learn not to laugh at others. The Big Bad Wolf doesn't learn, and gets roasted down the chimney as a result.

When writing always go back to two questions - what does my character learn from these events, and how have things changed for them? That's your story.

10 Ways to Make Your Work Exceptional

1. Page one needs to have something extra, something that will make the reader want to read on. It could be a plot hook or an intriguing premise, an appealing setting or fabulous writing. Whatever it is, make sure it's there.

2. And you need the same on page 2, 3, 4, 5....I see a fair amount of student work that is perfectly fine, just doesn't have that extra pzazz. Look for opportunities where you could add it. It may sound OTT but I go through my mss with a highlighter pen marking bits (phrases, metaphors, nifty dialogue, cunning transitions, description etc) I think add something extra. My minimum is 5 per page.

3. I also see a lot of student work that lacks edge or tension. Don't let things come easily to your characters, make them work for it. And don't let things come easily to the readers either. Only give readers information at the very last moment they need it. Keep 'em guessing, keep 'em waiting.

4. Characters without flaws are dull. Characters who complain are tedious. Characters who are nice are zzzzzzz.

5. All stories have been done before, it's how you write them that counts. Above all, keep them moving forwards, don't let them sag especially round the middle.

6. Pace. It's the contrast that makes it interesting. All fast pace is as dull as motorway driving especially compared with driving at 30mph on a housing estate with lots of free range children. Go fast, go slow, go fast again. Don't let the reader ever feel secure with your pacing.

7. You're probably bored with this one, but make sure your work is 100% mistake free. Check all spellings, grammar, sentence structure esp if you've done a lot of editing.

8. Also boring but essential, make sure the presentation is perfect.

9. Story, story, story. Beautiful writing is lovely to read, but without story telling it gets dull very quickly. What's going to happen next? How is this going to be resolved?

10. Confidence. This is a hard one to define, but it's the quality that makes you utterly believe that the author is in charge and knows exactly what's happening, how it's going to turn out. As a reader you happily let go and hand it over to the story teller to take you on a magical experience. I think confidence comes from re-writing and re-writing. If you don't believe, how can you expect anyone else to?