How to?

[SamScribble]

A friend of mine believes that she can teach anyone to write a pretty good short story. This is slightly at odds with the late Kurt Vonnegut who said: ‘You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something that God lets you do or declines to let you do.’ As far as Mr Vonnegut was concerned, courses that purport to teach people how to write well are ‘harmless’. But they are also ‘shmoos’.

I should also add that, as far as I know, my friend has never actually written a decent short story. She just teaches others how to do it.

So far, my friend’s instruction has been delivered ‘in person’ to small groups of (mainly) middle-aged women over coffee and cake. But now she has decided to ‘go online’. And she recently recruited me as a guinea pig student.

Her method is nothing if not thorough. A two or three thousand-word story requires at least five thousand words of ‘notes’. Before you can start the story, you need a detailed premise, a story arc, a detailed plot, character profiles, dramatic points, and a few other things. I’m afraid that I couldn’t be bothered with any of that. Perhaps as a consequence, my friend declared my story 'a fail'.

There’s a story (it may be apocryphal) that JRR Tolkien sat down at his desk one afternoon and wrote ‘In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.’ At that moment, that was as much as he had. No detailed premise. No story arc. No plot. No character notes. Just a hole in the ground and a hobbit.

I used the Tolkien approach for my failed story. All going to plan, you should be able to read it – along with several of my other stories – on a portion of dead tree later this year.

What’s your experience of ‘how to’?

 

[SimonDoom]

What’s your experience of ‘how to’?

It starts, nearly always, with an idea popping into my head about a person, or two persons, confronted with an unusual situation (erotic situation, since my only experience is writing stories for this site).

From there, I mull over the idea to figure out if I think it will make a story. The idea has to be interesting, and sufficiently erotic, to me. The characters have to be interesting enough. There has to be some sort of dramatic conflict, and usually some sort of boundary that's being pushed.

If it passes that test, then I outline the plot, partly in my mind and then on paper. I usually, but not always, outline my stories, at least mentally. I do not just start writing and go from there, heedless of the end. I never do that.


I wouldn't go as far as Vonnegut does. Talent counts in writing, but so does practice. I suppose there are people so hopeless at it that they can never learn to write a good story, whatever lessons they take and however much they write. There are people so talented they pick it up with little practice or learning. And then there are people with some talent, whose talents require lots of practice to yield a good story. Writing is like a lot of things, that way.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Her method is nothing if not thorough. A two or three thousand-word story requires at least five thousand words of ‘notes’. Before you can start the story, you need a detailed premise, a story arc, a detailed plot, character profiles, dramatic points, and a few other things. I’m afraid that I couldn’t be bothered with any of that. Perhaps as a consequence, my friend declared my story 'a fail'.

Fell off my chair laughing. She's a complete fail as a teacher for me, then. I do none of that, absolute zero, and for me, that's complete bollocks.

Yet I can write a story where someone says this:

This incredible story has some of the most beautiful prose I've read in a long time; very lyrical and almost musical. There is very little dialog in much of it, which normally renders a story stagnant for me, but not in this case. It just isn't needed.

(Thanks to Carnevil9 for the mini review.)

BTW - Carnevil has offered to do snap-shot reviews - see this Feedback thread:

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1468857

 

[NotWise]

What’s your experience of ‘how to’?

I make a few plot notes and keep the characters in my head. I write in the same document with the notes and delete notes as I cover them. I'm usually at the end of the story when the notes are gone, but sometimes I'm not.

So maybe I don't write good neither.

 

[oggbashan]

My stories fester in my head for weeks, months, years before I type a single word.

When I start I know how they'll end. Beyond that? I write and the story develops as I write - or not. For every published story I have three or more part written ones even if I do know how each one will end.

I've attended several Creative Writing courses. They have taught me some techniques but none of them helped with creating a story.

 

[KindofHere]

................

 

[Wkd_Macey]

What’s your experience of ‘how to’?

I have to agree with electricblue66 (although possibly not quite so emphatically).

I tend to have a general idea of what I want to write about, usually inspired by a situation that has occurred in real life, but I don't usually 'plan it out'. I more often just start writing - getting the ideas on paper (well - my phone or laptop) as quickly as I can. I also leap around forwards and backwards, filling in gaps and fleshing out ideas as they occur to me.

Like electricblue, I too have had a few glowing reviews of my work (and a few critical ones too), but as I've been told by my tutors (I'm 18 and a half and at Uni.) you will never please everyone.

I agree too, that good writing skills (composition and use of language and vocabulary) comes with experience. Despite my relatively tender years, I've been writing fiction for a bit over six years now, and I'll be the first to admit that my earliest efforts were pretty dire by almost any standard.

One thing I've been taught quite recently though, is...
Try not to repeat yourself (with phrases or vocabulary). It tires the reader very quickly. If you see this happening in your work, look at the two (or three or more) instances, decide which one fits which instance best, and leave it there. Then look at the other(s) and replace the word or phrase.

I use an App on my phone called Dictionary.com, which is a Dictionary (obviously) combined with the best thesaurus I have ever come across. I use this on a daily basis (several times a day), to find a more suitable alternative than the word that initially comes to mind. I also use a Reverse Dictionary (online) called One Look (www.onelook.com) when I know what I want to describe, but I can't think of the word that fits.
Both of these tools really help

E.G. I used the thesaurus to find the word 'emphatically' above, when all I could think of at the time was 'firmly'.

I seem to remember there was another thread I saw a couple of months ago, asking almost this same question. Maybe electricblue could remember it (I feel sure he posted there too ) One tip I picked up from that thread was, when your work is finished, leave it for a couple of days before proof-reading it in full. It's time consuming, but it's surprising how many errors come to light. Also, run it through a good Spell Checker (I use Word), and one of the subscribers to the earlier thread recommended a free Grammar Checker called Grammarly.

Hope this helps

 

[sunandshadow]

There’s a story (it may be apocryphal) that JRR Tolkien sat down at his desk one afternoon and wrote ‘In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.’ At that moment, that was as much as he had. No detailed premise. No story arc. No plot. No character notes. Just a hole in the ground and a hobbit.

That is in fact false. Tolkien was a professor, who was already in the habit of writing out lecture notes, and his hobby was researching European mythology, and for this hobby he regularly took notes. The Silmarillion, in fact, is a whole volume of his worldbuilding groundwork for The Lord of the Rings.

Personally I'm laughing at you, because you must have been the worst possible guinea pig for this class if you couldn't be arsed to give it an honest attempt. I guess that's funny as revenge on your friend for pressuring you into it, but it really doesn't put you into a legit position to evaluate your friend's method.

 

[Wkd_Macey]

Personally I'm laughing at you...

Awww... That's not kind
The guy is looking for inspiration.

I say, do it whichever way works best for you

 

[ElectricBlue]

Personally I'm laughing at you, because you must have been the worst possible guinea pig for this class if you couldn't be arsed to give it an honest attempt. I guess that's funny as revenge on your friend for pressuring you into it, but it really doesn't put you into a legit position to evaluate your friend's method.

Proof is in the pudding. Sam writes concise, elegant stories, beautifully observed, wise.

I should also add that, as far as I know, my friend has never actually written a decent short story. She just teaches others how to do it.

This is just a replay of the old George Bernard Shore line (was it him?):

He who can, does.
He who cannot, teaches.
He who cannot teach, teaches teachers.

I see it all the time in my professional life - academics in fields such as project management, systems engineering, business management:

"Could you tell me the last time you ran a big project in real life? How big was it, again?"

"Oh, twenty-five years ago. But I'm current on the literature."

"Mate, you'd be celibate in a brothel, starve in a restaurant. And you're "training" the next generation how, exactly?"

 

[PuckIt]

I blame it all on my Algebra teacher.

She and my Dad were friends since he also worked at the school. And the unspoken cultural thing in that time and place was that when a co-worker had a child, you gave them a gift. Her husband (our mail carrier) brought mine by and it was my first book. Or chew toy. Whichever.

Now maybe that might not have had quite so big an impact if I hadn't been a sickly little thing as I grew, allergic to everything but myself. (And the jury is still out on that!) But, I wasn't allowed outside any day the wind blew. And, living in West-by-God-Texas, I think there might have been five days it didn't the year I turned six. And even the coolest toys available tend to pale when you are playing with them alone.

So, I took refuge in my growing collection of books. The year I was nine, I took part in a read-a-thon for... er... Cystic Fibrosis? No, pretty sure that was the bike-a-thon. Muscular Dystrophy maybe? Well, one of those diseases schools had the kids do something about where they had to run around get people to pledge so much money for each whatever done. In that case, books read.

I decimated 48 books during that month. And not the "kiddie" books my classmates were managing either, but full blown paperbacks around 300pages or so for most of them documented in MLA style with blurbs that could not be cribbed from the jacket. (Two decades later Mom remarried to a guy that had been a neighbor back then and he gave me no end of grief until the day he died about how he had picked the one damn kid to sponsor who actually read. And ever after when he saw me walking up his sidewalk, with some form in my hand, he pretended he wasn't home.)

And I thought it might be pretty cool to make up a story for other people to read and write it down.

When I was ten, my fifth grade teacher made my dream come true. She assigned us to write a story for class. Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! So, I spent that first hour carefully crafting a tale I'd had in mind about a spaceship that came down and threatened my school and I stepped up to be the hero!

The very next day, that same teacher had us hand our stories to the person in front of us (with the people on the front row getting up to take their to the back, obviously) and continue the story the other person had started.

Just my damn luck Rowdy, the guy who sat behind me, had just the year before been diagnosed as dyslexic and was only then getting help. After about thirty minutes trying to puzzle out just what the hell was going on, I spent the remaining time feverishly scribbling what seemed to make sense to add to the two paragraphs of gibberish he had started.

Day after day, we did that until everybody in our row had had everybody else's in that row. But, teacher didn't stop there. She took them all up and passed them out to the row to our left. Oh, my God! There were some of my classmates who couldn't write a five letter word without getting one of the letters wrong. It was his name!

And I swear they didn't give a crap what up to five people before them had wrote, but just tacked on some stuff that just didn't even make sense, but might have in their original story.

Finally, she graded our efforts and handed them back. And those assholes had pissed, shit, and puked all over my original story!

Needless to say, I did not try to write again for several years unless it was required essays in class. I did, however, continue to devour books of all flavors rapaciously despite growing out of my childhood ailments and becoming a poster child for extra curricular activities.

Eventually, however, I began to think again that it might be kind of cool to make money by writing stories down and selling them. Hey, it couldn't be any worse than the rest of the options they were touting and sounded a whole lot more fun than the dead end job I'd washed up in to try to be a "contributing adult member of society."

I subscribed to magazines such as "Writer" and "Writer's Digest." I bought books with titles like "How to Write Horribly for Fun and Profit." Hell, I took classes in Creative Writing at the local University. And I could not, really just couldn't, even hazard a guess at just how many "Literature" classes I took studying what other well known (and some lesser known) writers throughout history had done.

And could not sell a fucking thing I'd written myself! (Well, technically six poems with one before I even graduated high school. But, they considered a free copy of the one page mailout they "published" it in as "payment.")

I tied on my red bandana and fought against the man trying to keep me down. (Or the machine. I never was clear which.) But, eventually gave it up as a lost cause, burned all my manuscripts (and my two foot long ponytail), and set about the daily grind of making a buck and enjoying my family. (And, of course, kept reading.)

Eventually, I discovered Literotica.com and decided to act out on my writing impulses again. I submitted some stuff and even managed to get some accepted. And came face to face with the fact that some people just don't like my stuff.

And all right. I freely admit that I have some issues with grammar and will occasionally misspell a word that won't be caught by most versions of Spellcheck since the misspelled word is a word in it's own right. But, other than that, I've got a pretty solid lock on the technical aspects. I thought anyway. Hell, I'd done everything the manual said to do! (Except find an editor after my one attempt went sideways four times.)

What I had forgotten to bring, what none of the manuals for neophytes or classes on writing could teach me how to bring, was the "give a shit."

I like to think I may have gotten a little better at that over the years while struggling to maintain some semblance of proficiency at the technical aspects. But, I may be flattering myself when all I've really done is unbuckle my belt and let my ponderous verbiage roll over anyone daring to try to read so that only the most hardcore can fight their way through to the end.

Any road...

TL;DR - I think there's two aspects to writing; technical and artistic. I think the technical aspects can be taught/learned but the artistic aspects can only be discovered by doing it.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I seem to remember there was another thread I saw a couple of months ago, asking almost this same question. Maybe electricblue could remember it (I feel sure he posted there too ) One tip I picked up from that thread was, when your work is finished, leave it for a couple of days before proof-reading it in full. It's time consuming, but it's surprising how many errors come to light. Also, run it through a good Spell Checker (I use Word), and one of the subscribers to the earlier thread recommended a free Grammar Checker called Grammarly.

Hope this helps

This one maybe?

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1467067

 

[SimonDoom]

It should be said that teaching and doing are not the same thing, and there are people who can do something but cannot teach it and people who can teach something but not necessarily do it. Teaching is a skill unto itself.

I had some great teachers in my day. Whatever I have accomplished or will accomplish in my writing, I owe a debt to them. But I have no idea if they were good creative writers. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. It makes no difference to me, or to the rest of their students, some of whom I know have because published authors.

There are book shelves full of books telling you how to write a screenplay, written by people who never sold a single one. I've read some of them. It's a common phenomenon.

If I were a creative writing instructor, I think my number one admonition would be: just write. Keep writing. I like to outline and plot, personally, but that doesn't work for everyone. The one thing that will make everyone a better writer is to just keep writing.

 

[KindofHere]

..................

 

[Weird Harold]

TL;DR - I think there's two aspects to writing; technical and artistic. I think the technical aspects can be taught/learned but the artistic aspects can only be discovered by doing it.

This ^^

The technique outlined in the OP will work just fine for teaching writing to those who can't write. That technique will last as long as the student needs the structure and formality. It will be modified and/or forgotten as the fledgling writers develop their own style.

Anyone who is a "storyteller" first and a writer only as an adjunct to telling a story doesn't really need to learn to write a story; they may suck at technical writing or grammatical fine points, but nobody is going to notice if the story is good enough.

The technique that works for me is to start with an outline; expand each outline point with each editing pass; fill out the expanded outline points with color and detail; send to a grammar nazi who hates you for final editing.

 

[SamScribble]

That is in fact false. Tolkien was a professor, who was already in the habit of writing out lecture notes, and his hobby was researching European mythology, and for this hobby he regularly took notes. The Silmarillion, in fact, is a whole volume of his worldbuilding groundwork for The Lord of the Rings.

I'm not sure that this proves or disproves what may or may not be an apocryphal story. It is entirely possible that, at the moment he had finished writing: 'In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit' he had no idea what he was going to write next.

 

[HisArpy]

Anyone can write a short story. What it takes is time and organization as well as an idea of how a plot should run. All of these things can be taught.

Whether it will be a good story is another matter entirely. We all know our first efforts sucked, so deriding others for the same failings is meanspirited. Writing a good story takes practice. How much depends on the individual; some people are more talented than others and some may never get off the starting line without years of practice.

My first story back when I was 16 was decent. The plot was mine - the words were not. It wasn't plagerism because I wrote the whole 2 pages using bits my memory retained on how this author said that about a character and that one said other things and so on. It basically was a mishmash of the writing styles of L'Amour, Grey, Saberhagen, Ramsey, and others.

I got an A for it but I can't say it was a good story. What it did was illustrate, for me anyway, that all it takes to write a story is time, organization and a plotline. If you have those things, you can write a story. The OP's friend need only teach that. From there, it is up to the author to find those three things.

 

[yukonnights]

Anyone can write a short story. What it takes is time and organization as well as an idea of how a plot should run. All of these things can be taught.

Whether it will be a good story is another matter entirely. We all know our first efforts sucked, so deriding others for the same failings is meanspirited. Writing a good story takes practice. How much depends on the individual; some people are more talented than others and some may never get off the starting line without years of practice.

My first story back when I was 16 was decent. The plot was mine - the words were not. It wasn't plagerism because I wrote the whole 2 pages using bits my memory retained on how this author said that about a character and that one said other things and so on. It basically was a mishmash of the writing styles of L'Amour, Grey, Saberhagen, Ramsey, and others.

I got an A for it but I can't say it was a good story. What it did was illustrate, for me anyway, that all it takes to write a story is time, organization and a plotline. If you have those things, you can write a story. The OP's friend need only teach that. From there, it is up to the author to find those three things.

I generally agree with all you said. To elaborate on the part about writing a good story; Even that might be possible...but it's the writing of a great story that separates the many from the few. It's like music, visual art, and all art; some are gifted with a special genius that no amount of study, practice or effort will ever replace. I can do all of the artistic stuff I mentioned, and more...but I'm a master of none of them. I think we all know this "genius" gift is out there, and it need not prevent us from doing our best...but it would really be amazing to be so gifted in something, I think. Sorta magical somehow ~ sighs...

 

[8letters]

So far, my friend’s instruction has been delivered ‘in person’ to small groups of (mainly) middle-aged women over coffee and cake. But now she has decided to ‘go online’. And she recently recruited me as a guinea pig student.

Her method is nothing if not thorough. A two or three thousand-word story requires at least five thousand words of ‘notes’. Before you can start the story, you need a detailed premise, a story arc, a detailed plot, character profiles, dramatic points, and a few other things. I’m afraid that I couldn’t be bothered with any of that. Perhaps as a consequence, my friend declared my story 'a fail'.

Your friend's method sounds like it would suck all the fun out of writing for me.

That being said, it may be a great method for the people who have turned to her for help. I could see that after you'v done all that work, writing the story would consist of stitching together the bits of prep work you've already done in a way that fits the plot you've already worked out. But for someone who's banged out a story before, it's overkill.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Your friend's method sounds like it would suck all the fun out of writing for me.

Is that Irony 101, 8Letters, given your love of the expository note? . Though, to be fair, your writer's notes are written after your story has been written, describing your motivation and process, not before.

I totally agree though, all of that planning and analysis would be a spontaneity killer for me. I'd rather cut my head off with a chainsaw.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Is that Irony 101, 8Letters, given your love of the expository note? . Though, to be fair, your writer's notes are written after your story has been written, describing your motivation and process, not before.

I totally agree though, all of that planning and analysis would be a spontaneity killer for me. I'd rather cut my head off with a chainsaw.

When I started writing, I just sat down and wrote with a vague idea of what I was going to write. Now I'm getting a little better and picking up techniques as I go, I'm doing more planning although the notes are high level memory joggers and the rest is in my head. I have a few books on plotting and planning and I'm working my way into those coz I can see the benefit for me.

But in the end it's the plotter vs pantser debate and it's whatever works for you isn't it

 

[Bramblethorn]

A friend of mine believes that she can teach anyone to write a pretty good short story. This is slightly at odds with the late Kurt Vonnegut who said: ‘You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something that God lets you do or declines to let you do.’ As far as Mr Vonnegut was concerned, courses that purport to teach people how to write well are ‘harmless’. But they are also ‘shmoos’.

I enjoy Vonnegut's work, but he had a tendency to make sweeping pronouncements with tongue somewhat in cheek. Every great writer is full of advice that works for them.

That is in fact false. Tolkien was a professor, who was already in the habit of writing out lecture notes, and his hobby was researching European mythology, and for this hobby he regularly took notes. The Silmarillion, in fact, is a whole volume of his worldbuilding groundwork for The Lord of the Rings.

Let's see what the man himself had to say about it:

...the first real story of this imaginary world almost fully formed as it now appears was written in prose during sick-leave at the end of 1916: The Fall of Gondolin, which I had the cheek to read to the Exeter College Essay Club in 1918. I wrote a lot else in hospitals before the end of the First Great War.

I went on after return; but when I attempted to get any of this stuff published I was not successful. The Hobbit was originally quite unconnected, though it inevitably got drawn in to the circumference of the greater construction; and in the event modified it...

All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror's Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s...

So Sam is quite correct. It shows, too; there's no mention of hobbits in works like the Silmarillion, except occasionally in appendices that were written after Hobbit/LotR to help tie the canon together, and the style of "The Hobbit" is quite different to the rest of the canon, even its direct sequel LotR.

 

[Bramblethorn]

So, I took refuge in my growing collection of books. The year I was nine, I took part in a read-a-thon for... er... Cystic Fibrosis? No, pretty sure that was the bike-a-thon. Muscular Dystrophy maybe? Well, one of those diseases schools had the kids do something about where they had to run around get people to pledge so much money for each whatever done. In that case, books read.

Multiple Sclerosis perhaps? We had a MS Read-A-Thon here in Australia, but I don't know whether that was also a US thing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

One thing I've been taught quite recently though, is...
Try not to repeat yourself (with phrases or vocabulary). It tires the reader very quickly. If you see this happening in your work, look at the two (or three or more) instances, decide which one fits which instance best, and leave it there. Then look at the other(s) and replace the word or phrase.

There's truth in this, but IMHO it needs to be applied with a truckload of nuance. Repetition isn't always bad and sometimes writers do far worse while trying to avoid it.

Used deliberately, repetition can be a powerful tool that gives words structure. Lincoln and Hitler used it in their most famous speeches, e.g. "of the people, by the people, for the people" & "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer".

It can also be useful for suggesting ideas without directly stating them. In one of my horror stories here, I make frequent use of the colour yellow to suggest a sort of conspiracy theory; by associating yellow with a particular threatening power, I can then signal its presence indirectly.

Unintentional repetition often does point to problems, but often it's more a symptom of weak writing than the underlying cause. If my story is full of "twinkling eyes", "sparkling eyes", "angry eyes", "curious eyes", the real problem here isn't overuse of "eyes" - rather, it's that I'm relying too heavily on eyes (by any name) as a way to describe people's emotions. The fix is not to pull out a thesaurus and look for different words; instead, what I really need to do is think about all the other ways that people can display emotions, and use some of those instead.

Often it's better to repeat the same five-cent word a dozen times than to fill the story with five-dollar words solely for the sake of avoiding repetition. If word choice makes the reader think "I wonder what thesaurus that author's using?" then it's not doing the job.

Some repetition is bad! I over-use things like "actually" and "I think", and I try to cull them in editing. But there's a place for it.

 

[SamScribble]

I enjoy Vonnegut's work, but he had a tendency to make sweeping pronouncements with tongue somewhat in cheek. Every great writer is full of advice that works for them.

A fair point about Vonnegut (and, I suppose, about many other writers who give advice). Thank you, Bramblethorn.

And thanks too for the Tolkien reference. Maybe not apocryphal then.