Re-post: Beginning to End

There is a beginning, middle and end to every plot in books, movies, TV shows and country songs (ballads). It’s how you build each of those components that keeps your readers interested and turning pages.

A writer should make use of more than narrative in telling the story – the characters, setting, and conflicts are all important. Use the way a character walks, dresses, talks and even flinches when they are startled to help lay out your back-story. Make your characters real and multi-dimensional so that your readers can relate, sympathize and like (or maybe hate). Develop your character’s personal history – even if most of it never comes out in the story – and use that to help your character react to events and conflicts. Keep an edge of tension and a touch of mystery about your main characters and your readers will try to get “inside his/her head” – why is he brooding, why is she so suspicious, etc?

The setting is when and where your story takes place. Is your story contemporary, futuristic or back in history? And where does your story take place – a battlefield full of death and misery, a school campus loaded with students dreaming of the future, a factory where the workers feel bored and underappreciated? Your setting will help to tell the story and even “set the stage”. Use the gloom of an old mansion to communicate the undercurrent in a wealthy but dysfunctional family; or use the bright lights and busy city sidewalks to emphasize the energy in your plot.

Your plot is the telling of the story, an introduction and the order of events, the conflicts, climax, and the resolution. Pace the events throughout your story, too much action at once may confuse your readers whereas too much time between events may get boring. If you are the type of writer that I am and you let your characters write their own story, this pacing has to come while doing editing; if you work by outline you can pretty much lay out the events and conflicts so that your readers interest remains piqued.

Short stories should remain focused on one or two major conflicts, don’t clutter up your plot. Full length novels can add side stories and multiple conflicts so long as they don’t draw away from the major conflict and eventual climax and resolution. In real life we often face different challenges and have several surprises along the way so it wouldn’t be farfetched for your hero/heroine to face several tests between the beginning and end. Your ending doesn’t always have to be “happy ever after”, it does need to be a solution or a resolve of the conflicts encountered.

Every story begins with a concept, an idea. Build on that idea, decide what the major conflict is and sprinkle (liberally) little mini-structures of action and blocks. Allow your characters actions and dialogue, as well as the setting, help to pull your readers into the story – remember “Show Don’t Tell”. Let your characters smile and laugh when they are happy and slam doors and stomp when they are mad. Let the pleasant scent of blooming flowers show the reader that it’s a new day fresh with morning dew.
Writing exercise: Did you have a favorite story you were told as a child? Perhaps it was a family tale, a nursery rhyme, or something comforting you were told as a bedtime story? It’s time to rewrite the story – bring it into today and let the problems be like those adults encounter. This might be the time for you to give the story the ending you really, secretly, wanted all those years ago.
Writing prompt: Choose five items within your site and reach – make up a slogan about each that you would use for an ad campaign if you were selling these things.