Hello, friends, possibly family, and enemies alike. I have created this lovely blog in order to stimulate a flow of thoughts from me to you and back to me and so on and so forth. Let me tell you a little bit about me. I am a writer. I love to create stories. Little universes that allow us to be gods if only for a moment. I am also an artist who is attending the Art Institute of California –Sacramento as a Media Arts and Animation major. Most of what I am about to share with you is what I have learned over time as I have grown as a writer, and what I have learned from professional writers and artists in school. So now that you know me, let’s begin.
A story is a funny thing. Subjective tastes, discrepancies over certain elements, and controversial topics make writing difficult at times. We try to keep an audience in mind, but even within any targeted demographic, there is a wide range of tastes. So how do you write a good story? One that makes people think, laugh, love, cry, scream, and explode with emotion? First tip: stop trying so hard. Even if you’re the type of person that plans every damn detail out to the T, you are going to need to relax and let the words flow out instead of a forced-through, verbal pile of constipated crap that is sure to ensue if you don’t learn to turn off your left brain once in a while! Now I will take this first opportunity to get started with how a good story works. In later blogs, I will explore concepts in a deeper manner.
So now that you’ve relaxed and possibly removed a long, thin, possible cylindrical object from your most posterior orifice, let’s start getting something flowing. You need a genre. Your story can be any genre you want. Just make sure you’ve researched this genre front and back and understood any and all implications of the genre throughout time. Take our two most famous genres for example. Comedy and tragedy. A comedy is a story that results in a happy ending. That’s it, really. The story doesn’t actually even have to be funny, despite the fact that comedies now are generally humorous, or attempt to be. Shakespearean comedies ended in a marriage, like his play, Much Ado about Nothing, which in fact ends in a double marriage. Oops. Spoiler alert. Tragedies are the opposite. Sad ending. Generally everyone of importance dies. For reference in terms of tragedies, try Greek plays or Shakespeare’s…almost everything. Picked a genre? Good, now let’s decide who we’re dealing with.
You need an idea. What is your story about? The setting (location and time period), the conflict (why do we care about this story? Why does any of it matter? The struggle, the pain and gain, the humanity, even if your characters aren’t human), and the characters themselves, which will be explained with the conflict. The biggest way a setting can fail is lack of research. My teacher, Mark Yeager, repeatedly states that research is God. If you don’t understand a real-life application of what you are writing about, your story is fake no matter what and will fail. Any question you have about anything can be answered either on the internet or by a professional. Medical story? Talk to a doctor. War story? Pal around with veterans. Read other stories about this stuff. It’s okay to borrow facts and ideas as long as you thank the source and show where you got these ideas from. Research time periods. The television program, Downton Abbey, is an extremely well-researched period piece. Watch the behind-the-scenes of shows and movies. Research will happen automatically.
Next issue is conflict, and the conflict with creating a conflict is how conflicted one can be in the process of it all. Wars happen, people fight, fire, lighting, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! Thanks to Ghostbusters for that one. You can create any type of conflict! Point is to make it believable and make people care. That’s why you make the audience understand why this is so important. Why should we care that Julia or Mike or John Jacob Jingleheimer-Schmidt can’t get to their best friend’s wedding or pick an apple from a tree? You do that with the back stories. Maybe Julia needs to break up her lover’s wedding because they are “soul-mates” that have a long and extensive history. Or maybe Mike needs to get to the same wedding because he needs to stop Julia because she is batshit crazy. Maybe John (don’t make me say the rest of it) needs to get the apple because it is the last apple ever and he needs in to make the magic apple potion to save his dying father. I don’t know. Point is, make people care about this. Make it something that would make you antsy. Scare people with the possibility of failure. And in the process, establish yourself as a sadistic little genius. You emotional abuser, you!
As I continue this topic in other posts, I will explore other facets of writing and show you how I do it and hopefully learn more about this wonderful thing that is writing. So please, I urge you to offer feedback and tell me how you write. Thank you.
Tell Me a Story 