Story building: It’s like a stack of boxes, says Damon Knight. From base to apex:
Impetus: Why do you want to write this story? What inside you is trying to get out?
Idea
Materials – characters, background, setting, etc.
Form
Surface – what the reader sees, the sentences and words.
If your story isn’t working, find the earliest level where it fails, and fix that.
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“In a story we expect a quality of completion, of roundedness, which sets it apart from a sketch, an incident, or an anecdote.”
After some examples of sketch, incident and anecdote, Knight demonstrates how each could become a story, and summarizes: a story requires an emotional relationship between at least two people, and an impediment to a satisfactory conclusion.
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“Over a period of time you may find your stories saying again and again something you didn’t know you intended to say. It is just as well not to worry about this, because it will happen whether you do or not.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
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So you have a vague idea for a story. How do you get from there to an actual story? Here’s Damon Knight (Creating Short Fiction):
1. Particularize. A particular character, in a particular place, feeling a particular way about a particular situation. Someone who you understand, and for whom you feel affection.
2. Complicate. Introduce another character, event, or circumstance that makes the outcome less certain and therefore more interesting.
Having at least two characters will protect the main character from excessive navel-gazing and give them something to push against (even if the two are allies). Three characters are even better.
3. Criticize. Why did this happen? How is it that here this, but there that? What led to this change? What leads on from it?
4. Research. Don’t learn everything you can. Learn everything you need. Then think about it.
5. Constrain. The more you know about the specifics of your story, the more things there are that can’t happen – which is good, because that guides you to what can happen.
You can start from any of the four of: character, setting, situation, emotion. But you need all four to write your story.
Think of four things that can happen next. Reject them all and think of a fifth one that’s less obvious. If it doesn’t move you forward towards having all four elements, try another, or adjust the elements you already have until they work together.
Don’t make characters to serve only one story purpose. They need to have their own background and their own past, and be the kind of people who will do what you want naturally and inevitably – but who also have other dimensions to them.
In the middle of the four elements you will find theme. Don’t start there.
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“Love and understanding are the missing ingredients in most slushpile stories. If you don’t understand your character, you can’t make her believable, and if you don’t care about her, the reader won’t either.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
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Damon Knight had some training as a visual artist. In Creating Short Fiction, he talks about how learning to be an artist involves learning how to perceive the world.
He suggests some exercises for writers, such as:
– People-watch. Describe someone – not superficially, like a police report, in a way that would describe a thousand people, but with insight, in a way that describes only that person.
– Look at something alive until you feel you know something about it that you didn’t know before.
– Blindfold yourself and listen.
– Think of vivid moments in your life that stand out in your memory, and try to understand why they stand out.
– Learn to pay attention to and accept your own feelings, observe other people for signs of their feelings, and imagine what it’s like to be them.
– Collaborate with your unconscious (which he calls “Fred”). Present Fred with interesting challenges and listen for the response.
Damon Knight, in Creating Short Fiction, talks about four stages of development for writers. (He acknowledges that there are stages beyond four, but after that point they don’t need help.)
1. Narcissistic daydreamer. Think “Mary Sue author-self-insertion fanfic”. The way to get out of this stage is to imagine how some other character feels about the author self-insertion/idealisation.
2. Trivial writer. Stories are half-formed, with beginnings and ends but no middles (where the plot and characters would develop). The characters are tokens, placeholders. There are no complications; it’s just a bunch of things that happen.
3. Writer with technical issues. We now have complete stories, but there are problems with plot structure and characterisation. The plots are poorly constructed, and the characters are puppets. Nobody cares what happens to them, and what happens to them sometimes makes little sense.
4. Competent writer. You’ve learned how to solve the technical issues at least well enough that people will buy your stories.
Knight (who taught writing for decades) observes that people who start writing later in life, at least early 30s, often manage to skip stage 1, and sometimes also stage 2.
The way out of stages 3 and 4 is by learning technique. You can do this by yourself through trial and error, or you can take instruction.
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“Most of the student writers I meet fall into two classes: those who have something to say but don’t know how, and those who know how, to some degree, but have nothing to say. Members of this second group are oftener men than women…. Looked at as a technical construct, a story is a shell built to contain something.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
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“Certainly concealment is part of writing, and we all hide in our charactrs; but writing is also a way of revealing ourselves. Either we do this voluntarily and courageously, or we do it out of timidity and in spite of ourselves. The unhappy young writer who invents heroes of stupefying intelligence, wisdom, beauty, strength, and virtue is like a child trying to hide behind a fencepost. She can’t hide all of herself, or even choose which parts to reveal.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
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A “signal from Fred” is a critique term, apparently, for when the author is aware at some level that what the characters are doing is stupid and makes no sense, and that awareness leaks out onto the page.
Fred is smart. You should listen to Fred.