Dramaticapedia

Drudge people.  You see them every day.  On the news.  In your town.  Outside your window.  Perhaps, even in your own home.

You can easily recognize them as they have lost their tales.  With no tale, they are directionless, shuffling endlessly forward with no destination.

How did they become Drudge People?  They were not born that way, oh no!  Each and every one came into this world as we all did, with a curious mind and an inquisitive spirit.  Life seemed an endless wonder and full of opportunities to explore.  Each new discovery was a tale to tell – a eureka moment so powerful that we ran to share it with our loved ones and friends, lest it burst within us before we could release the pressure of epiphany.

And then we started school.  Suddenly, there was regimen.  Conformity was rewarded, individuality punished.  Oh, not in in such direct terms (that would be abhorrent to our democratic ideals in these United States.)  And yet, we were all gently guided away from enthusiasm and into the soft protective embrace of routine.  Layer by layer, responsibilities, obligations, social sensitivity, compromise and procrastination became our shellac and armor in what we were constantly reminded was a cold and dangerous world.

Our education ended when we were fully indoctrinated, inoculated, and insulated from any original thinking and targeted instead on whatever mindless task was placed before us.  In short, we were ready for the work place.  And it was here the alchemist’s art of turning students into automatons was refined into the science of creating a population of  robot-slaves.

In a technically savvy world, the shackles must be so subtle as to be invisible to all except the jailers – the emperor’s new closed mind.  No tangible restraints can be seen.  But for those with a keen eye and a little patience, you can identify the Drudge People in our midst.  If you suspect someone, ask yourself, “When was the last time (Person Z) bolted into my cubicle aglow with something (he or she) couldn’t wait to tell me?”  When was the last time they posted something original on Face book, other than their new high score on some life-eating game or a link to someone else’s pictures or a re-post of someone else’s thought or (most telling of all) simply clicked the “Like” button without writing anything in response?  You see, when you lose your tale you have nothing to say.  The Muse has run out of you and your creative juices have crystallized in your veins.

We become infected whenever we consume rather than create, when we opt for a virtual experience instead of an actual one, a recorded adventure as a safer substitute for the real thing.  The more we show up right on time for our daily coat of varnish, the less it becomes our shield and the more it serves as our prison.  After years of build-up, the constraints have become so thick that one may become wholly beyond redemption.

But there is hope for some of us, my friends.  If your eyes have been opened and you can now (perhaps for the first time) see the glossy membranes that are hardening around you, there is still a chance to avoid permanent incarceration.  You need to re-grow your tale.  This will not be easy.  Through atrophy, it has likely been almost wholly absorbed back into your system and re-tasked as raw material to be added to your casing.

Begin as thus: seek out original thinkers – those few individuals whose clarion voices resound out above the din of the mindless masses.  They are they outcasts, perhaps even the outlaws in our civilized society.  Listen to their call, but not too long, for it as easy to become lured by the siren song as it is to become deaf to innovation.

Take in these new voices just long enough to resonate within yourself – to build up a sympathetic vibration that begins, ever so gradually, to create cracks in your full mental jacket.  Then funnel the energy of those maverick rants into your core – recharge the cells at the base of your tale until, through the synthesis of many alternative ideas you begin to form one of your own.

All it takes is a single concept – something you’ve not thought or heard before.  Take note – this is a delicate and crucial time in the clockwork of your escape!  Do not let that concept simply fade away as you are distracted by the next mind-numbing diversion that drifts upon you from the mill of collective mundanity.  Nurture that embryonic thought, feed it with research and water it with conjecture.  Allow it to place roots in your mind, so strong that it will not be scoured from your consciousness by the next brisk breeze of life.  Grow it stout and tall until it bears fruit.  And as it expands, it will poke out through one of the cracks in your cage and you will find that your tale has begun to grow again.

But tales are not self-sustaining, they must be exercised regularly if they are to become and remain the rudder of your life course.  This can only be accomplished by putting them into action – wagging your thoughts.  And you do this just as when you were a child – you run excitedly to your loved ones and friends to tell them of your wonderful new experience or discovery.

You can do this in fiction.  You can do it in fact.  You can do it in music or pictures or words.  You will find that it quickly burns within you – an intensity of life you had either forgotten or perhaps not ever experienced.  And the more your engage it, the more brightly it shines, as do you.

And finally, when you are a self-starting engine of creativity, when life has become both raw and meaningful again, perhaps you will take a moment to cast a life line to another who is still not wholly beyond hope.  A life line such as this article I’m throwing to you.  But, for the love of God, don’t just post a link to this or simply “like” it without any original comments of your own, or you will be truly lost and doomed to remain one of the Drudge People forever….

 

Contributed by Teresa Darnold 

A character can be seen as being more thoughtful or more creative if they say things that are inventive and unique. Phrases that the reader has never heard or read before will seem new and fresh – unlike many colloquialisms that are said so often they have lost all original meaning, like; ‘We’re/they’re/somebody’s not out of the woods yet’. Now – while this might make some sense when the story is taking place in Washington state, when you hear newscasters say it when describing a car chase in the middle of a California desert or in the city of Los Angeles – it makes very little sense at all. 

If you’d like to see what I mean – try this; start to listen to your local evening news reports for the ‘Not out of the woods yet’ phrase and you might find yourself surprised at how often it’s used. It’s so overused we really don’t hear it being used. Likewise, if you fill up your story with characters uttering commonly called-upon colloquialisms, metaphors and puns, your story stands the chance of being as memorable as the evening news itself. 

Lawn Janitors. Have you ever heard the phrase before? They’re those guys who do little more than run a lawnmower, edger and/or leaf blower at your bank or apartment. Can such technicians really be called a ‘Gardener’ if their entire job involves cutting grass, sweeping up said grass, and then taking said cut grass to the trash?  I’m pretty confident you haven’t heard that one before because I just made it up for the purposes of this article.  And that’s what you should do for your stories as well. 

For example, Shawn Levy, the director of Night at the Museum I & II used a word in the sequel that he and his wife had made up in their own private conversations: “jimmyjack”.  It is intended to mean something like “crackjack” in its old usage, but with more of a sense of “splendid” than “top notch”. 

In his commentary on preparing the movie he says he gave the word to the character of Amelia Erheart because it simultaneously enhanced her personality and also made her unique.  Further, the sound of the word fit in with her time period.  And finally, it gave the audience something memorable to repeat, which leads to more word-of-mouth and recognition for a movie (or a book or stage play, for that matter). 

Think of all the clever, totally devised phraseology in other movies such as Men In Black, Beetlejuice, and Avatar, and books like Harry Potter, Interview with the Vampire, and anything by Clive Cussler. 

Now, admittedly, it isn’t always easy to come up with an inventive new word or phrase on the fly, so a good trick is to train yourself to notice when they pop up all on their own, such as when you mis-hear a phrase on TV or the radio, or when you mispronounce something in your own conversation. 

When you hear it, jot it down straightaway in your writer’s notebook.  You DO carry a writer’s notebook don’t you? – or at least the modern equivalent such as a smart phone, ipad, or voice recorder? 

Well if you don’t, you should – and for a lot of other reasons besides only made-up phrases.  And if you do, you will be richly rewarded with richer dialog and descriptions.  Or, as I always say, you’ll more pleased than a butt-happy, foot-happy kick-a-roo pony!

Like to contribute an article to Dramaticapedia?

Email your submission to mail@storymind.com

Shakespeare just wrote as himself, and you should too. While trying to emulate another famous writer can be useful as an exercise (just as an artist might copy the Mona Lisa as a “study”), that approach is never userful in creating or advancing your own art.

Sure, read what other write, disect their work, and practice their techniques - even in your own creations, but ONLY if those techniques also fit your own personality and style.   The best way to achieve Writer’s Block is to try and write like someone else.  When you do, you are hobbling your Muse; locking her in irons.  You are trying to play a role for which you are unsuited.

Of course we all want to be beloved successful writers, but we are not all going to be.  You are only as good as you own talent – GET OVER IT!

Why are you writing in the first place?  To make a buck?  To make a name for yourself?  Or perhaps, just perhaps (Lord help us) because you actually like writing?  Or maybe, just maybe, because you want to like writing, but don’t, try as you may?

Fact is, while money and fame are good motivators for any career, be it singing, dancing, playing a sport or writing, if they are the Prime Motivators, you won’t have a very good time doing it, whatever “it” is.

The Wise Man famously said, “Work at what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  The important aspect here is that he didn’t expect to become a famouse wise man when he said it.  It just occured to him as part of his personally satisfying manner of thinking.  Just as it occurs to me to say, “Don’t blame the weather – its’ only humid.”

Now that clever little phrase is never going to make me rich OR famous.  But I did have a really enoyable time telling it to you.  And that, dear readers, is the very essence of the writing life to which we should all aspire.

Unless you truly enjoy laboring over a single book for your entire life, word by word, with endless rewrites and improvements, then just write it out as you feel it.  Plot doesn’t make sense?  Come back to it later when you know your story better.  Characters dull and derivative?  You’re not going to fix them by micromanaging them.

Give it up and get on with it.  Write endlessly.  Write until your fingers fall off.  Keep an archive somewhere to put all the stuff the world should never see and then post the bulk of the rest on your blog.  (You DO have a blog, don’t you?  All real writers have a blog…..)  And for those gems – the occassional piece that just zings and sings and hits the mark – well those you send off to a publisher, magazine or agent.

If you’re looking for gold, you won’t find as much by sifting the same sand through a finer and finer mesh as you will by marching from one dig to the next in search of nuggets.  So be prolific, knock the blocks out from under your tires, throw open the stop-cocks and let loose the dogs of words.

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic
	Too many writers fall into the trap of making Structure their Story God. There’s no denying that structure is important, but paying too much attention to structure can destroy your story. Although some writers are natural born StoryWeavers, there is still hope for the rest of us. In fact, you can become a StoryWeaver just by practicing a few select techniques until they become second nature.
A Novelist’s Bag of Tricks
	Remember those “grab bags” you found when you were a kid at a toy store, discount store or county fair?  Inside was a whole collection of little treasures that were collectively worth a lot more than you paid – but you never knew what you were going to get until you looked inside. In that spirit, here’s a “grab bag” of tips, tricks and techniques any novelist can use to improve his or her work.
Creating Characters from Plot
	Even if all you have is a log line or thumbnail sketch of your plot, this method will enable you to create a whole cast of characters to populate your story. In addition, the work you do developing these characters will, in turn, create additional story lines and details for your plot as well!

Step 2: How to Come Up with Ideas  

Raw creativity is all about coming up with ideas from scratch – in other words, making something from nothing.  But when ideas won’t come, we are suffering from the all-too-familiar “writer’s block.”

Though creative blocks aren’t exclusive to writers, (i.e. a batting slump or derivative music), writers have to be more continuously creative, moment to moment, in a way not many other professions require.

Even more common are the less extreme cases wherein ideas come like molasses.  Sure, you make progress, but the pace of it is so excruciatingly slow!  Worse, the more you try to force it along, the more the pace declines.

If you’ve ever suffered through a creative bottleneck or a complete shut down, fear no more!  Here in Step 2 of How To Write Your Novel we’ll provide you with a whole toolkit of surefire techniques for banishing creative blocks and slowdowns once and for all.

To begin with, there are two causes of writer’s block which, when remedied, open the valve to full creative flow:  One, a mental obstacle to creativity and two, a lack of fresh input.

In the first case it is as if a mechanism in the mind has seized up – not unlike a stuck gear.  Other mental processes may be working just fine, but the place that generates the particular kinds of ideas you need won’t budge.

This is, in fact, the way half of all cases of writer’s block feel while they are occurring: as if something in your mind that used to work has frozen in place, put up a moat, or become impenetrably dark.

The second type of writer’s block feels like a great emptiness, as if the mind is a desert in which nothing can grow – the mental equivalent of a blank piece of paper and you’re fresh out of mental pencils.

In this version of the writer’s block issue, the mind’s machine is running just fine – like a windmill in a favorable breeze.  Problem is, there’s no grain for the mill to grind.

We’re going to explore these one at a time, then bring our conclusions together into a single methodology for putting writer’s block behind you once and for all.

Writer’s Block Type One: The Seized-Up Mind

To understand how to break-up this kind of mental log jam, we first must understand how it happens in the first place.

Creativity is half intellect and half passion.  Each is a separate mechanism and, left to its own devices, functions quite fine.  But our minds mesh the two together, one driving the other, then the other way ’round, all in the hopes of reaching a consensus.  When it works, we spout brilliance.  But when the results of these two parallel processes are in conflict or contradiction, and when repeated attempt to resolve that differential fail, the force of both processes collide like two meshed gears trying to move in opposite directions, and the flow of ideas grinds to a halt.

The solution to this problem, surprisingly, is stupidly simple:  Don’t use both processes together.  Now what could I possibly mean by that?  It’s like this….

Use your passion to generate ideas and your logic to analyze them.  In other words, give yourself a temporary mental lobotomy and let each process work on its own, one at a time, alternating between the two rather than trying to force them to work together simultaneously.

Here’s how it works….

Partially paraphrased from the earlier article,
 ”The Creativity Two-Step“

When you find yourself stuck at some point in a project, as counter-intuitive as this may sound, shut off your creativity completely – it’s not getting anywhere anyway.  Just put on pause any efforts to come up with solutions and new ideas for a bit.  You’ll come back to that later.  For now, you need to stop beating your head against a wall and clear your mind.

A lot of writers have learned to “just walk away” from their story for a while, but that doesn’t really work.  Usually, the creative block is still there whenever you return to try again.  Sure, the idea behind taking a break is that you’ll think about other things, get new mental patterns going, and come at the problem from a new direction that bypasses the mental obstacle.  Unfortunately, this does not work all that often or all that well.

We’re going to try something else instead.  Once you’ve stopped “working” on the problem creatively, you need to shift from that passionate state into a logical one and immediately approach the problem analytically without missing a beat.  In other words, you’re going to shift gears, rather than shut off the engine.

To do this, try to stop looking at your story as the author and try looking at it as if you were a reader or part of the audience.  This helps you take a more objective view of whatever you’ve written or developed so far and makes it easier to stop being overly passionate about your own work and adopt a more analytical perspective.

Once you are thinking analytically, re-read through your material and scan for holes and inconsistencies, just like an audience would.  If you really were the reader rather than the writer, you’d have no idea about what you intend to do – just what’s actually presented on the page.

Since it is a work in progress, there’s going to be a lot of material missing.  But rather than try to fill it creatively, just describe what isn’t there.  Do this in the form of analytical questions.

For example, if you wrote “A Marshall in an Old West border town struggles with a cutthroat gang that is bleeding the town dry.” and then got stuck, you might come up with a list of questions as follows:

1. How old is the Marshall?

2. How much experience does he have?

3. Is he a good shot?

4. How many men has he killed (if any)

5. How many people are in the gang?

6. Does it have a single leader?

7. Is the gang tight-knit?

8. What are they taking from the town?

9. How long have they been doing this?

Certainly, you could come up with an almost endless list of questions about what you don’t know about the embryonic story concisely described in that one little sentence.  In fact, you might want to try this right now on your own story just to prove to yourself that it isn’t too hard to think of a whole variety of questions that spring from just about anything you might write.

It’s really pretty easy.  After all, it is always a lot easier to criticize than to create, and if you remove yourself passionately from your story you can tear it to pieces just like your readers or audience will.  But you don’t have to be that hard on yourself.  And you don’t even have to creatively try to define what ought to go in a hole.  Just read what you’ve written and ask questions the way you might if you were playing “Twenty Questions.”

Now for step two.  We’re going to move past your creative block by using each question as a branching point for your next step of story development.  To begin, its time to shut down your analytical side and re-start your passionate, creative side.

To do this, take each question, one at a time, and see how many different answers you can devise with absolutely no deference paid to whether your answers are logical or practical.  Don’t allow yourself to even consider how each answer might fit in with what you’ve already written or what you have in mind.  If you were to think about that you’d be trying to use logic at the same time as passion again and you’d grind to a halt once more.

So, just throw caution to the winds, pull out all the stops and write as many different answers to each question as you can.

Here’s an example:

Take the very first question, “How old is the Marshall?”  You might come up with a list of answers similar to this:

1) How old is the Marshall?

a. 28

b. 56

c. 86

d. 17

e. 07

f. 35

While some of these answer may, at first blush, appear ridiculous or unusable, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Fact is, most stories are pedestrian simply because they stick to the common, expected, tried and true elements.  Writers often try to play it safe by toeing the line.  But a story written in that manner has nothing about it that stands out and makes the story special and memorable.  It becomes nothing but another bland, sausage-machine crank-out, with no personality at all.

Having come up with your answers, it is time to alternate back to logic again and ask questions about each one, just like we originally did with the first little snippet we analyzed.  So, turn off the creativity again and put on your objective hat.

For an example, lets take answer “c” – the Marshall is 86 years old.  What questions come immediately and easily to mind about an 86 year old Marshall?

Here’s some examples:

c. The Marshall is 86 years old.

1. How would an 86 year old become a Marshall?

2. Can he still see okay?

3. What physical maladies plague him?

4. Is he married?

5. What kind of gun does he use?

6. Does he have the respect of the town?

Again, there must be a hundred questions you could ask right away about an 86 year old Marshall.

Now, switch off the logic and switch on the creativity again.  For example,

5. What kind of gun does he use?

a) He uses an ancient musket, can barely lift it, but is a crack shot and miraculously hits whatever he aims at.

b) He uses an ancient musket and can’t hit the broad side of a barn. But somehow, his oddball shots ricochet off so many things, he gets the job done anyway, just not as he planned.

c) He used a Gattling gun attached to his walker.

d) He doesn’t use a gun at all. In 63 years with the Texas Rangers, he never needed one and doesn’t need one now.

e) He uses a sawed off shotgun, but needs his deputy to pull the trigger for him as he aims.

f) He uses a whip.

g) He uses a knife, but can’t throw it past 5 feet anymore.

As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, you could go back and forth like this forever, branching wider and wider with each series.  On top of that, you could go back to your questions from the first branch point and follow each one just as far into detail or farther.  For example, question 2, “How much experience does he have” could easily have several interesting answers, each of which could lead to more questions.

The best part of this system is that you spiral into minutia of little details when you keep branching off, you just come up with more and more quality material of the first order with which to flesh out your story.

Also, though we have focused initially on the Marshall, you might have focused on the plot or the theme as well.  And if you develop those areas of your story using the same technique is doesn’t take long before you have more material than you’ll every be able to use in a story.

Branch by branch you develop your story’s world.  When you finally come up for air (or lunch) you’ll find that you’ve completely side stepped your writer’s block simply by employing your logic and your passion in alternating sequence, rather than at the same time.

That may be all well and good, say you, but what if I can’t come up with any ideas at all?  What if I have Writer’s Block Type Two – The Empty Mind?

Well, I hate to leave you hanging, but there’s only so much we can cram into one newsletter, so you’ll just have to wait for the next issue when we will continue with:

Step 2: How to Come Up with Ideas:
Part Two, The Empty Mind

Click here to read our latest issue

Remember:

This step by step approach is based on our best-selling
StoryWeaver Story Development Software:

StoryWeaver Story Development Software – $29.95Our Bestseller!  By far, our most popular product, outselling all of our other products combined!  StoryWeaver takes you step by step through the entire process–from initial inspiration to completed novel or screenplay.  At just $29.95, StoryWeaver is affordable for any writer.  (Details)

Let’s not kid ourselves.  It’s not really possible to write a novel (or screenplay) step by step because that’s not how the creative mind works.  Rather, we come to a story with a whole bag of bits and pieces of ideas, some complete, some half-baked.

What’s more, the ideas we do have are from all across the board: a snippit of dialog, a setting, a bit of action, a type of personality for a character (even though we don’t yet have any idea if it’s a protagonist or antagonist or even if it is the Main Character).

You see, inspiration – the desire to write a story and an idea of what it will be about – comes from the subjects that interest us.  But stories themselves come from the structure that holds them together.  And that is the age-old author’s dilemma: “How do I turn my interests and motivations into a finished novel that makes sense?”

When embarking on a new writing project, it often seems as if the whole process is summed up in that old saying, “You can’t get there from here.”  And for many writers, once the novel is written, they can’t really see how they did it, or more aptly, “You can’t get here from there.”

Yet, there is hope.  There is an approach you can take that works with your Muse, rather than against her.  And, it is a real step-by-step method that will actually take you from concept to completion of your novel or script.

So what is this miraculous “silver bullet” for banishing writer’s block and dancing merrily down the garden path to a finished novel?  Simple.  Rather than focusing on the needs of the story, focus on the needs of the author.

No matter what kind of author you are, no matter what kind of novel you want to write, you share the same sequence of creative steps with all other authors everywhere.  Just like the stages of grief or Freud’s psycho-sexual stage, there is a common order to the creative process which drives us all.

This process can be divided into four Creative Stages: In order, 1 – Inspiration, 2 – Development, 3 – Exposition, 4 – Storytelling.  Let me define each a little more fully.

1. Inspiration

Inspiration comes to us all, sometimes through great effort; other times unbidden.  From the outside, it appears as if a person plucks an idea out of the ether, creating something from nothing.  But in truth, every inspiration is just the synthesis of some combination of new and previous experiences.

Many inspirations aren’t worth pursuing.  But, occasionally, a worthwhile concept pops into our heads that’s just too appealing to toss away.  These little visions can be single grains of sand that require lots of time and effort to develop into a pearl.  Or, they may be fragments, glimpses really, of something larger for which we do not yet see the full extent, scope, or shape.  The most impressive of these little mental feats are those rare ideas which thrust themselves upon our conscious minds completely developed already, like a snap-shot of the whole shebang in a single big bang moment of creation, right out the head of Zeus, as it were, mature upon birth.

There’s many ways to help bring inspiration about, and I’ll be writing about those in articles to come.  But for now, here are some links to previous articles I’ve penned on the subject:

Finding Your Creative Time, Finding Inspiration for Writing, and Writing from the Passionate Self.

For your convenience, I’ve also compiled all my best articles on finding inspiration into a twenty page booklet called The Case of the Missing Muse, available as a PDF Download and also in Kindle Book format on Amazon.com.

2. Development

As obvious as it may be, it bears repeating: You can’t develop an inspiration you haven’t had yet.  And just as important: Inspiration doesn’t stop just because you move into Development.

You see, these four stages the creative process don’t follow each other one after the next.  Rather, they are layered, like a layer cake or the floors of a building under construction.

No matter what the story, you have to start with Inspiration – there’s no way around it.  Once you have that inspiration you can start adding depth and detail to it until it fleshes out in a fully developed story concept, or at least a part of one.

But even while you are developing one part or aspect of your story – perhaps because you are developing one part – new inspirations start popping up all along the way.  The very act of enriching a previous inspiration add more concepts and new perspectives into the mix.  Those bounce around in your head, run into each other, and merge and blend to create whole new inspirations.

So just because you have all your basic ideas worked out, don’t shut your mind to Inspiration just because you have started Development.  It may turn out your best ideas are yet to come!

What’s more, you don’t have to wait until you have your whole story worked out to start developing the parts you have.  There’s no reason why you can’t figure out the arc of one of your characters before you even know who the other characters are or what the plot is about.

It is more like weaving than building timeline.  You follow one thread until inspiration runs dry, then pick up another and run with it for a while.  And even these don’t have to be in story sequential order.  You can jump to the end to dabble with a surprise conclusion to your plot, for example.  You might not yet have any idea how you are going to get your characters there, but you know what kind of twist you want.  So, just go for it.  You can always rewrite later if you get in a bind.

You know, a lot of writers worry that if they don’t have everything figured out in advance, they may have to get rid of a lot of work they had already done that just doesn’t fit with the way the story turns out to be.

Hey, words are cheap.  If you are any kind of an author at all, you’ve got an endless supply of them.  It pays to remember that writing a novel almost always takes a long time.  You’re going to spend hundreds of hours tooling it together.  Don’t cry over a few hours or even dozens of hours that have to get ripped out later.  It is all part of the process of finding your story.

Keep in mind the salesman’s creed:  If you get nineteen doors slammed in your face before you make a $20 sale on the twentieth call, well then you made $1 each time you knocked on a door.  Same with writing.  It doesn’t matter how much work you have to throw away.  By following each inspiration as far as it will go, even if that material is never used, it was a necessary step to get you to the material you WILL use.

We’ll get into this a lot deeper in articles to come, but for now, here’s some links to a few techniques that will help you during the development process:

Creating Characters from Plot, The Creativity Two-Step, and Avoiding the Genre Trap.

Just a quick reminder that our StoryWeaver Story Development Software is designed to help guide you through all four stages of the creative process.

3. Exposition

Okay.  So you had some inspirations and you’ve done some development.  Perhaps you’ve even worked out your entire story and everything in it.  You know your story up one side and down the other.  But – your readers don’t.  Exposition is the process of working out how and when you are going to reveal everything you know about your story as it plays out over time.

Perhaps the most common mistake made in Exposition is knowing your story so well that you forget to share that knowledge with your readers.  It is so easy to leave out a critical piece of information because it is so important it never occurs to you to see if you actually conveyed it.

But exposition is much more than that; it is an art form in its own right.  Intentionally holding back on information to create assumptions or misunderstandings can help set your readers up for jaw-dropping shockers.  Putting information out of sequential order in flashbacks and flash forwards can force your readers to have to reevaluate characters and plot .  This makes the “read” an active endeavor rather than just a passive experience.

There are two basic ways to approach Exposition: 1 – Work out an Exposition Plan in advance so that you know how and when each key bit of information will unfold.  2 – Just go ahead and write the story and then go back to make sure you put everything in that ought to be there.

The first approach  works well when you want to keep the readers guessing, as in mysteries or conspiracy stories.  The second approach is better if you are the kind of writer who likes to go with the flow and not feel too constrained while writing.

If you elect not to have an Exposition Plan in advance, here’s a tip that will still ensure all the crucial bits of information made it into your story: Before you write in fine literary prose, write a shopping list of all the elements of your story you want your readers to know.  Describe your characters, plot, theme, and genre all in terse, concise terms.

Then, when you have written your story, refer to your list and find each element in the story as written, checking it off the list when you find the actual place at which you’ve conveyed that information.  If any of these character and plot points doesn’t get checked off your list, you’ve gotten so wrapped up in the storytelling you forgot to put them in and need to find a place to insert that information as gracefully and dramatically as possible.

As before, Exposition is layered on top of Development and Inspiration.  So, even while you are working out how to unfold your story, that very process may inspire whole new concepts to include the your novel and also suggest new details that can enrich the ones you’ve already got.

Here’s some links to some of the best techniques for solid exposition:

Introducing Characters – First Impressions, Blowing the Story Bubble, and Genre- Act by Act.

One of the best tools for working out an exposition plan is the new Outline 4D program from Write Brothers.

4. Storytelling

Finally, we arrive at the last stage of story development.  This is the part where you actually put words on paper that you intend your readers to see.  (Keep in mind that for a screenplay, your readers are not the movie-goers but the cast and crew who will interpret your words and present them to the audience on your behalf).

Now there’s no right or wrong way to tell a story, but there are more and less effective and involving ways.  Of all four of the stages, this is the one most dependent on natural ability.  Let me say a few words about that:

You are only as good as you own talent – get over it!

Most cases of writers block occur not because authors don’t have any ideas but because they don’t think the ideas and/or the way they expressed them is good enough.

Hey, we all want to be celebrated in our own time – the toast of the town, the person everyone wants to know.  Dickens was a rock star of his age – revered by scholars and applauded by his fans, especially when he went on tour throughout England doing “one-man-show” performances based on readings from his “greatest hits” and acting out all the characters himself.

Not everyone can be Dickens.  Hardly anyone can be Dickens.  In fact, only Dickens could be Dickens and only Shakespeare could be Shakespeare.  I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.

Some folks, like the aforementioned, are notable for many fine literary works.  Others, like Mary Shelly, Margaret Mitchell, and Ralph Ellison really only had one superb novel in them.  (Ellison might have had two but his entire manuscript burned up in a house fire and he had to reconstruct it from memory).

Fact is, if you aren’t good or lucky enough to be a Dickens or a Shakespeare, you’ve go two choices:  1 – labor over one single work all of your life until it is as perfect as you can make it.  2 – Write a lot of books (or screenplays) and hope one of them turns out to be great.

It really depends on whether you are writing to ensure how you will be remembered, or writing because you want to share something with people today.

Either way, there’s still only one cardinal rule in the art of storytelling: Never bore your audience!  Someone once said, “They won’t remember what you said and they won’t remember what you did.  They’ll remember how you made them feel.”

To be sure, there are all kinds of tips, tricks and techniques you can use to improve and hone your storytelling skills.  Just don’t get hung up on whatever level of ability you’ve go.  Rather, make the most of it.  After all, the more you write, the better your writing will become.

Here’s a link on storytelling  that can help grease the wheels of self expression:

StoryWeaving Tips

Naturally, the less that gets in the way of your writing process, the more smoothly it can proceed.  When you write novels or screenplays, consider Movie Magic Screenwriter.  It is not just for scripts, but automatically formats your novel, script, or stage play while you write.

Conclusion

This brief introduction to story development just scratches the surface.  I’ll be back next month with another step in the process of writing your novel or screenplay.