Short Story One -- Week Two

Your draft is due this Friday, February 27!  Get working!

Sparkler Magazine

Introducing: Sparkler!

Sparkler is a new e-magazine that two author friends of mine are starting.  (Check out their website here.) Their aim is to provide clean YA flash fiction for teens who want to read good, uplifting, creative fiction.

They also want to provide a place for teens to showcase their own creativity, which means that some issues will be seeking flash fiction written by teens!  We'll be writing a bit of flash fiction at the very end of this course, with the aim that you could craft a story good enough to submit to Sparkler for possible publication.

Sparkler will release quarterly.  Its first issue will drop this spring, but it will have only adult authors featured.  (I may or may not be one of them.)  They do have two introductory stories available right now, so readers (and authors) can get a feel for how good flash fiction works.  You can read those here.  The summer issue will be open for fiction submissions by teens in a few months.

The editors also plan to include reviews of clean YA books in every issue of the magazine, along with the new flash fiction stories.  And they want those reviews to be written by teens.  

Want to have your review(s) of a clean YA book (or books) you love featured in this magazine?  Check out this page to figure out how to do that.

You might also want to sign up for their newsletter.  Basically every page I linked to above has a spot where you can do exactly that.

Short Story One -- Week One

Well, we've spent six weeks learning what a story needs, how a story is built, and how to find ideas for stories.

Time to put that into practice.

You know those two fairy tale retellings you came up with last week?  Pick one of them and flesh it out into a full story.

This is a two-week project, so your finished first draft is due Friday, February 27.  And then you'll give them to me, and I'll read them and save them for later.  We won't actually work on revising them until mid-March, after a lesson on tips and tricks for revising and polishing your work.  I'll give you feedback on them by March 2 and again after you have revised them.

(Yeah, I changed up our schedule a bit again.)

How long should these short stories be?  How about between 2,000 and 10,000 words?  If they're longer than that, I won't have time to read them and give you feedback.

Since I am asking for a first draft, often called a rough draft, please be aware that these do NOT have to be beautiful.  They need a beginning, a middle, and an end.  They should make basic sense.  Don't worry about how pretty your writing is, or how electrifying your dialog is, or how fascinating your characters are.

My favorite piece of writing advice, of all time, is about first drafts.  Keep this in mind:

(I'm writing a first draft of a novel right now myself, and it's definitely just a box filled with sand so far.)

Gathering Ideas

Where do you get your ideas?

Every writer (and artist) gets that question once in a while, usually from someone who wants to learn to be a writer (or artist) themselves.

I don’t know about other writers (or artists), but my answer is:

Everywhere!

I get ideas for characters, plots, and settings when I am reading books, watching movies, looking at art, baking, cooking, sewing, folding laundry, or washing dishes.  I get ideas when I’m learning about history, learning about places far away, or learning more about the place I live in.

Many writers (and artists, I expect) keep an “idea journal” of some kind.  It’s a notebook or journal where they write down anything they think they might want to use for a future project.  Names, cool words, ideas for titles, facts, pictures, anything!  

You don't neeeeeeeeeeeeeeed to keep an idea journal, but you might want to try it.

Story Ideas on Demand

If you’re suddenly confronted with a school assignment where you’re supposed to write a story with little or no prep time, that does take some practice.  But if you remember that a story needs a protagonist with a want/need, an antagonist with a want/need, a setting, and a plot arc, that gets a little easier.  Grab a couple of character types, give them each a want/need that somehow are opposed to each other, plop them in a setting, and figure out how they go from the beginning through the middle to the end.

You might think I'm joking when I say that's all you really need.  I'm literally not.  When I got asked to write a book for a multi-author series two and a half years ago, I sat down and figured out which of the suggested fairy tales I could pop into a western setting, what kind of protagonist I could have and what she would want, what sort of antagonist would oppose her and her needs, and how the basic plot could go.  And that was all I needed to know in order to commit to retelling "The Ugly Duckling," which eventually became the novella A Noble Companion.

If you have an ideas notebook already, then you can draw from that for names of characters, plot ideas, settings, and so on.  It really helps you write better stories more quickly because you’re not starting with no ideas and nothing to work with.


Your Turn!

Assignment One: Imagine you're in my shoes from a couple years ago!  Figure out a protagonist with a want/need, an antagonist with a want/need, a setting, and a basic plot arc (beginning, climax, ending) for a retelling of your choice of TWO of the following fairy tales.  Put each one in a separate comment.

Cinderella
Beauty and the Beast
Rumplestiltskin
The Elves and the Shoemaker
Little Red Riding Hood
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Plot

Any story has three main parts: the Beginning, the Middle, and the End.

That may seem simplistic, but it’s true.  Think about some famous and wonderful stories for a minute, and break them into those pieces.

At the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker lives on a farm on Tatooine.  In the middle, he leaves the farm and joins the Rebellion.  At the end, he destroys the Death Star and returns a hero.

At the beginning of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Robin Hood is a happy-go-lucky forester.  In the middle, he rebels against Prince John and his corrupt henchmen and becomes an outlaw.  At the end, he helps restore King Richard to the throne and is pardoned.

At the beginning of Peter Pan, Wendy and John and Michael live at home.  In the middle, they leave home and fly to Never-Neverland with Peter Pan.  At the end, they defeat Captain Hook and return home.

At the beginning of Cinderella, Ella lives happily with her parents.  In the middle, she lives unhappily with her step-mother and step-sisters.  At the end, she marries the prince.

Usually, the beginning and the end are shorter than the middle.  The beginning and most of the middle build up toward the climax, or high point of the story.  Luke attacking the Death Star; Robin Hood helping King Richard confront and defeat Prince John; Peter Pan arriving to rescue Wendy and her brothers from the pirates; and Ella dancing with the prince – those are the climaxes of their stories.  After the climax, the rest of the story is just about wrapping up what happens to everyone because of what happened during the climax.  We call that the “denouement” or “falling action”

 

Some stories are simple and build steadily toward the climax like a straight line.  Only one big thing happens during the story, like Cinderella finally getting to go to the ball.

Some stories are not so simple.  There might be lots of small things that are more like stair steps leading up to the climax.  Robin Hood stops some bad guys from beating a poor man, confronts Prince John and his henchmen and escapes, falls in love and sneaks into the castle to see Maid Marian, captures some bad guys, wins an archery tournament, gets captured, is rescued, and rescues King Richard.  In between each big and exciting thing that happens, things get a little calmer again, but the action is always steadily climbing up and up toward the climax. 

We call each of those steps “rising action.”

These are obviously simplified diagrams, but they give you the general idea of how a plot works, at least.

Now, what drives a plot?  Problems and conflicts.  Remember what we talked about a few weeks ago, about a protagonist and an antagonist wanting or needing different things, and that creates conflict?  Conflict creates a plot.

Anne Shirley wants to be accepted and loved for who she is, but Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert want to adopt a boy.  Anne Shirley wants to forget her hair is red, but Gilbert Blythe teases her about her red hair to get her attention.  Anne Shirley wants to be best friends with Diana Barry, but Mrs. Barry thinks Anne got Diana drunk and forbids them to be friends. 

Problems can also create plots.  In the movie Mary Poppins, Jane and Michael Banks are so naughty that no nanny will take care of them for more than a few weeks before leaving.  Their parents have a problem: they need a new nanny for their children.  When Mary Poppins answers the advertisement for a new nanny, her ways of caring for children cause some new problems… but ultimately help solve the family’s real problem, which is that the parents don’t spend enough time with their own children.

Your Turn!

Assignment One:  Can you figure out the plot structure of these stories?  Put your answers in separate comments, one for each story.

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"
"Jack and the Beanstalk"
"Beauty and the Beast"

Be sure to include the beginning, rising action, climax, falling action, and ending.

Assignment Two: Take a look at the sets of protagonists and antagonists you created back during the first week of class, during the Conflict lesson.  Pick three pairs and come up with three different problems for each pair based on their conflicting wants and needs.  Make them the kinds of problems that it might be interesting to write a story about.  No need to share these here yet, but hang onto them -- we'll be working with them more in the future.