fiction tips

By Liz Matthews

“‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot.” –E.M. Forster

The conflict in a story is what makes your reader want to keep reading. In order to write a successful story, your characters need to desire something, and that desire needs to motivate them to act. For example, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wants to get home. This desire compels her to follow the yellow brick road. As you develop your characters through action, you will inevitably create conflict. Conflict is a struggle or ongoing battle between your character and some outside force.

By Liz Matthews

“A writer should know how much change a character has in his pocket.” – James Joyce

By Liz Matthews

Prompts

Do you have trouble deciding what to write about? Does the blank page or screen make your mind go blank? Here are a few ways to jumpstart your writing:

By Geoffrey Gevalt
YWP Editor

All of us are storytellers. We tell stories in the halls to our friends in the morning after a long weekend. We tell our teachers great yarns as to why the assignment wasn't completed. We tell our parents or their friends something memorable to keep them from asking so many darned questions.

But for some reason many of us have trouble putting those stories onto paper; somehow we never think they're good enough, or we can't find that conversational tone or we just don't feel like it.

This piece is aimed at offering you some guideposts for writing a short story that is both memorable AND fun to write.

Establishing setting is an important part of any writing process. The author must decide where and when the events will unfold before starting the piece. Setting helps the reader understand the characters and their actions, and can add another layer to the story. Here are a few things to keep in mind when developing the setting for your piece:

Excerpted and edited from a 2005 YWP aricle
By T. Alan Broughton

• Your dreams can inspire your writing; use your imagination to turn real experiences into fictional moments, images, and stories.

• Begin with what you want or need to write, not with someone else's ideas.
• Use words and language to intrigue your reader.
  

Excerpted and edited from a YWP article
By Chris Bohjalian

• Before you begin writing, decide which viewpoint you will use. First-person and Third-person are most common.

• First-person offers an idiosyncratic voice and great intimacy. But it also limits just how much knowledge novelists can share with their readers, because they can only offer the information their narrator can know at the time.
• Third-person allows novelists to jump in and out of any character's head whenever they want, but it may feel more emotionally distant than first person. Moreover, the omniscient narrator probably won't have a voice that is especially eccentric.

By Geoffrey Gevalt
The old man reached for the doorknob without an inkling as to what he was about to experience …

Now that I've got your attention, it's time to talk about writing a narrative.

Narrative writing is fun; it's the act of telling a story, having a conversation with your reader. You can find good narrative writing in newspapers, magazines and books; it is used in letters or short stories, news stories or novels.

Excerpted and edited from a YWP article

By Howard Frank Mosher

• Write what you know.

• Get out of the classroom and explore every corner of where you live. This can help when creating a setting for your stories.

Excerpted and edited from a YWP article

• As a reader, think about what you like to read.

• Write about a subject you know really well.
• Write using a style or genre that you enjoy reading.

By Philip Baruth
There’s more to J.D. Salinger than “The Catcher in the Rye.” Lots more. Some of Salinger’s best books involve a fictional family of child geniuses — the Glass family. Raised by vaudeville performers, the Glass children appear regularly on a cutesy radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child” — but in private, at home, these children wrestle with the deepest questions known to man, spiritual questions, questions about human nature and the role of art.