Interested in Writing Fiction?

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Interested in Writing Fiction?

• A Crash Course in Creating Characters and
  Developing Plot

This Power Point is an optional resourceuse it
to help jump-start a story, improve character or
plot development in a story already underway, or
otherwise inform your magazine submissions.
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Characters

• How do you make them?
• How do you make them INTERESTING?

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Types
Try starting with a CHARACTER idea, not a plot
idea!
TIP!

• Flat (or Simple, Secondary, Static)
• Round (or Complex, Primary, Dynamic)
• Need to Be
• Believable, Real
• Consistent
• Distinctive

Worst beginner faults characters who are all
alike (cant tell one from the other), or are
generic.
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Flash Fiction

• Look at The Poets Husband character
  development.
• Look at other pieces what do you think of this
  micro fiction?

5
Try a verbal character sketch now
Sometimes it helps to LITERALLY draw the
character!

• I.e., invent someone.
• A person who will be with you all semester.
• At least 3 paragraphs.

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Look again at your character sketch.

• What were you doing? Your character is FLAT!
  BORING! GENERIC! 2-dimensional!
• Look at questions in Harmonious Confusion and TRY
  AGAIN!
• http//www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/cinichol/Creati
  veWriting/323/HarmoniousWhole.htm

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Plot

• What is it?
• How do you make one?

How do you make a GOOD one?
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What is the difference between an essay or a work
of expository prose and a story?

• Essays generally have a thesis, are primarily
  factual and reflective (not dramatic), are
  narrated by the actual author, and are usually
  structured as traditional, a-temporal arguments.
• Stories dont have a thesis, are primarily
  dramatic and fictional, are narrated by an
  invented character, and have temporal structures.

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HEY!

• Dont confuse a first-person narrator of a
  story with the author of the story!

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Plotting a Story
This question linked to CHARACTER a stronger
story. Consider Cathedral.

• What's a plot?
• A sequence or pattern of events.
• What sets a story in motion?
• A QUESTION is posed, explicitly or
  implicitly, and you want to know the answer!
• Or a balanced situation
  becomesunbalanced! Some
• sort of equilibrium is disturbed.
• Keep in mind overall estimated or intuited length
  (remember in media res).

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PlotDont Plod! Building Suspense
Students almost NEVER use this particular
resource.
SETTING can also reveal character.

• Introduce additional narrative questions. Create
  multiple obstacles, physical or emotional.
• Control the rate of revelation. Slow pace
  interior monologue, description, dialogue,
  exposition. Fast pace action, answers to
  narrative question.
• Provide false clues what false clues might have
  been added to the the student stories weve read
  so far?
• Develop sub- or parallel-plots which delay
  revelation in the main plot.
• Consider creating your backstory gradually. Don't
  give main characters full story immediately. Let
  it evolve.
• Provide powerful IMAGERY which heightens
  tensions.

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What else is important to plot?
Note many students are not aware of where their
scenes stop and start, and their transitional
passages are consequently muddy
over-elaborated, bogging the whole story down.

• Scene Development
• A unit of time and place in which (usually)
  important action takes place.
• Can be like mini-stories within the larger story.
• Scene transitions
• Provide a simple extra space on the page. This is
  common these days.
• Transitional phrases.
• Jump cuts. Allowing for ellipses, intuitive
  connections, leeeaaaps (cut out needless
  exposition and crud).

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Helpful Plot Devices

• Flashbacks
• Foreshadowing
• Parallel or intersecting plots or sub-plots
• False leads
• Hooks

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What weve been examining so far is the
traditional, linear, rising action plot
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Hook triggering action or complicating
action or narrative question or twist
Crisis
Standard rising and falling action
Increasing tension
X
False clue
Partial answer
X
Hook
X
Introduction of minor parallel plot
X
Hook
What SLOWS Pace?
X
Flashback
X
Hook
X
Dialogue. Internal monologue. Description.
X
Hook
Resolution
What SPEEDS pace?
X
X
ACTION!
X
Scene-setting (exposition)
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• But there are other structural
• possibilities !

And each carries with it its own worldview,
understanding of time, vision of human desire
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Alternate Plot Structures
See the OBrien story you read.
Framed narrative. Montage. Chronologically
backwards plot. (Yesbackwards. See Lorrie
Moores How to Talk to Your Mother.) Static
plots. (See experimental stories by Robbe
Grille.) No plot (as in pure interior
monologue).
Different plots can express alternative ways of
experiencing TIME and REALITY!
Circular plot
Circular plot
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And they all lived happily ever after.

• Now thats a dumb way to end a story.

Do better than that
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Hemingways notion of the
The Iceberg Principle
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• Let only the tip of the iceberg showthe right
  details will evoke the great mass of what lies
  beneath.
• Show, dont tell.
• Provide fewer, but better, details. (Less is
  more.)
• Avoid platitudes, like the ones Im using here.

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• It roars down the road. The engine howls, a
  caged animal begging to be set free plumes of
  bronze smoke blast skyward with every scream.
  Dust billows in airborne whirlpools behind
  gargantuan tires. Its ominous shadow bears down
  upon everything trapped in its destructive path.
  Ever closer it approaches, once a mere speck on
  the horizon this beast becomes a veritable
  leviathan.

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• It roars down the road, The engine howls, a
  caged animal. begging to be set free Plumes of
  bronze smoke blast skyward. with every scream.
  Dust billows in airborne whirlpools behind
  gargantuan tires. Its ominous shadow bears down
  upon everything. trapped in its destructive path.
  Ever closer it approaches, once a mere speck on
  the horizon this beast becomes a veritable
  leviathan. Once a mere speck on the horizon, ever
  closer it approaches.

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• Silences arent silent.

Silences arent nothing.
Being good with words means knowing when to shut
up.
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Prose Style
Prose Style
See Blackboard Course Documents for
sheet. Also at http//www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instr
uct/ cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/Style.htm