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Where to Start?

18 Friday May 2012

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Start at the beginning, continue through to the end, then stop.

That’s pretty decent advice for storytellers (although it precludes more experimental narrative structures, like in the movie Memento) but if you’re struggling with where to start your story it doesn’t actually help. “Where do I start?” “At the beginning.” “But what is the beginning?” “Um…”

In real life, a person’s story begins at birth and ends at death. Or does it? Even for most of us, whose tales will likely not extend beyond our own personal terminal points, the beginning of our stories are not so clear. Is it at birth? Conception? When our parents met? What about the other direction? High school graduation? Military enlistment? The day we met our long-term partner?

A story, an artificial narrative, should be easier to define. Right? Maybe. Just like the question of where our personal narratives begin, we must ask when the story of our protagonist actually starts. Is it the birth of our main character? Probably not. Yes, a story about a person’s life can work (just look at Forrest Gump or The World According to Garp, but it’s a risky proposition. Maybe I’m just not exposing myself to the right stories, but the “person’s life as a story” seems to be a pretty rare narrative. Most people are simply not interesting until at least their mid-teens, anime and manga protagonists notwithstanding.

So, okay, I’ve established when we shouldn’t begin our story, but I haven’t really helped with advice for when we actually should.

One consideration to determine the start of your story is medium. Simply put, what form are you going to use to tell your story?

Let’s start short. For a short story, you want to begin your story as close to the end as possible. A general rule of thumb I was taught in my fiction writing class is to keep your short story all in the same day (or, you know, 24-hour period, if it happens at night). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”–an amazing story, by the way, that seems to have at least partially inspired The Hunger Games–occurs over the course of a few hours. But what a few hours those are!

For a longer narrative, say a novel or ongoing webcomic or serial, you want to start at the point the primary protagonist’s life changes in and intersects with the presumably longer narrative. Often, a longer narrative begins when someone enters or exits the primary protagonist’s life. If you’re going to make your main character an orphan, the day he or she becomes one works pretty well for this: it worked for the stories of Harry Potter and for Nobody Owens. On the other hand, if you want your protagonist’s life to change because something (or someone) entered it, the day that person (or thing) is introduced is also an excellent place to start. That’s what happened to Frodo Baggins and Antimony Carver, for example.

This, of course, is a very broad bit of advice, but it should help you at least conceptualize where in the narrative you start your story. If you’d like, we can revisit this topic in the future and look at more specific advice for starting out. I already plan on revisiting the topic at least thrice more: once to talk about the pros and cons of starting in medias res, once to talk generally about starting out in games, and once more to talk about starting games in medias res.

The start of your story is an important topic, after all, since in traditional print storytelling (short stories and novels) the beginning is absolutely the most important part. Without a good, solid beginning, you won’t be able to pull in an audience.

So definitely let me know where you’d like me to go with this idea in the future. And maybe I’ll share some of my own struggles with starting stories.

Come back next week when I look at the start of game narratives.

What You Know Can Help You Write

06 Friday Apr 2012

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On Tuesday, Ann talked about six techniques you can use to interact with your story without working on your story. Her post inspired me to change my plans for this week and write today’s subject. I’ll come back to finish up my thoughts on antagonists some time in the future.

It’s possible–likely, even–that you possess detailed knowledge about something, be it a hobby, an academic subject, or a specialized (or not) occupation. That is knowledge you can include pretty easily into some stories you might tell. It can even be the background, inspiration, or major element in a story.

Now, before I go much further let me clarify that I’m not advocating the old advice, “Write what you know.” No. I think that is generally terrible advice and instead advocate the “Write what you want to read” approach introduced to me by my friend Sean (who I think heard it elsewhere).

What I am saying is “What you know can inform what you write.” Some extreme examples of what I mean are John Grisham,  a lawyer who now writes bestsellers about lawyers doing stuff, or Tess Gerritsen who is a doctor most famous for her mystery novels starring a city medical examiner. You needn’t go quite that far, of course, to find inspiration in what you know, what you’ve done, and what you’ve lived.

Whatever you know, whatever you do (both occupationally and leisurely), you can integrate something from your life into your stories to give them that added touch of realism–or to heighten the drama.

The things you know and do might not be appropriate to all stories, genres, or media, of course, but you can almost certainly pull from your experiences to add gravitas, weight, and depth to your stories.

Let me indulge here in a personal example. Some years ago I worked in the on-call courier business in Portland, Oregon. I have all kinds of stories–vignettes, really–from my five years on a bike, in a car, and behind a desk in the Portland courier biz. For the longest time, I considered that universe–of snarky beer-swilling bike messengers and bitter beer-swilling car couriers–as a background to a movie screenplay, novel, or other long-form narrative. In truth, though, the nature of on-call delivery is more appropriate for episodic narrative. Were I to go back to that time I’d consider turning my experiences–and those of other messengers and couriers in Portland and elsewhere–into a webcomic or other short-form storytelling medium.

Instead of writing about being a courier, though–instead of writing what I know (or knew, really; I imagine much has changed in the past nine years)–I use those experiences to feed into my stories and settings I create today. No, I don’t focus the action around couriers, but over the body of my work it’s hard to not see couriers and messengers sneak in here and there–almost always in important ways. It’s something that is, or was, a significant part of my life, and it’s something I feel comfortable going back to and talking about.

Your own knowledge is probably very different from mine, of course, but my base advice remains the same. You know something you can include in a story. Slip it in when you can!

Stones in Wet Clay

16 Friday Mar 2012

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Sometimes a story just comes to you whole cloth, as a complete entity. All you have to do is write it down. It’s like your story is written on a wet clay tablet, and once you’ve written it all down it begins to solidify almost immediately. You still have time to modify it, of course, but it’s basically whole and done once you lay it out to dry.

That’s best-case scenario. In reality, it’s usually a little more difficult than that, right?

Sometimes you have to build your story from lots of little unconnected pieces. To keep with my analogy, rather than having a drying clay tablet of a single idea, you have a bunch of little idea stones you need to try to work together into some kind of aggregate of ideas.

The challenge you face is to bring together all these little stones of ideas and hold them together in such a way that they make your story—your slab of aggregate—stronger, more stable. The danger, of course, is that some of your ideas will create weaknesses that break your story.

Okay, maybe I’ve taken this metaphor a little too far. ;) Let’s bring this into the real world a bit.

Last week, I had an idea. Yes, okay, I have lots of ideas; a rare few of them are even pretty good. But I like this one in particular, partially perhaps because it revisits and partially fleshes out a world I’ve been thinking of for years and am only just getting close to exploring. The idea kept popping up in my mind at the most unexpected and inconvenient times, so, taking Ann’s advice (which I shared earlier) I wrote it down.

Now, it isn’t a big idea. It’s not even a proper scene; it’s just two characters standing together. But it’s a little idea stone that fits in well with all the other idea stones I’ve had for this world. So it might someday turn into something more. Even if it doesn’t, though, it creates something solid for the world I want to build. It is a little stone in the wet clay of the world around which I might someday mold both the rest of the world and a story that incorporates it. I need a lot more little idea stones, though, before I can create a story in this world, because right now all I have is chunky clay.

What I’m getting at is this: An idea isn’t usually a story unto itself, but it can be an excellent place to start building one. A story needs lots of ideas to make it work—ideas about characters, ideas about setting, ideas about plot. The longer the story, of course, the more ideas it needs.

The trick is to discover what the clay is that holds them all together and makes them into a cohesive whole.

Works in Progress

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Welcome to Story Papers! Mike and I enjoy concocting stories in a variety of formats, and we wanted a place where we could talk about the creative processes and storytelling–and learn from others, too. These are things that have and haven’t worked for us–and I must begin with the standard disclaimer that there is no one true path as a storyteller. Something I mention here may not work for you, but I hope in those cases, that in itself may bring its own inspiration.

What’s the difference between being a writer and being a storyteller? Writing encompasses everything from how-to articles to fiction, whereas storytelling is a specific piece of that pie, and usually includes writing as a medium, but it certainly doesn’t have to. In my case, I’ve had stories in my head for as long as I can remember, and I’ve tried to express them in various prose fiction (flash, short stories, novels), roleplaying games, and even illustrations. I’ve found novels to be my true love in storytelling, and despite a difficult and identity-altering burn out a few years ago, I’m returning to them. I know now that I need a different kind of relationship with them than I have in the past, with less of a focus on getting published (and all that entails), and more of an approach of playing around and experimenting.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

One of my latest experiments has been re-approaching the same scene seeds or situations over and over (how many of us do this for real life moments?). Each time, I change the point of view, the dialogue, the overarching theme, and even the background.  It’s incredibly inefficient and messy and I have scene bits scattered between physical notebooks, cloud documents, and hard drive documents….

I’m loving it.

You’ll see that technique here as well. Improving a craft is about experimenting and pushing beyond our perceived capabilities, and we may broach a topic one week only to revisit it from a completely different (and contradicting) viewpoint shortly after. You won’t find a lot here about publication, marketability, time management, or the nuts and bolts of grammar, but rather a focus on creativity/creation in storytelling and activities that encourage (or discourage) that.

We aim to update twice a week on average. Any more than that and I feel like we’re both distracting ourselves and you from the stories we all want to tell.