Writing Good Stories by James Van Pelt

I spent much of my career teaching high school writers. They know a lot! Certainly more than the first graders my wife teaches. Somewhere in the twelve years or so they grew and matured and experienced a fair amount of writing instruction.

Still, in general, they are terrible storytellers.

Why is that?

The schools don’t spend much time on narrative, unfortunately (and even less on poetry, which is educational maleficence as far as I’m concerned). But even if the students did get more story-writing instruction, it would be diluted with the other concerns in a writing classroom.

What the schools do shouldn’t matter, though, not as far as storytelling goes. The kids absolutely swim in story outside of the classroom. Even the nonreaders are exposed to an avalanche of story.

How many hours did they spend watching cartoons as a kid? I grew up with Looney Toons, Johnny Quest, Scooby Doo, the Flintstones. Those shows still could be found fifteen years ago, along with Pokémon, SpongeBob SquarePants, Rick and Morty, etc. The shows are for kids, but they contain all the storytelling elements, and it wasn’t long before they moved beyond cartoons to watch episodic television shows and movies. They live in a world absolutely stuffed with streamable story content!

And if the child was a reader, the opportunity to digest stories multiplied.

Can you imagine how knowledgeable they’d be if they spent the same number of hours over the years in chemistry, math or history?

They should know the rudiments.

Yet they couldn’t tell stories when they got to the classroom, at least not ones with the basics in place. They didn’t understand drama, narrative tension, character creation, dialogue, and the rest.

I haven’t found college students to be better, and motivated adults who join critique groups often struggle.

So, what’s the problem? Why is it so hard to tell a good story well?

Well, clearly, consuming story and creating story aren’t the same. We see good art all the time, but if you’re anything like me, who can barely manage drawing people who aren’t stick figures, none of that art exposure made us artists. We listen to music constantly too, but I don’t know the first thing about writing music.

Here’s how I started with high schoolers to jumpstart them into the world of creating story instead of just consuming story.

It’s an aspirational list of attributes:

• An authentic storytelling voice that sounds as if a real person with attitudes and opinions is speaking.
• An attention to specifics: a sense that the story is too accurate about details to be a lie.
• An attention to all five senses so the reader experiences the story’s world.
• Selection of the vital: the author knows what is important in action, description and dialogue, and leaves out the unimportant.
• Nicety of word choice: a tendency to choose interesting, vivid words (particularly in the verbs, but elsewhere also).
• A consistency of inventiveness: a repeated tendency to surprise the reader (in all areas of the writing).
• Flow or momentum: a sense that the story is going someplace and that there is purpose or urgency to the words.

And, of course, the most important attribute: Having something to say.

Since most stories are scene-centric, I started by having them write scenes. This is a good exercise since it’s low stakes. You’re not actually trying to tell a story yet. Try these:

• A child shovels snow from the driveway for the first time. Start when the child steps out the door, and finish when they come back in.
• A student finds a wallet in the school parking lot. Start with the discovery and end with what they do with the wallet.
• A homeowner accidentally locks themselves out of the house at midnight during a storm. Start with the door closing and finish with how they save themself.

Scenes provide the foundation of most stories.

I know my story-writing skills took a huge jump when I stopped thinking in terms of the entire narrative, and I shifted into writing scenes.

The other jump my writing took was when I realized that everything I’d learned about “conflict” in literature classes didn’t help me to create my own stories. My teachers said, “Conflict can be man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. society, man vs. himself . . “ etc.

We spent days discussing the conflict in every story, play or novel we read, so when I began writing stories, I knew conflict must be important. However, deciding that my story about an astronaut trapped in a drifting, powerless spaceship was “man vs. nature” didn’t help in the least. What do I do with that?

I did find a better definition, though, which made the difference.

Conflict is when someone wants something, something stands in the way, and something of value is at stake.

Oftentimes, when starting a story, I won’t know the answers to the implied questions those three statements ask. What started me writing might have been a mysterious situation or an interesting conversation or a character who fascinated me. That initial enthusiasm might take me a few pages, but I’d eventually bog down because I hadn’t figured out what my character wanted, what stood in the way, and why it was important to my character.

Once I knew those three elements, writing what followed became much easier. What I had to do was ask myself, “What will my character do next to get what they want?” And then I’d write the scene.

At the end of the scene, the character is either closer to their goal, farther away, or the action produced an unexpected result that neither advanced nor reversed forward progress, but somehow changed the character’s world anyway.

Oh, interestingly enough, of the three elements of a conflict, the one that ends up being most important is “something of value is at stake.” The “something of value” is valuable to the character. I might write a story where a high school student wants to be the state champion in the 100-meter dash. What stands in the way has tons of choices, but the readily apparent ones might include strong competition, other obligations that interfere with training, a teammate who sabotages our character’s efforts, etc. What gives the story its power, though, is why winning the state championship is important to our character. Is it something material, like they really want the gold medal (and why is that important to them? Have they always felt like a failure? Did their dad win the state championship years ago and now lords it over his child? Does our character really like someone they’re trying to impress?).

The story advances through scenes until a climactic moment where the character gets what they want, doesn’t get it, or some weird alternative that’s not a win or loss happens and yet it still ends the desire.

And finally, the character has some sort of reaction to all this based on how it impacted that part of the conflict, which says “something of value is at stake.” Oftentimes, this reaction broadens the story. Our example story about the 100-meter dash might tell readers about the value of hard work, or the futility of effort, or the beauty of competition, etc.

Good stories are hardly ever just about the events. They are about what the events mean to the characters, and by extension to the readers.

Writers share stories partly for the same reason anyone ever tells a story: they have something to say.

At least this is one path to writing a good story.

There are others.

 

James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. Recently he retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Choice awards. Years and years ago he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.