The Art of Writing Stories.

Is writing stories a craft or an art?

• When I first started writing stories, I was told it was a craft like building a rabbit hutch.

• But when I started to think about it, I thought well let’s analyze some stories. True enough many were well crafted and fulfilled the requirements, but the best had something else beyond the good structure. They had art.

What do I mean by art?

• Good question. At art college I was taught art is a concept made tangible through a material. Ironically when you look at the origins of the word originally it meant craft, but over the centuries we see the definition moving away from this, art now includes all those qualities that transcend craft. Back in 2012 Maria Popova in the Atlantic collected a short omnibus of definitions from artists, etc.

The Points of Art

• Madness• Beauty• The unknown• The means to unite people• The way to find oneself• Risk• The extra

ART IN THE STORY

• True you must craft the story. It must fulfil the requirements for publication, but you must factor in ART for it to be something special. The first few sentences are not a pitch. Relax even in a small compass such as a short story you can afford to linger over description.

Serendipity

• The concept of serendipity is something to bear in mind. Take a risk once you have the semblance of a structure in mind or finished kow-towing to the conventions of your chosen genre. Mix it up. The success of Anton Chekhov was down to challenging society and literature.

Getting Ideas

• Edward de Bono has excellent methods for brainstorming. My favourite is to get a dictionary and at random select ten words. Use them to plot and for characterization. Lateral thinking takes you into the unpredictable world, even into the land of Edgar Allan Poe.

Go against yourself!

• Write a story from outside of your experience. • Naturalize the narratorial voice like method

actors do.• Research, but, as Oscar Wilde warned do not

over do the immersion into the location or character!

The Character.

• One single gesture like a brushstroke can delineate a character.

• A character in a story can be the whole story. Can be from the outside or from the inside, or both.

• You need not like your characters.

Narrative Voice

• The writer Stephen Hudson (Sydney Alfred Schiff) wrote novels in first person (I) , second person (you), third (he)person and even with a super-ego (He, She & I). Try to write stories in different persons.

• Be reliable or unreliable. There is no contract between you and the reader.

Sense of an ending

• The story can continue offstage or into another story.

• You can play with expectations. Sign post the ending then either reward or disappoint. You can end anywhere.

Humour

• A comic story is much more difficult to pull off than tragedy.

• Do not try too hard. Like all the great comics study the form of the great comic writers. Do not steal from them.

• Just because your friends laugh, is not enough. Study all kinds of humour.

• You are a sit down comic.

Tragedy

• Our existence is by definition tragic. Washing the dishes can be tragic. Robert Carver exploited that rich seam of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Sex

• Henry Miller and Anais Nin wrote pornography for its ownsake and incidental pornography like D.H. Lawrence. We live in the post-Kinsey Report Era, everything has been written about – mostly to shock. Describing in detail nose picking and eating snot is more shocking than describing fisting. So think of style more that crudity.

The Plot

• Imagine a story is a fish. If you cut out the plot it could still swim. It would still be a fish.

• If you have a plot in mind. Muck around with it. It is not the number 42 bus. You are free to go where you please