CREATIVE STORY RSS
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EDITING BY AUTHOR Stu Leventhal!
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Telling a story and writing a story are two different cans of beans. Often people with large personalities, who are the life of the party and natural, nonstop, chatter mouths, are advised; you should write some of your stories down. They’d be sure to make the best sellers list. When these wind bags sit down in front of a pen and paper they become quite miffed that the words don’t seem to flow as prettily, humorously or prolific. Sure a great story teller, living the fast life has an advantage over the rest of us scribes if he or she has a seemingly unending well of interesting adventures with which to dig into for inspiration. Still, developing better and better skills of literature and honing one’s craft of written communication through trial and error and experimentation is what makes great authors and great written stories.
Talking and writing are both similar means of communication. They both use the same words, for the most part. Although, talking makes use of slang a lot more than is permitted in most textual printed mediums. Speaking also utilizes popular local expressions that may need further explanation when converting them into letters and symbols on a page that may be presented for reading globally. Remember, a book or story could be read two hundred years after it was originally written. The reason the creative writer must be much more skilled than the vocally creative story teller is because the story teller has tons of advantages over the author despite the fact that they may be presenting the exact same tale.
Envision, for an instance, a man at a party with a crowd of his peers gathered around him as he tells the usually embellished story of how he bagged the big sword fish, or moose head stuffed and mounted over the fire place. First off, everyone probably has a few drinks in them and they are already in a jovial mood otherwise the experienced party story teller would not choose this time to engage them all. An author on the other hand has no idea who his audience will be or what mood the person will be in when he first picks up his story to read it. The verbal story teller is probably surrounded by at least a few friends who will be interested in hearing his story even if it isn’t all that exciting or funny simply because they know the story teller on a personal level. If that same story teller goes home and tries to type up the same tale he has to elevate the game a lot in order to capture and keep the attention of people who don’t know him from Adam.
The great writers have to be able to communicate as dramatically as any verbal story teller and they have to be able to reach, engage, keep entertained and communicate with a multitude of different audience types who they have never met. The spoken tale can be enhanced with hands gestures and facial expressions. The accomplished speaker knows when to pause for effect and when to raise his voice for emphasis. Most notably, a verbal tale can be adjusted as it is being told based on the responses an accomplished story teller is getting back from his audience. If he doesn’t get the preferred response he can rephrase his words instantly for effect. The story writer must find a way to compensate and still evoke the same emotional responses at the same level of intensity as the speaker. After all, punctuation like commas and exclamation points only go so far in producing responses in readers, overuse them and they will quickly lose all power. The good news is the creative writer does have one advantage over the verbal story teller; the advantage of being able to re-write and re-write as many times as it takes until his story is a perfect as he can make it. This is where creative story structure really comes into play.
Creative story structure is about putting all the pieces of a story together so others can read it and will understand it. Depending on the type of story, such as with an entertainment piece, you may also want your readers to enjoy it. Your goal for a satire may be to get your reader to think. With an informational piece you strive to teach with the hope someone will learn. A humor piece is meant to produce laughter. How you structure your story will be based on what you are trying to achieve.
Ideally, every; word, sentence, phrase, and idea you type should build towards the particular response you want your audience to have when they reach and read your very last words. This is easiest to see and understand in some genres like horror tales where the story is obviously meant to frighten. If the story revolves around a scary monster, the story never continues very long after the monster is killed. With jokes, everything builds up to the punch line. Once the punch line is delivered, nothing more is ever mentioned. Ultimately, this is how every story regardless of type, style or genre should be structured; to achieve the author’s desired response from his reader.
When trying to raise a certain response out of your audience, in each case, a different story structure, will deliver a better, more heightened result. A newspaper story could be meant to deliver empathy or it could be written to shock or it could be written to persuade voters or perhaps it is meant to simply report and record an event. It’s easy to see how each type of news story would be written using a different structure. The story structure chosen should help the writer tell the tale.
The problem comes into play, usually, because halfway through typing up a story writers realize they’ve chosen the wrong structure or a difficult structure or they just have an idea that doesn’t seem to fit the overall structure that everything else is already written in. Now the choice becomes whether the writer should start all over, scrap the new idea or try to; squeeze, hammer, chisel, sand and shape the idea so they can slide it into a slot in the story where it really doesn’t fit, belong or is needed. In this case the story structure is restricting the other elements of literature; theme, setting, characterization, plot and point of view. The story structure is reigning in the young, new, inexperienced or overly zealous accomplished author and probably in a good way. The story structure pulls everything together. No one aspect of the story can run amok without standing out and becoming obvious to even the basic bit of editing, revising or scrutiny.
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Talking and writing are both similar means of communication. They both use the same words, for the most part. Although, talking makes use of slang a lot more than is permitted in most textual printed mediums. Speaking also utilizes popular local expressions that may need further explanation when converting them into letters and symbols on a page that may be presented for reading globally. Remember, a book or story could be read two hundred years after it was originally written. The reason the creative writer must be much more skilled than the vocally creative story teller is because the story teller has tons of advantages over the author despite the fact that they may be presenting the exact same tale.
Envision, for an instance, a man at a party with a crowd of his peers gathered around him as he tells the usually embellished story of how he bagged the big sword fish, or moose head stuffed and mounted over the fire place. First off, everyone probably has a few drinks in them and they are already in a jovial mood otherwise the experienced party story teller would not choose this time to engage them all. An author on the other hand has no idea who his audience will be or what mood the person will be in when he first picks up his story to read it. The verbal story teller is probably surrounded by at least a few friends who will be interested in hearing his story even if it isn’t all that exciting or funny simply because they know the story teller on a personal level. If that same story teller goes home and tries to type up the same tale he has to elevate the game a lot in order to capture and keep the attention of people who don’t know him from Adam.
The great writers have to be able to communicate as dramatically as any verbal story teller and they have to be able to reach, engage, keep entertained and communicate with a multitude of different audience types who they have never met. The spoken tale can be enhanced with hands gestures and facial expressions. The accomplished speaker knows when to pause for effect and when to raise his voice for emphasis. Most notably, a verbal tale can be adjusted as it is being told based on the responses an accomplished story teller is getting back from his audience. If he doesn’t get the preferred response he can rephrase his words instantly for effect. The story writer must find a way to compensate and still evoke the same emotional responses at the same level of intensity as the speaker. After all, punctuation like commas and exclamation points only go so far in producing responses in readers, overuse them and they will quickly lose all power. The good news is the creative writer does have one advantage over the verbal story teller; the advantage of being able to re-write and re-write as many times as it takes until his story is a perfect as he can make it. This is where creative story structure really comes into play.
Creative story structure is about putting all the pieces of a story together so others can read it and will understand it. Depending on the type of story, such as with an entertainment piece, you may also want your readers to enjoy it. Your goal for a satire may be to get your reader to think. With an informational piece you strive to teach with the hope someone will learn. A humor piece is meant to produce laughter. How you structure your story will be based on what you are trying to achieve.
Ideally, every; word, sentence, phrase, and idea you type should build towards the particular response you want your audience to have when they reach and read your very last words. This is easiest to see and understand in some genres like horror tales where the story is obviously meant to frighten. If the story revolves around a scary monster, the story never continues very long after the monster is killed. With jokes, everything builds up to the punch line. Once the punch line is delivered, nothing more is ever mentioned. Ultimately, this is how every story regardless of type, style or genre should be structured; to achieve the author’s desired response from his reader.
When trying to raise a certain response out of your audience, in each case, a different story structure, will deliver a better, more heightened result. A newspaper story could be meant to deliver empathy or it could be written to shock or it could be written to persuade voters or perhaps it is meant to simply report and record an event. It’s easy to see how each type of news story would be written using a different structure. The story structure chosen should help the writer tell the tale.
The problem comes into play, usually, because halfway through typing up a story writers realize they’ve chosen the wrong structure or a difficult structure or they just have an idea that doesn’t seem to fit the overall structure that everything else is already written in. Now the choice becomes whether the writer should start all over, scrap the new idea or try to; squeeze, hammer, chisel, sand and shape the idea so they can slide it into a slot in the story where it really doesn’t fit, belong or is needed. In this case the story structure is restricting the other elements of literature; theme, setting, characterization, plot and point of view. The story structure is reigning in the young, new, inexperienced or overly zealous accomplished author and probably in a good way. The story structure pulls everything together. No one aspect of the story can run amok without standing out and becoming obvious to even the basic bit of editing, revising or scrutiny.
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Now the writing and the creativity involved becomes much more difficult for the author but the end results are a decisively easier story for the reader to follow and understand. When the reading is smooth and effortless the author’s messages come across louder and clearer which is the essence for creating a spectacular story.
Learning proper story structure is like putting on the final coat of polish. Story structure is about organizing the telling of a tale to achieve maximum effect on the reader. It is the true art to elevating ones writing to a higher literary level. Telling stories is the life blood of literature even the seemingly scholarly genres use story telling to make their points! |
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