I'm getting ready to post a new story. My stories are always stream of consciousness writing style and I don't understand how people craft structural narrative or multi part stories.

Any advice?

Some find an outline helpful. Knowing in advance where the story is going helps organize a logical progression of events and prompts you to set the stage for things to come. It also helps keep you on track as you write so that your story doesn't wander off into the weeds. Seeing the skeleton of the story can help you give each part proper emphasis and length, too. You don't need to make the outline formal; it may all be in your head. If you see that a multi-part story is appropriate, the outline can also help you spot where each part should end may suggest a cliff-hanger ending for each part to make the reader want to come back for the next.

Sandi

Poorpupnoballs (imported) wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2015 3:35 am I'm getting ready to post a new story. My stories are always stream of consciousness writing style and I don't understand how people craft structural narrative or multi part stories.

Any advice?

Start off with the very short story and then just imagine someone asking you, "Really? What happened next?"

Usually for me, it's all in figuring out what the ongoing struggle is going to be, and what the underlying themes are going to be. For my longer "My Life As A Girl" story, the ongoing struggle is "I want to be female, and just woke up with a vagina, but I am socially TERRIFIED of anyone knowing about it, and am trapped by a complex emotional web of self-doubt and dysphoria. Will I be able to overcome it and be my true self eventually?" And for my longer "Me & My Best Friend" story, the ongoing struggle is "My best friend just changed me into a girl magically. This makes me get bullied, teased, question everything I thought I knew about myself, and have a very hard new reality to adjust to." And once I had those basic premises in my head, really it was just a matter of building the story up from there. If you have a strong premise with complex issues that can't be solved simply, which involve complex multifaceted characters dealing with struggles in a complex multifaceted world, you almost need to write a whole lot to sort the whole thing out. When you develop a complex problem, it takes a LONG time to work toward a solution, and people will keep reading because they want to know where you're going with it.

That's really the key to longer writing, is just keeping it moving. Keep the characters growing and learning, keep the plot progressing toward something. Make it feel like the characters are trying to learn, trying to figure the world out, trying to reach a state of happiness within themselves, trying to work toward some eventual conclusion, trying to find a resolution to their struggle. (I've found that basing characters off of people I've known in my real life, and events that have happened in my real life, helps, because it makes the entire story less one-dimensional and more complex.) Really, the key is just making an emotional connection with people. Make the characters interesting, set up a world that makes the reader curious as to how it will turn out in this complex soup of uncertainty, and then just keep going. People will keep reading, and can get very emotionally invested even, if they want to know what happens to those characters.

For me, the best stories to both read and write introduce a conflict right at the beginning. Then the protagonist finds their situation getting further and further out of their control. At some point the character fails and finds himself or herself lost and seemingly defeated.

What makes the story compelling is taking the character from that point of utter despair and loss and have them step by step pull themselves up out of the hole. An epic story may have this happen to the character many times, in subtle ways.

Think of The first Star Wars movie (episode IV) from 1977. Luke just wants to be a star pilot, but finds his family won't let him. He then loses the droid he is supposed to be looking after, then finds himself mugged and beaten in the desert. He then finds a new friend in Obi-Wan, who asks him to help save the galaxy, but Luke is not ready. He returns home to discover his Aunt and Uncle have been killed and his homestead in ruins. He is at his lowest point.

He then decides to travel with the old man to Alderan, but when they get there find it destroyed and their ship is captured by the Death Star. The group barely escapes capture, and choose to attempt to rescue the princess. But during their escape they are hunted, nearly killed in a trash compactor, and Luke's new mentor, Obi Wan, is killed. Luke is again struck low by this defeat.

Luke then finds himself and his new friends tracked back to the Rebel Base, and the Death Star has followed them intending to kill them all and blow up their planet. One of only a few star pilots on hand Luke is drafted to assist them. One by one he sees his friends destroyed by the empire as they make their suicidal run on the Death Star, all simply in hopes of saving his remaining friends back on the rebel base.

At last, Luke finds his courage and his purpose in life by finally believing in himself. He takes the shot and destroys the death star. The friend he made along the way (Han Solo) saves his life from Darth Vader, and they are all hailed as heroes.

Luke is constantly finding himself in deeper and deeper holes along his journey. What makes him interesting and a hero is that he keeps finding new ways to pull himself out.

Whether your story has multiple pitfalls for your character to face, or only one, he must overcome something, and in some way at the end, he is stronger for living through the ordeal.

In much simpler terms, dig a deep hole, toss your character in, and make him scratch and claw until he can climb back out. That is how to structure a story.

Maybe you need to see little daily life aspects. While you write the draft you could include more characters that appear to be not so important but as the story is developing they became increasingly relevant. Catch the reader attention from unexpected things that could happen. Vary the place where the action happens. Give the characters differents shades, describe their physical features, personality and their minds. Once defined The characters and the initial storyline you will realise that both will evolve along the story in a natural way. If you want to extend the story think in new conflicts and situations that could happen in the everyday life.

Poorpupnoballs (imported) wrote: Wed Apr 01, 2015 3:35 am I'm getting ready to post a new story. My stories are always stream of consciousness writing style and I don't understand how people craft structural narrative or multi part stories.

Any advice?

First, write what pleases you. Write what thrills you, excites you. Write what in your secret heart of hearts fogs your glasses with steam and makes you sit in corners doing pleasurable things. Don't even worry that it isn't in the proper form.

Put the words onto paper. The most important act of writing a story - write it.

To repeat: Put the words to paper. That's the only way that you write successfully -- put the words down onto paper, or onto a computer screen. Write!

After that, remember that the reader doesn't have your same stream of consciousness. A reader is not you. So when the scene changes, create a paragraph. Set off the spoken words in quotes. All that punctuation is for the reader.

And then remember, all stories have some sort of dramatic climax -- Dostoyevsky started his "Metamorphosis" with the following line "One day Gregor Samsa woke to find himself to be a giant cockroach." and the story falls from that dramatic high to show us why Gregor Samsa was so afflicted.

Agatha Christie started a novel "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley, again," and that opens a chapter of thoughts on "going back" and "returning home." The great and stunning climax of that story coming in the penultimate chapter in a doctor's office, and then at the end in fire and regret.

If, like William Styron, you title a story "Sophie's Choice" then a character named Sophie has to make a decision of some importance.\

So write your story. (see how I repeated that first step -- write the story. Without writing it, there is no story.)

Do not worry about length but do have an end in mind.

Finally, Don't worry about writing like anyone else in the world. You aren't William Shakespeare and you shouldn't try to be him. Neither are you Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling, or anyone else.

Then throw your little darling lambkins to the wolves (for readers and critics are wolves) and learn from that.