Today’s article will be a kind of a guide for all newcomers to the writing workshop who are eager, but do not yet know how to write a story . In it, I tried to outline the important stages and give fundamental recommendations that will allow newly minted writers to avoid annoying and gross mistakes when working on their first literary text. Best essay writing company My Premium Essay.

It is no secret that when a person first sits down to write and sees a blank sheet in front of him, chaos and confusion usually reign in his head. Often he has little idea of ​​what and how he will do, where the story will lead and how it will end; in the overwhelming majority of cases, the novice author does not even imagine a clear sequence of actions. Knowing this firsthand, I have prepared an article whose sole purpose is to explain to everyone how to write their first story.

HOW DOES IT USUALLY WORK?

I wrote my first story in one evening. Yes, yes, I needed one single evening in order to decide on the topic, not really think about anything, sit down and write my first story.

This happened thanks to Stephen King’s book How to Write Books: A Memoir of Craft (the Literary Workshop blog has a detailed analysis of it ). In it, the King of Horrors offers the reader the following entertaining exercise: sit down and, without delay, write an action-packed story about a conditional couple in love – Dick and Jane. The main condition of the exercise is that you cannot think about anything in advance; the plot, denouement and twists and turns should be born by themselves already in the process of writing the text (this method is called “spontaneous writing” in literary usage ). The condition, in my opinion, is rather pretentious, but following King’s lead, I wrote my first story in just a couple of hours.

Naturally, this work was not subjected to any editing, but it was quickly posted on the Internet and was greeted very warmly – for the most part, good reviews accumulated an order of magnitude more than bad ones. And this is despite the fact that in the course of writing I, as they say, “suffered”, and a huge chunk of the text turned out to be devoted to the events of the past, which had practically nothing to do with the main conflict of history. Well, I also remember the craziest ending, in which a five-year-old child killed one of the parents with office scissors (now they understand how King comes up with such moments?) It’s hard to believe, but someone even praised such a story on the Internet! Although it was written, in essence, at random. There was no plan in my head, no clear understanding of the direction in which the story was moving, and how it would end at all. There was not the slightest prerequisite for anything adequate and readable to grow out of this adventurous venture. Therefore, I sincerely wish that you approach the writing of your first text with at least minimal knowledge of the process. And in order for your first literary experience to be successful, I tried to clearly outline the sequence of actions with which you need to start writing the text.

HOW TO WRITE A STORY?

When working on any literary work (including a story), three main stages can be distinguished: preparation , writing, editing . If one of the stages is skipped or not worked out properly, it is at least naive to expect that the result will be a cake. However, seeing in front of you and performing simple local tasks, it is quite possible to conquer even the highest and seemingly unattainable peak step by step. All in your hands.

PREPARATION (DRAWING UP A STORY PLAN)

Preparation, in my opinion, is the most important and defining stage in the work on any literary work. Your result will ultimately depend on how well and scrupulously you have thought of everything. Preparation for writing consists of the following elements: selection of material, development of the structure of the text, drawing up a plan . Moreover, all three processes, if necessary, can be carried out in the mind, even without the use of notebooks and writing utensils: you can remember or come up with a certain plot, break it up into scenes, estimate their sequence, and then, having approved the plan of the work in your mind, sit down to implement it on paper. However, at first, I highly recommend writing down your plan.

Before you sit down at the monitor or at the writing-book, you should think carefully about some points.

• What is the purpose of writing text? Just to entertain the reader or convey some idea (moral)?
• What will the story be about? What is its theme? What’s the main idea?
• Who will be the protagonist?

You may be intimidated by these questions. But to give clear answers to them means directing thinking in the right direction. To begin with, it is worthwhile to firmly decide what kind of thing we are writing. If this is purely entertaining reading, then the emphasis should be on the plot, try to saturate it with interesting and unexpected episodes as much as possible. If we are trying to convey an idea to the reader, then we need to think carefully about how to implement it: choose such a plot and such characters that allow you to reveal the idea as fully and vividly as possible. Further, when we have decided on the goal, we need to compare it and the plot that we have in mind, and decide whether the plot corresponds to the tasks that we set for it. And if it does not match, decide how you can correct it.

For example, with our story we want to convey to the reader the idea of ​​universal justice – good always triumphs over evil. However, our plot is more like a thermonuclear action movie with a sea of ​​blood and corpses. Obviously, this is not the best story to illustrate ideas of justice. Then we need to decide – either we are writing a purely entertaining action movie, or we are choosing a more suitable plot for our idea.

Now is the time to sit down at the monitor or at the writing-book. However, it is too early to start writing. It’s time to sketch out at least the simplest plan for the future story. How it’s done? Everything is very simple. First, we write down the main idea so that it is always before our eyes, and below we briefly describe the sequence of events in our history. At first, it’s best to stick to the “more is better” rule. Do not be afraid to put in the plan all your ideas regarding the text, later you will reject all unnecessary, leaving the most successful ideas, which will become a solid basis for your story. In the future, as you gain experience and skill, you can reduce the volume of your plans or even switch to a spontaneous letter, but first it is better to write everything in detail in advance so as not to lead the story into the jungle.

Here I consider it my duty to warn you that at the preparatory stage you will certainly have a lot of difficulties. And this is good, because it is better to solve them before writing, and not to suffer in the process. The main problems are the lack of intelligible transitions between scenes, the absence of character names, names of places and objects, and many other details. However, the preparatory stage was created in order to come up with the names and descriptions of all characters, geographical names, fill in the gaps in the storylines in advance. Thus, the better you do at this stage, the easier and faster it is to write your story.

As a result of the above work, you should have a plan in your hands, in which:

• the idea of ​​the story is clearly indicated;
• all events in history are briefly but consistently described;
• the names of all the characters were invented, their descriptions were given;
• names of all places mentioned in history were invented.

Agree, not so much. However, this is the minimum that will allow you to go through the next stage as comfortably as possible. If you are interested in a more detailed algorithm for working on a plan, read the article “ How to write a work plan? “  For more experienced authors, I recommend the extremely important article” Preparing to write a book “, which examines the intricacies and secrets of preparatory work on a work of art.

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