Posts

Showing posts from March, 2010
Short Stories – Part 3 The Three Elements – Dialogue, Narrative, Description The stories you write will be nothing without good dialogue and sentence structure. New writers tend to do two things with dialogue: they write too much, or they write too little. Finding the right balance isn’t easy, but it will come with practice. Having the right amount of dialogue balanced against your narrative and your descriptions will make for a better, tighter story. Let’s take a closer look at Dialogue. Dialogue Your characters help drive the story forward, and what they say and how they say it is vital. As already pointed out, too many novice writers make the mistake of writing too much dialogue. This tends to make the story clunky. This not only slows the story, but it can hinder the entire piece and deter a reader altogether. The idea is to keep the reader interested, so dialogue is also there to help characterize and impart necessary information. Incidentally, revealing information through dialog
Writing Short Stories Part 2 Structure In the second part of this look at short stories, we’ll examine their structure, themes and conflict, motivation and characterisation. As already established, every story requires a beginning, middle and an end, and this is particularly true for longer stories such as novels, but a tight structure is just as important when constructing short stories. The easiest way to define a story structure is to think of a mountain range which your character has to climb in order to reach the summit – he has to journey through peaks and troughs, highs and lows, before he reaches his goal. This means as he climbs towards this, he’ll come into conflict or a barrier to prevent him from reaching is goal, then he’ll climb a bit further, another barrier, and so on, until at last, that final moment when he achieves what he set out to do. Short stories don’t necessarily need this kind of in-depth configuration, but with a basic structure in place, you can open your st