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Short story writing- Part ISLAMABAD:
Flashback
An essay always has an introduction, body and conclusion and is divided into paragraphs. The essay can largely be judged by the quality of the descriptive text it contains. You can create high-quality descriptive text by ample use of animated verbs, adverbs and adjectives.
Story writing— baby steps
Go back a few lessons, and you will recall that brainstorming is a necessary prewriting step for any piece of prose. You already know how to brainstorm and then prioritize your ideas when you are writing an essay upon any topic. If your essay happens to be a story, you can take your pre-writing process one step further. I like to call this step the “story flowchart”, where you can plan out your story in greater detail and make sure that you don’t get different parts of the story jumbled up. Your flowchart also helps you maintain a rational sequence of events in your story, and the best part is, you can always add in more ideas as you make the flowchart. This way, any new ideas popping into your head can make their way right into the story, without you even having to create a fresh mind map or thought web etc.
You can see an old 5 Ws + H map of a simple story, “A rainy summer day”. I have already isolated the better ideas and prioritized them.
Heres how it goes
Now, on top of any rough piece of paper, draw a little circle. This will be the beginning of your story. Now, keeping your mind map/ thought web (which you made earlier) as a guide, and according to order of priority, start making a flow chart. Add subsequent circles below the first circle, draw lines from them, and jot down the events of the story as they should come in sequence. If any more new ideas are coming into your head, jot those down on the paper, making sure that they follow the sequence of your story’s events. If you feel a part of your story should come at some other stage or shouldn’t be there at all, you can always slash it off the paper or erase it and add it at a different position along the story chart. See how a flow chart begins to form on your paper?
My story flow chart isn’t done yet, but you can see that I have my old ideas already there (in blue), but I’ve added more new ideas too (in red). If I felt that the space around a circle was too small to write in, I jotted down an important event in between two circles (connected with the green line).
So you see? It doesnt really matter if youre not neat about your flow chart: after all, its rough work.
The best part
With appropriate time and practise, you will develop enough confidence to directly create a flow chart and do away with your mind-map/thought web exercise in your prewriting strategy! So what are you waiting for? Take out an old story mind map and start creating a story flow chart along its lines. See you next week. Bye!
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