I’ve been tutoring creative writing at UQ for the last few months, going back to some early principles and trying to explain them in different ways. Sometimes it takes a particular example or way of phrasing a technique for it to click with a particular student, but you can always see the epiphany and the excitement when the see how stories work.
I know a few things about writing, but I read how-to books voraciously because I want other people’s phrasing and techniques in my toolkit for things like this. One of the winners, this time around, was this description of how scenes/stories work from Robin Laws Beating the Story:
More importantly, the important thing to keep in mind that he drops a little later in the chapter:
We don’t just want to know what happens next. We’re rooting for an outcome.
I don’t often do this kind of planning up front, but it’s the first thing I turn to every time a scene or story isn’t working. What do I want the reader to hope for? What result do I want them to fear?
