Hope and Fear and Writing

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?