Creative writing

Last updated Jun 28, 2022 Edit Source

• Seed

• Creative writing is about creating ’literature’ and not genre stories: it is more so a question of quality than content
• Writing is an innate talent: writing is a tool that can be honed and practiced
• No real world application for creative writing: almost all conversations, media, arguments, involve some form of convincing the other side! what better way to do that than through story telling
• The riddle of storytelling
  • Imagine two groups of early humans competing for the same resources who lived pretty much the same
  • The first group gossiped and told stories during their leisure time while the second group continued working
  • We know the first group survived because that’s us! So why is story telling so evolutionarily beneficial? It’s a form of simulation (see also: behaviourist approaches to consciousness)

• Freytag’s Pyramid
  • Exposition
  • Rising Action
  • Climax
  • Falling Action
  • Denouement
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories
• Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” (story wheel)
  • Character is in a zone of comfort
  • But they want something
  • They enter an unfamiliar situation
  • Adapt to it
  • Get what they wanted
  • Pay a heavy price for it
  • Then return to their familiar situation
  • Having changed
• Three Act Structure
  • Act I: Get your guy up a tree
  • Act II: Throw rocks at him
  • Act III: Get him outta the tree

• McGuffin: an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.
• The universal grammar for stories: character + conflict = change
• Plot: the how of the story. Explicit. A series of actions, taken by characters, towards their wants, needs or desires
• Theme: the why of the story, the “so what”. Should be
  • Universal
  • Specific
  • Implied
• Summary (general information, tell) vs Scene (specific descriptions, show)

• Structural ambiguity: missing important story beats (e.g. Four undramatic plot structures) – you need character, conflict, and change

• Cliché/Familiar phrasing: don’t do things that are incredibly overdone
• Awkward exposition: having conversations that characters would never actually have for the sake of reader understanding
• Abstractions: don’t invoke abstractions, make it concrete, reify it

• Vagueness (unclear) vs Ambiguity (up to interpretation)
• Deus Ex Machina: god from the machine, heavy handed use of magic or coincidence to solve a conflict
• Characters: be aware of your defaults
  • There not always a person but instead an element of storytelling – a vehicle on which the action of the story plays out

• Voice
  • How your characters speak, their voice and diction
  • The language you use as the author
• Irony
  • Verbal irony: the device by which we say one thing and mean another
  • Dramatic irony: the device by which the audience has crucial information that the characters do not
  • Cosmic irony: our understanding of the human condition, in which efforts are thwarted despite our best intentions

• Assonance: repetition of a vowel sound between consonants that may or may not match
• Consonance: repetition of the consonant that concludes a word or syllable
• Alliteration: repetition of an initial consonant sound
• Rhyme
  • True rhyme: both the vowel and consonant of the last accented syllable correspond
  • Internal rhyme: the end of one line rhymes into the beginning or middle of noather
  • Off-rhyme: near-rhyme, slightly discordant or ’not quire there’ rhymes (four-inch, door hinge)
• Line: a typographical break representing a slight oral pause or hesitation
  • It adds a kind of emphasis both to the last word of the line and the first of the next line