Story Design Course: The Creative Process Hank Quense

Story Design Course Hank Quense

Story Design Course Hank Quense

The Creative Process in Fiction Writing

Creating a new work of fiction requires the fusion of three creative processes: ideas, story design, and story-telling techniques. The ideas have to come from the writer.  Story design and story-telling techniques can be developed through study and practice.

Here is my definition of story design and story-telling techniques.  Story design is the development of the elements that go into a story.  These include building characters, creating a plot, coming up with the story setting and scene design. It also includes the character arc. 

Story-telling techniques include such devices as show-don’t-tell, point-of-view, stimulus and reaction and foreshadowing to name a few.

With character development, a biography is essential.  The more important the character is in the story, the more detailed the bio should be.  The character’s personality is also important as is the character’s personality.  A tricky part of the writing is to ensure all facets are consistent as the character moves about in scenes and talks to other characters.

With the plot, a test is whether or not the events are believable.  If the writer doesn’t believe in the plot, he’ll never convince the reader to believe in it.  I often develop a set of plot events and then discard them because I can’t believe in them.  At that point, I have to start over to develop a new plot.

A different way of thinking often helps with the plot.  The usual way of developing the plot is: if event X occurs then event Y must follow.  Now ask yourself, if event X occurs what would happen if event Y didn’t follow.  What would change? What would the next event be? Sometimes this reversal can initiate an entirely new path of plot events.  This works especially well in writing humorous and satiric stories and I often use it for that purpose.

No matter how great the ideas are and no matter how wonderful the story design, if a writer can’t tell the story in a way that engages the reader’s interest, the story will fail. That’s where the story-telling techniques come in.  Show-don’t-tell demands the reader interpret the writer’s word to deduce what is going on.  Readers love to do this and it makes the story much more enjoyable.  Who tells the story is also a critical decision. The issue here is whether or not the point-of-view character is interesting to the reader?  If the reader doesn’t think the character is interesting she won’t read much of the story.  Foreshadowing is another useful technique.  It sets up the reader so that future events won’t come as a complete surprise.  When this future event occurs, if it was foreshadowed, the reader’s reaction is, “Of course.  That’s what the foreshadowing meant.”

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Story Design Course Hank Quense

These story design elements are covered in depth along with many other elements in my Story Design lectures.  You can learn more at https://bit.ly/338UqjY

There is more information on my Fiction Writing & Self-publishing Solutions webpage: https://padlet.com/hanque/rph7u51miayn

Story Design Course Hank Quense

Story Design Course Hank Quense