And then what happened?
The following notes reference Neil Gaiman's storytelling training on Masterclass.
Introduction
Humans are fundamentally storytelling creatures. Whether you’re talking to a friend or penning a novel, you’re using the same tools to form a connection with people, to entertain them, and to make them think differently about the world.
Writing is emotional, it’s a connection with the reader.
As a writer, you are an explorer.
Being a good writer is knowing when to imagine and when to immerse yourself in new things.
Truth In Fiction
We convey truth with stories.
Using the “lie” of a made-up story to reach a human truth is one of the central tools of literature. The audience must be willing to accept that the story they are hearing is a facsimile of reality. Doesn’t matter how outlandish the world of your story is, it should feel real to the reader.
1. Provide specific, concrete details.
2. Focus on emotions that are true of your characters.
3. Incorporate the familiar alongside the unfamiliar.
4. Cover Objections - If something isn’t right in your world, let your characters notice that it isn’t right for them either.
5. The characters must be real. People care about real.
6. Use your life and the happenings of it, within you're writing to deploy truth in a way that’s convincing. Being specific about your life, your truth not only applies to you but other people too.
Sources of Inspiration
“Remember the most important thing you can do is open yourself to everything.
Sources of Inspiration
“Remember the most important thing you can do is open yourself to everything.”
An allusion is a short reference to another story, usually through the use of well-known elements. For example white rabbit would reference Alice in Wonderland.
Neil uses allusions often referencing, Egyptian and Greek mythology, Victorian Fairytales, Shakespeare, Tolkien and modern cinema.
Subverting expectations - Taking apart a story you are familiar with and inspect it new. Look at the things people take for granted
Snow White is an old well-known story. What kind of person has hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow. And gets to lie in a coffin for a year, gets up and is fine again?
What you are reading is a vampire princess and a necrofile prince. If you tell that story than the Hero has to be her stepmother, who obviously was doing everything she could to save the kingdom from her terrible dangerous daughter.
Make the story yours: Take a familiar story and add in a bit of your own background or experience. Mario Puzo did this with The Godfather (1969), bringing elements of Shakespeares Henry IV to the world he knew well: Italian Immigration in post-war America.
Notes One: Pretend you’re a therapist treating the character. Write a scene in which you discuss the character’s life and problems, then arrive at a diagnosis.
Write a newspaper article describing the events of the story. For example, Snow White - Woman Hiding in Woods for Ten Years Found by Wealthy Hiker: Then write a story for that headline using journalistic objectivity.
Have your character explain their actions to a jury.
Compost Heap: The process of allowing the unconscious and conscious minds to process experience before sharing or re-inventing it in writing. (Collection of words, thoughts and sayings).
Composting Into Practice: Before writing, for example if you’re writing about Greenland, gather all the words you know about snow, ice, flora, fauna, geologic formations, weather occurrences. Research history, arts, science. Write down all the words you love and the words you think will fit into your story.
Use the people around you
Tell that story. After use it as a framework, or a mirror, use it to bounce ideas off.
Imagine stories with the people around you. Throw all of you into a situation and wonder what all of you would do.
Listen to what people are saying and how they talk.
Finding your voice
It is composed of the choices you make regarding emotional tone, character, settings, and technical rhythms of your language like diction, sentence structure and punctuation. The sum of effect of these will be unique to you and will reveal your personality and attitude to your audience.
Persona: The voice of the story not the writer. Can be any narrative pop from an omniscient, third person to a close first person.
Writing Exercise: Choose an author you admire and read a few pages of their work. Write a passage in a voice that mimics theirs, using characters, settings, and problems of your choice. What makes the authors voice so appealing? How does it make you feel?
Write a paragraph in your voice. What sets your voice apart? What tone does it give? Do the characters and setting feel different when you write in your own voice?
Reading Exercise: Open a book to a random chapter and observe which aspects of the writers voice you enjoy and which ones you dislike.
Start with imitation - Find someone you like and write like them for a while.
As you write more and more and more your voice will reveal itself.
Finding the voice of the story.
Each story can have its own voice, but the attitude and the soul will be all you.
Before you start writing stop and think — Does the project feel like its first person or third person? Who’s telling you the story? Does it matter who’s telling you the story?
American Transparent - The Author is invisible, you do nothing to draw attention to yourself.
The Old Fashioned - Very often, premodern ways of speaking or writing. Can take you back to a historical moment or a different world.
Narrative Voice - The writer can be a character. Two types of narrative voices. First and Third person.
Developing the story
Starting the project - Dumping compost heap
- Title article brain dump.
- Begin with the critical elements.
- Settings
- Characters
- Main dramatic questions
- Themes
The Major Dramatic Question?
Write down a list of key questions your reader will have after they’ve read your story?
What questions have you raised?
What is your big idea?
What social messages lie beneath your topic?
What is the primary question you are raising for your reader?
What will they want to know soon?
What are the bigger questions you’re undertaking?
What issue do you promise the reader you’ll resolve by the end of the novel?
These are the promises you are making to a reader. You are aiming to find a question that will sum up the main storyline of your novel and will include your main character and their goal.
Tension
Suspense is a valuable tool for keeping a reader’s attention and interests. Suspense involves raising a major dramatic question that the reader wants answered. It is usually based on a characters desire. In order to sustain interest, you must continue to raise questions.
If you get stuck, you can ask yourself what you characters want - and that is like a flashily. It shines a light on the road ahead and lets you move forward. It’s the only question that opens the door to what do you do next?
Developing Suspense:
Withhold Information - The most common way to raise interest.
Let your audience know something the character doesn’t - The opposite type of suspense and is known as “Dramatic Irony.”
Make the stakes clear - Something of consequence is at stake for your main character.
Generate Conflict - If you always give your characters what they want, your story will lack tension. Only conflict moves a story forward. The character needs this in order to grow and conflict should increase as the story progresses.
Antagonism:
Stories don’t move forward without conflict and conflict is produced by antagonists. The antagonist should be well developed as your main character and that means understanding them well.
- The stronger the forces of antagonism are, the more well-developed your character will become.
- The conflict should be tailored to your protagonist’s main desire.
- Antagonism has to increase with time, or you’ll lose the reader’s interest.
The what’s going to happen game is the game you play as a writer with your readers. That’s what keeps them reading.
Remember the for most important words in story telling (and then what happened).
Just four words
“And then what happened.”
These are the most important words there are for a storyteller. Anything you have to do to get people to turn the page, but the main thing you have to do it to care. If you don’t care what happened, nobody else will.
So you need to care and you need to imbue that care into your writing, because then anytime you stop, anytime you move from one character to another character, anytime you move from place to place, anytime you hesitate the question is going to be and then what happened?
“Remember that characters always, for good or for evil, get what they need. They do not get what they want.”
What do your characters want?
“Everything is driven by characters wanting different things, and by those different things colliding. Every moment that one character wants something, and another character wants something mutually exclusive, and they collide — every time that happens, you have a story.”
Blank Framework when you are lost.
You can have two separate characters what want something mutually exclusive and set them off on their quest. If one succeeds the other one fails. This also gives you conflict and this gives you a plot.
Characters always get what the need. They don’t get what they want.
Character & Dialogue
“Writing good dialogue requires listening to your character. Writing a line and listening back at that line. What is the person saying?”
Dialogue serves the triple purpose of revealing character, advancing plot lines and providing entertainment.
People don’t speak in real life like they do on a page so there’s an art to writing speech to make it feel real. An important tool used in compression. This trims down the characters speech.
Compression:
- Attack wordiness: See how much you can cut out while retaining the tone and meaning.
- Use select sentence fragments — “Sounds great” is more natural than “That sounds great”.
- Use contractions when possible - We’ll go together is better than “we will go together.”
- Trim fillers like “uh”, “well”.
- It’s unusual to call people by name so don’t in writing.
- Use body language - Instead of the character shout, “I hate you”, have them kick a chair.
- If the dialogue seems repetitive put the character in motion - walking, driving, distracted by their environment.
“Dialogue is character. The way that somebody talks, what they say, how they say it is character. And dialogue has to show character. It also has to show plot. And maybe it can be funny along the way.”
Dialogue
Direct Dialogue - When you quote the character: “I wish I could see you tomorrow,” she said.
Indirect - A narration that doesn’t show quotes but often gives the feeling of being there. Had she agreed with him already to meet at the restaurant at six o’clock? She couldn’t remember. He’d said he had a meeting at five and might run over.
Summary - Tells the reader what happened from a distance: They’d discussed meeting up tomorrow.
Internal Monologue - Conveys character voice on a page. It means letting the reader see a characters thoughts as they happen and often shows the things they won’t say aloud: She stood in front of the restaurant wondering if he would be late, hoping he would. She realized suddenly that she didn’t want to meet him.
World building
Sometimes the first step in writing a novel is developing your world. This is not the actual landscape that your characters will inhabit, but the tone of your story, its major preoccupations and themes, as well as the nature of its morality.
One part of world building happens with characters and actions, but a critical part also happens with description. Along the way, focus on the memorable details, and keep them grounded in a character’s sensory experience. Everybody probably knows what a tree looks like, so if you’re describing one, tell the reader what makes it different or why it’s important for your characters.
One of the best tools for revealing your world is having your characters observe and respond to its features. You’ll want to let your reader know what it feels like for them, what it sounds and smells and tastes like.
Most novels are written in one of two styles:
First Person - Which the narrator tells the story. (“I turned one hundred years old last week.”)
Third Person - Which is the author telling the tale. (“He turned one hundred.”)
Instead look at places you’ve been and make them bigger. Build your world around places grounded in realism.
Ask the common questions:
Where do people go shopping?
Where do people go to the bathroom?
What are peoples daily routines?
What’s exciting about the world?
What’s convincing about the world?
Moments of reality create credibility.
Allow your characters to discover the rules.
Even if you don’t tell you need to understand what the rules of the world are. You need to know what the explicit and implicit rules are. In knowing them you need to treat them like the rules in this world.
Allow the characters to learn the rules of the world by making mistakes are taking advantage of those rules.
Let them bump into things.
Let them make mistakes.
People learn the rules of New York by making mistakes and getting lost.
Descriptions
When writing a description its vital to find one thing memorable, one thing important, one thing different. Look at that one thing with a sense. (Touch, Taste, Smell, See, Feel)
Humor
Take a scene people are kind of familiar with and twist it.
Ask yourself what are the cliche’s?
How can you make fun of the cliche’s?
Take a scene you have seen many times and tilt it. I can be using different words, or attitudes, It could be adding a surprise.
Building up to something tense, and releasing it with laughter.
One character can be more matter of fact. One character can know a little more than they should. One character can be much more concerned about something mundane.
Descriptions
Two types of Narration:
Scenes: Show the characters in action or having a convention.
Dramatic Narration: Describes what the character did.
To keep a balanced pace, it’s good to switch between scene and dramatic narration. Scenes tend to speed the pacing, and dramatic narration tends to slow it down.
Sensory experience: Use the strongest description sense for the scene.
Memorable details: Describe a trees unique feature or why it’s important to the character.
Emotions: Add emotional weight.
Description flexibility: Describe character looking at the memorable detailed tree.
Reveal Less: Don’t say what the character is painting allow the reader to guess.
Withhold info: Reveal details slowly over the course of a scene.
Cold open: Opening the scene in the middle of an action.