Okay, so maybe TV can’t actually write your short stories for you, but it can provide a structure to use for writing a short story.

The Intro – 1st 10 Minutes

Introduce the characters and the situation. Start your story on the day that is different for the characters (or just shortly before the moment that is different).

My example using one of my favorite TV shows, The A-Team:

A young woman, Debbie the Daughter, has an injured father, Dad, who is now unable to take care of their farm. Bad Bart the Neighbor wants to buy them out, but is offering very little money for the farm. He is pushy and insistent and frightens Debbie a bit. She tries to get some other farmers in the area to help out, but they are intimidated by Bad Bart. Debbie decides to get outside help to convince Bad Bart to leave them alone.

Complications – 2nd 15 Minutes

Start a new scene – show the characters trying something to resolve the problem, but it doesn’t work and the situation gets worse.

Debbie contacts the A-Team and has them meet her at the farm. They meet Debbie and Dad, but explain that they don’t think they can be of much help. Bad Bart shows up at the farm and tries to intimidate Debbie and Dad again. The A-Team stands up to him and he leaves, vowing to get the farm one way or another. The A-Team decides to stick around.

More Complications – 3rd 15 Minutes

New scene – the characters try something else to resolve the problem and it just gets worse.

The team hangs out around the farm, helping with the chores. That night, the barn catches fire and all the farm tractors are destroyed in the blaze, crippling their ability to work in the fields. The daughter and team know that Bad Bart is responsible, but can’t prove it to the local sheriff, so he can’t do anything to help.

Daughter goes to the bank to get a loan to rebuild the barn and buy new equipment, and is told the farm is in default on its loans and will be foreclosed if the back payments aren’t paid by tomorrow. There is no money, so Debbie is sure they will lose the farm.

The Climax – 4th 15 Minutes

The climax of the show/story – characters make one final push to resolve the problem, face off with the villain and win the day.

One member of the A-Team visits Bad Bart the Neighbor and announces that Debbie and Dad have agreed to sell the farm, so Debbie can take Dad to Florida to recuperate, if Bad Bart will bring the money in cash to the farm the next morning. He agrees.

He arrives the next morning with his henchmen, but says that the price he’s willing to pay has been lowered considerably, since he knows about the pending foreclosure. He offers $1 for the farm and he’ll let Dad, Debbie and the team leave quietly.

Hannibal pretends to have a change of heart, stating that his team just got involved in the situation because of a girl with a pretty face. They don’t want any trouble and will leave, so Bad Bart has clear access to the farm. Hannibal gets Bad Bart to confess to starting the barn fire and several other acts of sabotage around the ranch over the last few months. Eventually, Bad Bart realizes he’s been set up and his confession has been videotaped. He orders his men to attack and get the tape back.

The A-team withdraws into the house, while Bad Bart and his men surround the house, and attempt to get inside. The team quickly makes weapons out of household materials and fights off Bad Bart’s gang, just as the sheriff arrives and arrests Bad Bart and his men for various crimes, including the attack on Dad and Debbie. Hannibal hands over the videotape confession to the sheriff.

The Closing – Last 5 Minutes

Final short scene that ties up any remaining loose ends and leaves the readers smiling (or at least satisfied that everything ended well for the characters).

Debbie and Dad thank the A-Team for their help and announce that the bank has extended the farm loans because of the evidence of Bad Bart’s sabotage. The other farmers in the community heard about Bad Bart’s arrest and have offered their time and equipment until Dad is back on his feet. Debbie tries to give money to the A-Team, but they refuse it and ride off into the sunset.

Okay, so it’s a bit corny, but you get the picture. You could apply a similar structure to a humorous or dramatic story- introduce the characters and situation, throw in some complications, build to the climax and then resolve the situation.

Have you ever used a TV show or other form of entertainment as the structure for a story? What did you use and how did it work?

September has several workshops being offered. Check each link for specific costs ($30 or under) and details on how to register.

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• Creativity Journal
• Introduction to Discovering Story Magic
• The Language of Liars: How to Make Your Characters Authentic Liars and Sure-Fire Lie Catchers
• A PR Primer: Promoting Yourself Before–and Just After–the “Call”
• Cybercrimes
• Cozy Is As Cozy Does
• Discover How to Revise Without Getting Sick of Your Manuscript
• Infusing The Romance Novel With Emotional And Sexual Tension
• Plot That Novel YOUR Way

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The Fall Harvest Workshop presented by Midwest Fiction Writers is hosting a workshop on Story Mastery with Michael Hauge on Saturday, September 26.

Best-selling author of Writing Screenplays That Sell and Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds: The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read, Michael Hauge will present his unique approach to creating compelling fiction, and to eliciting emotion in your readers through story concept, plot structure, love stories, character development and theme.

Workshop Fee:
MFW and Screenwriters’ Workshop members – $99
Non-members – $109
Location: Crowne Plaza Hotel, Bloomington, MN

Jennifer Blanchard at Procrastinating Writers has a guest post from Joe Williams, Channel Your Emotions into Your Writing. Let your emotions fuel your writing and make you a stronger writer.

Don’t forget the importance of taking care of yourself as a writer. Read one writer’s cautionary tale in The care and feeding of the writer from Deadline Dames.

Read about a growing method of promoting your writing in Podcasting Your Work by Joe Nassise.

Another post on marketing – step by step instructions for Creating and Uploading Your Own Book Trailer by Marlayne Giron.

And a two-part series on revising your novel from Larry at storyfix.com – How to Cut Your Manuscript by 20%… and Love It and Part 2 – How to Cut Your Manuscript by 20% or More.

What great writing posts have you found around the web this week?

As mentioned previously, I’m taking a 6-month class on writing from Holly Lisle. I’ve been working through it at a slower pace, since I’m still dealing with the day job and running the website. That’s the beauty of this type of class. The lessons come out once a week, but I can work on them at my own speed, taking as long as needed before moving on to the next.

In the second month of Think Sideways, we’re doing our Project Planning.

Week 5 – Define Your Project’s Needs

Holly teaches the Dot and Line technique in this week’s lesson. The Dot helps you to focus on the most interesting, extraordinary or significant details of your character, setting, conflict, etc. The Line marks off the differences between things.

How do you use them? Well, the Dot helps you focus on the details that are pertinent. For example, your heroine has long, blond hair. Who cares? Lots of people have long, blond hair. That’s an ordinary detail. The Dot helps you make that into an extraordinary detail. Not just long, blond hair, but hair that is twenty feet long (ala Rapunzel) and strong enough to support the weight of an adult. Now that’s an extraordinary detail about your heroine that deserves to get mentioned in your story. You focus on the Dot details to make your characters, settings, and conflicts unique and extraordinary.

The Line helps you figure out potential conflicts for your story. For example, Rapunzel is on one side of the line, the Witch is on the other. Rapunzel is young, beautiful and yearns to get out of the tower. The Witch is old, ugly and thinks Rapunzel should stay in the tower forever. Pitting them against each other via the Line, you have young vs. old, beautiful vs. ugly, and escape dreams vs. long-term imprisonment. Lots to argue about there and plenty of material for sarcastic or angry dialogue, or sneaky acts against each other. In other words, plenty of conflict between those two characters. You can apply the Line to characters, settings, motivations… almost any part of your story.

The Dot and Line technique were a real eye-opener for me in how to enrich my story with extraordinary details and conflicts that I might have overlooked before.

Week 6 – Discover Your Project’s Markets

In this week we learned three things:

1. How to identify the market that our project fits into.
3. How to change genres with a technqiue called Book Mapping.
4. How to create our own genre (if one doesn’t currently exist to fit our work).

This is an extremely useful lesson for writers planning a long career of writing. Genres don’t stay static. They grow, change, wither, sometimes die, and morph into other genres altogether. If you can’t flex with the changing markets, you’ll have a hard time staying successful in the publishing world.

Week 7 – Develop Your Project-Creation System

Holly gives an excellent example of how she spent way too much time world-building on her first few novels, only to find that nobody wanted to publish those stories set in her heavily-detailed, fascinating worlds. Over time she learned to build only enough world to get her story started and then add pertinent details along the way. This saved her a bunch of time by eliminating all the hours she spent building worlds, characters, and plot details for stories that were never used, i.e. published.

She walks you through the eight core planning modules that allow you to build just enough details to get your story started. Five of the modules are mandatory for every story – Character, Conflict, Time & Place, Scenes and Math. Three are optional, based on the type of story you’re writing – Maps & World, Culture, Language.

Week 8 – Plan Your Project

In this week, you’re almost ready to start writing. Holly walks you through creating an effective and efficient outline. No, not the scary roman-numeral outline that you learned in school. This is a fluid, easy-to-use outline that provides a high-level summary of each scene in your story. The techniques she teaches in this week are how to use Plot cards and The Sentence Lite. The combination of the two helps you create active scenes with conflict to keep your story moving.

Recap

I’m really enjoying this course. Holly is presenting many techniques that have proven to be super useful already in planning my story. I’m adding interesting nuances to my characters and plot that I doubt I could have come up with on my own. I’m very eager to see how the final story turns out when it is all done. Feels like it could be a breakout novel for me.

If you’re interested in signing up for How to Think Sideways, you can check it out here. And check back here in a month for the next report on Month 3.

A prologue is an introductory chapter to a novel and it is the subject of some controversy in the writing world.

Here are some reasons why you don’t need a prologue.

• Prologues can distract from the actual story by providing extraneous detail. If the detail was truly needed, why not include it in the actual story?
• Prologues usually include people, places, and things that are long irrelevant by the time the real story starts, like events from 1000 years ago that somehow still have great bearing on your characters today.
• Prologues are often boring info dumps of historical info or worldbuilding that the author felt must be conveyed to the reader. They don’t, really. Take my word for it.
• Prologues are sometimes used by writers who aren’t ready to jump into the actual story, so they “warm up” in the prologue. Stop warming up and throw your characters into the fire already!
• Prologues can delay the reader from meeting the protagonist (if the protag isn’t part of the prologue). I want to meet the important people in the story as soon as possible, so don’t make me wait.
• Prologues are sometimes tacked on to add a scene of suspense at the beginning of the novel, so the reader knows something scary will be happening later. You don’t need a prologue for that. Give me the foreshadowing in the first few chapters of the book.
• Many readers don’t like prologues and skim through them or skip over them, me included.

Do you think your novel absolutely, positively MUST include a prologue? Try this test– take the prologue out of your manuscript and give the manuscript sans prologue to a fresh reader (someone who hasn’t read your novel or heard any of the details of it from you). If the entire plot still makes perfect sense to that reader, then you don’t need the prologue.

Why You Might Need a Prologue

• You have an event in the distant history of the story that affects the present and including it as a flashback in the story slows down the pacing too much.
• You want to provide a certain character’s viewpoint in the prologue and the rest of the story is in a different character’s viewpoint.
• Your prologue relates to a scene at the end of your story and you want to give the reader reason to keep turning the pages to find the answer to the questions raised in the prologue. (As in… how did the characters get into this awful situation that is in the prologue?)
• Even given these possible reasons to include a prologue, I’d still try to find a way to include the prologue material in the story itself. If it really has to be in the story.

If you’re including a prologue, do your readers a favor–keep it short, self-contained and comprehensible.

What are you thoughts on a prologue as a reader and a writer? Do you use them? Skip them?

Writers need an idea of some sort to start writing. If you’re fresh out of ideas, here are a few books from my bookshelf that provide story starters.

The Writer’s Book of Matches: 1001 Prompts to Ignite Your Fiction from the editors of Fresh Boiled Peanuts

The prompts are a mix of scenarios and dialogue, and some are very quirky.

Sample prompts:

• A dairy worker develops an uncanny ability to communicate telepathically with livestock.
• “Move away from the leopard print. I repeat: Move away from the leopard print.”
• A bookstore clerk decides to recommend the same book to all customers, regardless of what they ask her.

The Pocket Muse by Monica Wood

Includes writing prompts and exercises, quotations from a variety of writers, mini-lessons on technique and black and white photos, sometimes with a text prompt, sometimes not.

Sample prompts:

• Write about a person whose reputation rests on the appearance of an inanimate object.
• (under a picture of two hippos standing in front of a brick building) These hippos are called Dodger and Betsy. Your challenge is to figure out how they got into the parking lot of a Catholic school.
• Today’s horoscope: Something big is brewing behind your back.

A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves

The book is divided into chapters for each month, each with a guideline to follow, essays on aspects of the writing life and writing prompts for each day to carry you through a year.

Sample prompts:

• Write about a secret revealed.
• “You have stayed too long.”
• These were the doubts I had.

The Write-Brain Workbook by Bonnie Neubauer

This book has 366 writing exercises to work your creative muscles. The page are filled with photos, graphics and lots of color. If you’re a visual writer, this book is a treat.

Sample prompts:

• Use all of these in a story: Queen of Hearts, Full Deck, Joker, Deal. Start the story with: The nastiest trick ever played…
• Finish the story. Start with She Said, “I double dare you.”
• You look through the peephole of your front door and see a face. Play out the story. Start with: Sometimes I wish I came from a small family…

A Creative Writer’s Kit by Judy Reeves

This kit has a small journal with prompts for each day of the year and space to write along with instructional cards on various aspects of writing (examples: When your writing embarrasses you, transferring real life to fiction.).

Sample prompts:

• Write about a time someone lost control.
• If I tell you the truth…
• Someone says, “Can I see you in the kitchen?”

The Writer’s Idea Workshop by Jack Heffron

This book is intended to help you assess your idea and turn it into finished piece. The prompts at the end of each chapter are meant to be applied to your story idea.

Sample prompts:

• Change the place where you write for the next few sessions. The shift in geography can supply a fresh perspective.
• Spend a session exploring a minor character, placing her in the foreground of her own separate story. When you finish, consider ways of creating a subplot to the main story by giving this character greater prominence.
• After a writing session, write a congratulatory note from your ideal reader to you. The reader should tell you he or she loves your idea.

Know of other writing prompt books? Share them in the comments.

I’m excited to bring you a new feature here on Learn to Write Fiction–the Write a Novel With Me Series from Virginia Gruver. Virginia’s one of my fellow writers in the Saturday Writers group and she’ll be sharing her journey through the novel process with us each month. Check back often or sign up for the RSS feed, so you don’t miss a post!

Let me take a moment to introduce myself and thank Cheryl for allowing me to guest post on this great site. My name is Virginia Gruver and I have not published in novel length, yet. I have had a short story published several years ago in a local literary magazine and I have had a slice of life column in a local newspaper, owned by Gannett. I live in the Midwest and Cheryl and I became acquainted as members of a local writer’s organization that dissolved. Because we felt the group filled something for us and a handful of other writers, we decided to continue meeting on the first Saturday of each month, thus The Saturday Writers.

I came up with the Write a Novel with Me Series of blogs because, let’s face it writing can be lonely. My day job as a REALTOR® can be just as lonely, especially in a down market. Yes, I do spend time each week with buyers and sellers but I don’t know how else to explain it, it is only a few hours each week. The rest of the time, I am looking for more buyers and sellers, doing administrative stuff, writing ads, and touring houses. Except for the time, I am face to face with clients, I am working alone.

I also tend to be a perfectionist. If I can’t do something right the first time, I start over. I have half a dozen projects half-done. But I haven’t completed a first draft, yet.

By starting this project, I may still be working alone but it doesn’t feel like it. The traffic on my blog has been phenomenal so I think I may have hit a chord with other writers like myself.

Each post covers a step of the process.

• The idea – suggestions for how to come up with an idea.
• The premise – I used a suggestion from a how-to book on how to write a premise. It is the Suppose, What if, method. My premise for the story I am working on is – Suppose a failing romance author finds that her fiancé died in the arms of another woman. What if because of pride, she lets everyone think he was with her, until the police discover he was poisoned.
• I developed my protagonist – describing her physically and what her motivation and goals are in the beginning of the story.
• I developed victims – two, so far with their secrets.
• I developed the antagonist (my villain, since I am writing a mystery) description, goals and motivation.

And I am now working on innocent suspects. I am making some changes as I go. So far, I have had to change some names that just didn’t work for me. I also plan to change who the villain is. While working on the innocent suspects, I decided maybe someone else would work better. So for the past few days, I’ve been developing those characters and to be honest, I don’t know for sure who the villain is yet myself. I may keep it that way for a while. I need some method to keep the readers of my blog interested and I feel that might be one way. I feel like I am someone who is between a plotter and a pantzer. I like the surprise of not knowing what will happen but I need enough structure to keep me going. My plans are to develop enough characters, setting, and plot points to start writing the novel.

As I complete each step, I will post a blog describing what I’ve done and what the next step is. You are welcome to follow each step while you develop your story. I hope to continue through the writing, revision and marketing of this story. I am open to comments or questions. If someone else wants to discuss what is or isn’t working for them and share some information about their story, that’s fine too. I look forward to traveling the path to publication with you.

If you want to see how I am handling each step of the process in more detail, please check out my blog and follow along.

With this series of blog posts, I have author interviews that shed a little light into how published authors write, book reviews, and conference and workshop information and updates on my author’s new releases.

I will have a more detailed post next month, on this site, about the steps I’ve taken along the way from today on. May our journey be enjoyable and may we find success at the end.

Until next month,

Virginia
Virginia’s View on Novel Writing