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May 2006: Situations and Stories
Until now, I have been talking about description, an important element in every kind of writing. This month I’d like to begin talking about one specific kind of writing, writing stories.
I have been teaching developing writers for many years, and I’ve found that many people, both young writers and adults, will start writing a story and run out of steam. They get a few pages or a few chapters down and can’t go any farther. One reason, I believe, that their stories lose momentum is that they have failed to plan before they began to write. I’m not talking about creating an outline of each step a story will take. For most of us, such an outline would be deadening. We need to keep important elements of our developing stories open so we can keep making discoveries as we write. But many writers get bogged down in their story attempts for one simple reason. They haven’t made sure that the idea they have is suitable for a story. What they start off with may only be a situation.
What is the difference between a situation and a story?
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