Everyday Canvas

What a Story Should Be

What my mind does to me during sleep, with its hocus pocus, always stuns me but mostly scares me. Through its trying to tell me something enigmatic, it asks me to look deeper into things. Do I still need my strangely mysterious side butting into my business? I guess I do.

As usual, when I opened my eyes this morning, the first thing that came to my mind was why the concept of stories existed, and since it did, what should a story be like. So I kept musing over these two questions through breakfast and housework, while buying stuff from Amazon, answering e-mail, and talking to people on the phone, which had to do with arranging Thanksgiving.

This is what I came up with, roughly, for any story in any genre.

Stories exist to enlighten, entertain, or change existing thought.

Stories, therefore, should be entertaining or creating emotion that readers and the writer herself should be able to relate to or empathize with.

There should be a theme to create unity, and possibly a backstory, but the backstory should only be used as a part of a powerful and progressive front story. Some writers get so stuck on the backstory that there is no front story left or what is left as the front story is minimal and weak.

Time is usually chronological, but to give the story excitement, back-and-forth movement in time can be used, but a caveat here. Failure to orient the reader where time is concerned causes confusion in comprehension.

Setting as to place adds to stabilize the plot. Yet, too long setting descriptions bore the readers and make them skip paragraphs no matter how poetic or florid the language. It is a better idea to insert the setting descriptions inside the story several times in just a few, possibly not more than four sentences, rather than one big block of narrative.

Motion in plot, at least a potential for movement, is important. As soon as conflict is established, something should happen involving that conflict.

Stories of our time don’t (and should not) deal with fatalism and Deus ex Machina. Rather, free will of the character should be what drives the action.

There should be no sermonizing on any subject, telling writer’s thoughts, directly asking metaphysical questions, or blatant psychological analyzing on page; however, showing those things through character action is fine and expected.

Dialogue should be character-specific and believable. Each character should carry a different tone, have a different vocabulary, or speak with his or her own individual voice.

Stories, to be good, need specific (not general) language: That is, concrete and not abstract ideas, fresh and strong voice, characters that are consistent and believable, and avoidance of cutesiness or self-importance by the writer. As they say, the story’s the thing, so the writer should butt out.

Having thought and recalled all this from what I have read on the subject, I also remember what Writer’s Digest shows on top of its page in ecru when it has a how-to article: WD—There are no Rules.

Yeah, but for me, there are rules, at least until l learn them so well that I can dare to break them.