Humainologie creative dialogue on writing good stories next Wednesday June 9

“When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.” - Susan Sarandon

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” - Henry David Thoreau

Our second annual Humainologie Short Story Festival http://www.humainologie.com/short-story-festival/

is an invitation to your imagination. If you see only darkness on the road ahead, you are imagining things. Now imagine the sun rising, and in the light of morning you will see reality far better. Writing good stories can empower your imagination. You can rewrite your own story every day.

Start by imagining how to get started. Come up with two or three good ideas for generating stories. There are countless ways to do this, just ask your imagination. For example, you could write a story synopsis based on one of your favorite movies but do so in such generic terms that your synopsis could be used as a generator of many different stories. The stories from movies are often based on a novel, so it’s best to take just one part of the movie, write your generic synopsis, and then make the ending of your story different from anything in the movie. I’ll give an example based on just the first half of one of my own favorite films. This generic synopsis would need an ending, and once I’ve decided on that, I would start writing the story itself, aiming to make every paragraph of the story such that the reader is drawn irresistibly on to the (surprising) ending.

A young woman decides to leave her home country to find work far away. She arrives in the faraway land and finds a good job, but she is homesick. Then she finds a wonderful boyfriend. Her homesickness disappears. The boy is head over heels in love with her. Suddenly news from back home (the sudden unexpected death of a family member) makes it necessary for her to return. The boy asks her to marry him before she leaves.

So that is just one idea for how to generate short stories. Your mission for this coming Wednesday (should you choose to accept it) is to come up with two or three very different ideas for generating stories. And here is a short presentation by Kurt Vonnegut on how to write a story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc

Between now and our dialogue, I’ll be back in touch with the Zoom link and a piece of flash fiction (a very short short story, under 1,000 words) I wrote last year.

Toot sweet,

Arthur