Exercising your story telling techniques
- Exercising your story telling techniques
- Exercise: Using narration and context to shape dialogue
- Video: How to train your internal editor
- Writing exercise: Who, What, and Where in 3 sentences
I’ve often felt that one of the way writers differ from other artists is that we tend to jump into trying to create finished products without working on the individual skills involved in that finished product.
For instance: An artist will practice shading without working on a picture.
A writer very rarely sits down and decides to just practice description, or dialog, or plot, without worrying about trying to create a story at the same time.
To me, it’s always seemed like asking an artist to learn to draw a portrait without first learning to hold a pencil.
In art school, the techniques are broken down into individual components and we practice those so that they become natural. For instance, drawing pencils are graded B – H with 5H being the hardest and lightest. In drawing class, we shaded from dark to light with each of those individually, then did a larger shaded area using all of them, switching when appropriate. The goal was to understand which pencil does what so that we know what to reach for when drawing an object. The goal wasn’t to have perfect physical control, and certainly not for the sake of control, but to have internalized the techniques so thoroughly that we didn’t have to think about the craft and could focus on the art.
I think writers can benefit from the same approach.
I see writers skipping the step of learning individual techniques. People sit down to write a Story, and don’t think about the fact that dialogue, point-of-view, description, voice, and plot are all techniques that can be practiced individually.
As a writer, the year after OSC’s Literary Boot Camp it became really hard for me to write. Why? Because I’d learned all of these new techniques that I had to apply consciously. Writing only got easier by practicing them and getting them internalized so they no longer required thought.
Having had variations on this conversation recently with several other folks, I thought that I would share some of the exercises I find useful for practicing the individual techniques.
Do they require other language skills than the ones being practiced? Yes, but I’m working on the assumption that you’ve already done exercises playing alliteration, metaphor, and allusion and that we’re building on those. In exactly the same way that an violinist, having once mastered scales turns to etudes, or an artist having mastered what a pen does then learns the difference between stippling and cross-hatching.
So… I’m going to post some exercises for you, if you are interested. These build on each other so they work best if one does them in order.
We’ll start with a baseline.
Exercise: Sit in a location and describe it using third person. You are the point of view character, but instead of writing in first person, write in third. You must keep writing constantly for thirty minutes. Try to use all five senses, which include what is heard, smelt, felt, seen, and tasted. Do not describe people in the location, except where they cause the room to react. For instance, someone shifting in their chair would cause a squeak in the room.