So we’ve got an idea for a story. We’re excited about it. We know what kind of story it’s going to be. It’s time to start planning out how we’ll tell it.
Sorry? Time to do what? Wait a moment…
Disclaimer: Writers are Different
Some writers can’t begin until they’ve planned the whole story through, down to every entrance and exit. Others say they don’t plan at all. They just write to find out what happens. My father, the author Peter Dickinson, used to call this “Riding a Runaway Horse”. He said he could sometimes get a third of the way through a murder mystery before he knew which of his characters had murdered whom and why.
Well…
I think that writers who write without planning actually are planning, but they’re doing it instinctively. They have a feel for the way their story is going and they trust it. There are rewards for writing like this, but there are also risks. Personally, I prefer to have a plan. I’ll let spontaneity kick in along the way. More on this here.
And you? Decide for yourself. But here are a few tools you can think about – or not think about – as you go.
Twist
A twist is a surprise sprung on the audience as the story is told. It’s a chance for them to say “Wow!” and feel their pulses quicken. Very often you will have one in the climax of your story. But they can also help to get the story moving. Killing off a minor character in the early chapters is a classic way of doing this, if you are telling the sort of story in which characters get killed.
Going back to our example of The Good Samaritan, the twist comes near the end and it’s very simple: the person who actually helps the victim is the one that the audience would least expect to do so. This is the point of the story.
But you don’t want your twist to be too unexpected. You want your audience to feel that yes, this is the sort of thing that could happen in your setting, even if they didn’t see it coming. That’s why you…
Foreshadow
If something is going to be important in your story, it’s a good idea to foreshadow it.
“Foreshadowing” means you drop in a mention of the important object, person, event, whatever-it-is, at some stage before it becomes crucial, so that your audience registers it as a factor in your setting. But of course you don’t want them to register that they are registering it, because if they did they might guess what was going to happen, sooner than you wanted. So when you do your foreshadowing, maybe you could make it seem that you are telling them something else.
For example, just supposing you were planning your twist around (say) a kidney donor card, you might want to drop in the words “kidney donor card” early in your story, maybe as part of a character description:
“Even Mr Brown’s friends would admit he was a little obsessive. He counted buttons, collected marbles and had devoted forty years to designing the perfect kidney donor card.”
(Are you patting your pockets, by the way? Maybe you should. It could be important.)
The Power of Three
You’ve got something to say – a joke, a speech, a story, it doesn’t matter. How do you keep people listening to you? Try putting it into a structure of three.
“There was an Irishman, and Englishman and a Scotsman…” How many is that? Three. How many people passed the wounded man on the road to Jericho? Three, the third being the Good Samaritan. The oldest fiction in the English language is Beowulf. It’s a story in three parts, of a man who fights three monsters, and the third causes his death.
Our minds like things that come in threes. The first time we just see what happens. The second time we recognise it. The third time we are ready for the twist or the punch – whatever it is that’s coming. In a way, it’s like foreshadowing. It prepares the reader for something, even if they don’t know what it is until they get there.
Three has power. Your audience will be on the edge of their proverbial seats for the third time. If you go on the second, you’ll have gone too early. If you wait for the fourth, you’ll have kept them too long. For the storyteller, Three like a force of gravity. It bends our plot into a new path.
So, with all that said, maybe it’s time for another story? If you are sitting comfortably, I’ll begin…