NOTES ON STORY ORIGINS

Adapted and Embellished from Burroway's

A Guide to Narrative Craft

 

1. Freewriting / Clustering / Freedrafting

 

Freewriting: purpose is to train you to write without a censor, associating freely and without fear, writing to unlock material and bring it out without thinking about quality or shaping it or making a story from it, without worrying about punctuation, grammar, images, style, etc. -- putting down purely anything that comes to mind. Do this regularly, perhaps upon first getting up in the morning. There is no preconceived subject in free-writing. If nothing happens. If anything stands out or pops out unexpectedly, some small nugget of interest to you, then:

 

Cluster: take a single word -- fear, wine, chocolate, or the name of a character, or "yesterday" or something that arose in freewriting -- circle it in the center of a page. Spend three or four minutes musing about it, putting down associated concepts and words or ideas or memories or images or anything about it and circle these. As you move along, draw lines to connect some of the satellite circles that seem related. The purpose of clustering is to think organically rather than analytically or linearly or logically, to break away from logic chains and unlock associated images, to use the right brain rather than the left. When you've clustered, look at what you've done for a while. Then:

 

Freedraft: "freedrafting" is freewriting about a particular subject. Use the same technique of freewriting -- that is, simply write quickly and without censoring yourself, using the cluster as a reference in a general way and try to simply set down in any sort of prose the associations and ideas and feelings and thoughts and memories and facts and observations you encounter while clustering.

 

This method is not to be confused with actually writing a story, nor is it to be confused with art. When you've finished with these three things, you will not have a story. You may be ready to begin a story based on what you've free-drafted.

 

Burroway says she uses clustering more to help her write about scenes or to come to know her characters.

For practice, try clustering the word "fear" or "yesterday"

 

2. Keeping a journal. Cluster "today," then freedraft.

 

3. Write About something you care about. Make a menu of things you tend to think, feel about: what makes you angry, frustrated, happy? What do you want from your life? What have been crucial turning points in your life? List several important feelings -- love, hate, desire, fear, joy, anger -- and cluster and freedraft each in regard to yourself. Think how to recast what you come up with in some fictional characters' life or situation.

 

4. Write down the facts of the first seven years of your life under several categories: Events, People, Your Self, Characteristic Things, Places. Highlight items you aren't done with yet, that you still live with.

 

5. Journal, part II: a "pillow" book (so-called because Sei Shonogun, a fourteenth-century Japanese courtesan, keep a diary hidden under her pillow. This is a list of Things in which you are free to invent the categories: Things to Eat While driving; Things I Never Like to Think About; Things I Like to Do Before Going to Bed, etc.

 

"Such devices may be necessary because identifying what we care about is not alwways easy....It is so much easier to know what we ought to think and feel than what we actually do. Worthy authorities constantly exhort us to care about worthy causes, only a few of which really touch us, whereas what we care about at any given moment may seem trivial, self-conscious, or self-serving." Burroway, p. 10.

 

  Originality in art is as simple or hard as discovering how one is different from others. Originality in art is derived from individuality.

 

7. Think of a dilemma you or someone you know is facing or has faced, a situation in which there is no good solution and any action taken will be painful and costly.

 

8. Notice an incongruity or peculiar phenomenon; use a story to explain it to yourself and others. Maids reading the classics.

 

9. Notice a connection: while having your teeth cleaned, you're struck by how this "relationship" offers, incongruously, intimacy and distance.

 

10. What are your top 10 memories, both good and bad?

 

11. Think of some current problem in your life. Give it to an imaginary someone in an imaginary situation.

 

12. Right a Wrong. Take Your Revenge.

 

13. Read a newspaper and notice what interests you, what teases your imagination, and let your mind work on it loosely and freely, without forcing it too quickly into a "story."

 

14. Sketch a floor plan of the first house you remember. Place an X where important things happened. Write a tour of the house in which you're the guide.

 

15. Consider the following words as "cluster - freedraft" subjects: first memory, a dream, parents, loss, unfounded fear, my body.

 

 

Some afterthoughts:

 

            -- "Writer's block always represents a lack of information."

           

            --          "Laziness may be the imagination's need for more time."

 

            --          "Write to your lowest standard."