TEN  LESSONS  SO FAR

 

 

1.      Titles are important: they catch the reader’s ear & eye; they serve as guideposts to the style, tone, and theme of a story.

2.      Description – specific, concrete, vividly focusing on the use of the five senses – is crucial to making a story come to life in a reader’s mind.

3.      Stories should consist not of a summarized history of events but rather of a sequence of scenes.

4.      A story should begin (open) on the cusp between fixed and moving action, between what is usual and ordinary and the arrival of the unusual and extraordinary.

5.      A first-person narrator always has a good reason to be telling his or her story, though he or she might not appear at first to be the primary character in it.

6.      A good story moves its main character from one way of thinking and feeling to another that results from the experience in the story.

7.      Dialogue and action are indispensable tools to a story that arouses a reader’s interest.

8.      Stories can be made from the “actual” but have no obligation to be faithful to it.

 

9.      The action or events in a story must be “believable” whether true or not.

10.  The structure of a story has a powerful influence upon its effect.