In Christopher Beha’s The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, author Antonya Nelson shares her 9 step process of writing and editing a story. She writes about how she used that process as an experiment with her students and describes the process as follows.
Step 1: write something that happened to you. On the first day of this workshop, she asked her students to write a 500-word story about something that happened to them and write it from the first person point of view. Something that they understand is a story: something you tell at the bar or party to your friends.
Step 2: write it from someone else’s perspective. In this next step, she wants to give the students a bit of fictional leeway in turning their story into a story someone else who was part of it would tell. They could switch around pieces of facts like locations and times but the main story would be still the same. The story now should have 1000 words (each step adds 500 words from here onwards).
Step 3: add a clock. She describes the clock as
What is a clock, in the vocabulary of story making? It can be any of a variety of things, but ultimately it is a shaping device through which you signal to the reader the time they have to spend with your characters. For instance, the clock can be a road trip.
Thee clock can also be an arc of a story like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey. Anything that frames the story’s duration.
Step 4: identify props that can help the story. After adding the clock, she asked her students to identify props and objects that would be useful to the story. This was an exercise in detail-making.
Step 5: determine protagonist’s age. Knowing the age of your protagonist can help anchor their story to cultural, biological or social transitional moments which in part helps readers understand them better.
She uses an example of a story where “a son lives with his mother”. This story becomes very different if the boy is 10, 15, 21, 35 or 55. The dynamics between the characters and how the reader thinks about them changes a lot.
Step 6: introduce a world event. In the fifth step, she asked her students to introduce some real world event into the story. This event entering the story creates a new dynamic and brings an outside influence they need to deal with.
Step 7: divide the story to binaries. What are all the opposing forces in the story? A man vs a man, a man vs nature, a man vs themselves or something different? She asked them to make sure these binaries existed and if they introduced one part of a binary into the story, they should be ready to bring in its opposite later on.
Step 8: introduce a traditional story arc. Something like a Freytag’s Pyramid. This was to be done as an exercise of building, maintaining and resolving tensions in the story.
Step 9: add something crazy into the story to see what happens.
Would it be a better story if it were told in the second person? Would it be a better story if it were told in the present tense? Would it be a better story if it were told in reverse chronological order? Would it be a better story if it were told from the dog’s point of view?