Become a good storywriter

Highway to success, Charles Dube

WRITE a story set in places you know.

These stories have familiar settings.

They are set in real places and are about “real life” people, their feelings and the things they do.

Places you know could be: exciting places: well-known busy street, busy bus terminus, an old house, the football ground, a strip of wasteland, a dumpsite.

These could also include secret places like abandoned house or haunted house.

Ordinary places come in handy like a playground, a park, a shopping centre or even your own home.

**Victoria Falls is one of Zimbabwe’s most spectacular natural sights and tourist resorts**

If you are well-travelled you can write about holiday places like well-known tourist resorts like the Victoria Falls, national parks and other little-known places of interest which exist in most parts of the country.

Think of a place you know well but invent a good name for it. Unidentified places deny your story some form of reality.

Use details to make the place sound real.

Think of what you can see, hear and smell.

Put your character into the setting and have something go wrong.

This obviously will fire your imagination.

Using a place, you know well means it is easier to make your setting sound real.

Stories with familiar settings often use: the past tense. Mhleli climbed the ladder.

They also use the third person.

For instance, she saw an ox — not I saw an ox.

Stories with familiar settings also use time connectives like later and meanwhile to show how time moves on through the story.

Follow the advice offered by some writers of stories with familiar settings.

Where do they get ideas from?

The answer is they come from anywhere and everywhere.

An idea can come from something you see, something somebody says, something that just pops into your head without any warning.

As other writers do, you can jot down this “something” in a notebook in case you forget it.

The lovely thing about familiar settings is that they are just that – familiar.

You are surrounded by them – where you live, where you play, where you go to school.

You have already got all the details you need.

To make your settings sound real, never tell the reader too much.

For a start this will be boring – like reading a list.

Also.

It will stop the reader using their own experience, seeing their own setting in their head.

That is what you want to plug into.

When you write try to focus on what gets the readers “hooked” or interested so they cannot bear to put the story down.

That is the most important and difficult trick in all storytelling: to describe what is happening right now in a way that sets up what happens next.

Advice: What do you do after writing your draft?

Writers say they go back over it to look for ways to make it better.

Funnier perhaps. Or more vivid.

Or more exciting. Or to see if they can improve the pace.

(Pace means the speed with which things happen on the page.) If readers get to the most important bit of the story too quickly you will have lost your chance to hook them.

If the story is too slow, though, readers will not even get as far as the important bit.

Here is a list of some top tips offered to writers of stories with familiar settings: A top tip to get ideas for your story with a familiar setting is to use your own memories — about your happiest time, or saddest time, or funniest time, for instance.

However, a top tip for becoming a writer of stories with familiar settings is to read stories with familiar settings.

Do this and you are bound to succeed. Stories should have an opening which introduces the reader to time, setting and main characters.

It shows how the main character feels and makes the reader want to read on.

From there you build up your story by setting the scene for what is going to happen in the climax.

The climax is the exciting bit of the story — the main action of the story as the main character(s) tackle(s) the task.

You then come to the resolution.

This is the end of the climax — the main character gets out of the difficult situation leading to the ending which wraps up the story neatly.

This bit often ties in closely to the opening.

When planning to write your story consider where your story is set. As stated above for your setting choose a place you know well.

Has your setting got a name?

For example, Big Dip or Fred’s Place.

What is the weather like?