a service of Simcomserv Australia

Agency for Literary Review offers unpublished authors and first-time writers the opportunity to have their work assessed for free.

Free Advice and Assistance for the Novice Writer

Agency for Literary Review

Planning the Story

The question, how do you begin writing a story, is answered by the question, how do you begin telling a story.  One of the oldest ploys in telling a story is to start with, once upon a time.  The reason why that works is that it sets the scene.  That must be done with any written work, be it academic treatise or romance novel.  How you set the scene is a quality of your story-writing or story-telling skill.  

It is axiomatic that to be a good writer you need to be a prolific reader.  If you steep yourself in your craft you will soon recognise good from bad and use that awareness to sketch your opening scene.  Once that is established, the rest follows.  It follows easily if you have done your research and with more difficulty if you scrimp on the essentials in your eagerness to get words on page.

Interviewers tend to ask celebrity authors the identical question of how they go about their writing.  It is apparent there are no schools of authors in terms of methodology.  For as many times as this question has been asked, there seems to be a different answer each time (or there is a huge conspiracy and they have no intention of letting you in on the secret).  Authors go about writing in a way that is comfortable for them.

An author in the UK when asked the question said she sat down and began writing and the plot and its characters unfolded as she wrote.  From there it was only a matter of research and rewrite until most of the story was complete.

A Canadian author, once finding his idea for a story, writes out tentative chapter headings that lead through the idea.  He then researches each chapter and roughs it out.  When the story is finally constructed, he then weaves it into a novel.

An American author replied that each story ends.  You can’t tell a story without an ending, no more than you can tell a joke without a punch line. His method is to go (mentally) to the last page of the story and determine what desirable outcome of his plot he wants.  Having seen the ending, he then goes back to write how it all got to that point.

Another author reportedly creates her story with a word phrase like, love blooms, dispassionate love, entanglement of love, or, love knows no boundary.  She then creates a phantom main character with one name only.  Having done that, she creates several more characters to populate the story and then has each of those other characters tell their own story of how that word-phrase applies to them and their relationship with the main character.  It turns out, according to the interview, that the stories told by these people begin in turn to create the main character and to build the plot.  Her concentration is not on creating a story, but rather on creating credible characters with complex lives.

It seems that it matters little about getting started in some accepted manner or about mapping your activity throughout the process.   The only common denominator is the need to research.

Thomas Keneally was interviewed for Talking Heads on ABC TV.  He commented that he was often given ideas for a story from other people.  He was in America when a survivor of the Holocaust told him about the German businessman, Oskar Schindler.  That led Mr Keneally to write the acclaimed, Schindler’s Ark.  The book resulted from Mr Keneally’s demanding and dedicated research.  Schindler’s Ark was later made into Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award winning, Schindler’s List.  But none of it would have occurred without the research performed by Thomas Keneally, in the first instance. 

Research is everything.