The Mindful Writer is all about helping you to make a difference with your words by really digging deep into what you’re writing and why.
The full experience of the Slow Story Course is for member supporters of The Mindful Writer. Upgrade your subscription to get the workshop writing prompts, readings and exercises, join the community and share your ideas inspired by the workshop content, and start deepening your connection to your craft, yourself and everyone and everything you’re sharing this human experience with. 💙
Welcome to the Slow Story Course.
Please do say hello in the comments and let us know where in the world you are joining from. I’m looking forward to getting to know you and your writing.
There are six workshops in total for this course designed to help you draft a new short story. They are being released once a fortnight over the next few months. We will be going slowly to build a story with deep foundations.
I’ve designed the course so that each workshop builds on the previous ones so it’s better to work through them in order. But you can of course use them in whatever way best suits your practice.
Workshop 1
Getting to the heart of characters
When I think of the short stories, novels, and movies I love, it’s the characters that come to mind first rather than the storyline. Is it the same for you?
How we find the characters that appear in our stories can come from many different sources. Here are the main ones in my writing practice: they appear out of nowhere when I respond to a prompt; they appear out of nowhere and take up residence in my head and start telling me things; they’re inspired by someone I’ve met, or know, who tells me a story about someone they know and it sparks something in my mind. What about you? How do you find the characters in your stories? Do let me know in the comments.
Characters are who we connect to our stories through in order to write them, and they’re the element our readers remember if we create ones that crackle with life and make them feel something. Even if the narrator is unlikable, and/or unreliable, if we write them with nuance, understanding and compassion then the reader will have an emotional response.
For us to engender an emotional response in our readers, we have to feel those emotions too when we write our stories. So how do we get close enough to these characters that appear in our heads to really feel for them? We get to know them properly.
Whose story is this?
When we’re thinking about whose story it is we’re writing here during this course, and in every story we write, I believe that to bring the characters to life we really have to take the time to understand who they are and why they are coming to us to tell their story.
Hopefully after the first workshop on the themes at the heart of your story, you will have discovered the character that is exploring those themes for you, and what it is you as a writer believe about those themes.
Before we dig into your character though, let’s look at the concept of conflict in a story.
Conflict is a key element in stories. The external conflict in the world of the plot (things that happen and people they are involved with) which is the reason the story is being told now (from the three questions I posed last week); and the internal conflict at the heart of your character, which is tied to your themes and the reason the story is being told at all. The internal demons they need to face in order to grow and change by the end of the story.
It's the internal and external conflicts you set up and how your protagonist reacts to them, is changed by them, as the story progresses that provide emotional resonance and connect the reader to your characters. Simply put, conflict is when something stands in the way of a character and their goals. In other words:
CHARACTER + WANT + OBSTACLE = CONFLICT
In the short story “Wenlock Edge” by Alice Munro, the unnamed narrator wants to be a sophisticated and intellectual woman living a life in the city that removes her completely from the provincial world she grew up in. She has moved to the city to study English and Philosophy and is disappointed by the other college girls she meets who seem to want nothing more than to get married. When she gets a new roommate, Nina, she realises she isn’t sophisticated at all. Nina is 22 years old and has already been married and had two children with her husband, and now she is in a relationship with a rich older man whose baby she also had but the baby died at eight months old.
When the narrator learns all of this she says “Hearing about Nina’s life made me feel like a simpleton.” Confronted with her own naivety she is forced to realise that she is not sophisticated at all. In trying to overcome that obstacle, the narrator agrees to go for dinner with Mr Purvis when Nina is too unwell to go. What happens at the dinner sets in motion a series of events that change the narrator’s life and views of herself, and others, forever.
So in Wenlock Edge, the conflict comes from the narrator’s need to feel she is different from the girl she was growing up in a provincial town. Even though she is never named, and the whole story seems focused on her telling Nina’s story, she is who the story is really about and she comes completely to life and reveals a lot about herself. Now, I don’t know Alice Munro’s writing process but in an interview she gave, she said:
I always have to know my characters in a lot of depth—what clothes they'd choose, what they were like at school, etc ... And I know what happened before and what will happen after the part of their lives I'm dealing with. I can't see them just now, packed into the stress of the moment. So I suppose I want to give as much of them as I can.
And for myself, over the course of writing two novels, a novella and countless short stories, I have discovered the same thing. I have to really know who it is I’m writing about.
Writing Exercise
Getting to know you
Now we are going to start digging into the heart and mind of your protagonist to find out where they’re from, where they’re at, and where they’re hoping to go.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Mindful Writer to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.