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.
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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 will be released once a fortnight over the next few months. We will be going slowly to build a story with deep foundations.
In the fifteen years since I started writing fiction again, taking my time with my stories has come to be a very important part of my practice. Sitting with ideas, with characters, with settings, and themes, letting them come to life in my mind without trying to force them to go in any particular direction. So while I will share lots of ideas, tools and resources in this course, nothing is prescriptive. There is no right or wrong way to respond to any of them. Use them in the way that works best for your practice.
Have you come to the course with an idea for a story you want to work on? Great if you have, but also great if you haven’t! If you have then you can use the writing exercises and prompts to develop that, if you haven’t got an idea yet then a good place to start from is a theme.
These themes listed above don’t mean much on their own though, so to carry a story, they need to be expanded on — materialism could be a story that shows chasing money won’t provide happiness, for example.
Themes are the heart of the story, the core element of the human condition that your characters are exploring through you, the reason it's being told. I believe they come to us as we need to learn something too in writing the story. The theme is also what the internal conflict at the heart of your character is linked to. The one that needs to be addressed to deliver the change they need to undergo. As essentially, stories are a container for change. Something needs to shift fundamentally by the end.
As Dara Marks says in the amazing craft book, Inside Story: The power of the transformational arc (a book about screenwriting that has helped me be a better novelist, short story writer and person that I wrote about here):
“A theme only becomes viable when a writer attaches personal meaning to the subject matter.”
Being True
I love this idea about our stories being guideposts to our hearts. To write the best stories we can, the ones that mean something to us as we write them and to the readers they reach, we have to dig deep and write our truths. I think a lot of the time we avoid going deeper. Not just into our characters' lives, but into our own to free the truths inside us. That’s a scary thing to do and I have a suspicion that we plod along writing stories that don't go much below the surface of things, even though they are well-crafted and have some lovely sentences, to keep ourselves safe from that. I don’t thinks that’s a conscious decision, but one that a part of our unconscious makes on our behalf to protect us. I have lived experience of our unconscious mind protecting us, as suppressed memories of childhood trauma resurfaced in my mind when I was in my early forties.
But writing our truths pulls readers to us, and when we do that and write with no inhibitions, I believe it pulls us to the page with newfound joy and freedom too. We want to write, to tap into those truths to make our stories crackle with life, to bring new insights into this human experience, and let readers find something that speaks to them. And after facing all those buried memories myself, I know that the thought of doing it is worse than the actual doing of it. And it has enabled me to open my heart more fully to myself, to my loved ones, to my characters and everyone I encounter. It’s set me on a mission to help change the world with stories by bringing more compassion and empathy to everything we write. Everyone that reads a story built on these foundations will find their own heart opening a bit more too.
So if you are looking for a theme to build your story around, look inside your heart and see what are the truths you need to write about being human. Writing from the heart to reveal these truths is how we can change ourselves, our writing, and the perspectives of the people who read our words.
Now we’re going to start doing some writing to get to those truths so we activate our own internal development as we draft this story, and help the readers it reaches to do the same thing.
Writing Exercise
What it means to be human. This is what all our stories are about.
So to start creating a new story with deep foundations, you need to free your truths about what it means to be human. Not just the surface thoughts. The ones deep down inside of you that have been formed at different times, by different experiences, and may well never have been looked at before. So how do we do that?
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