TWA General Discussion

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Also, if everyone could please 'watch' this group, that would be great. To do so, follow these steps:

 

Lol, well, you're story's not too bad for such a short tale, but it's missing a key element of narrative: complication. Basically, all forms of narrative have three basic elements:

1. Orientation (where the protagonist and surroundings/setting are introduced).
2. Complication (where something happens that upsets the order of things as they were originally presented in the O).
3. Resolution (where the problem introduced by the C is fixed--either back to how things where in the O, or onto some other suitable arrangement).

Your story (being so short) would follow the pattern:

if you were to fix up the middle ("The man was a cool man.") so that it contained some problematic element. Generally longer stories will play out something like this:

or even (if the writer has taken the time to weave in multiple narrative threads) something like this:

noting how you can have multiple problems created at once, running at once, solved at once. For example, if I took that last narrative pattern and added colours to highlight which C was paired with which R you can see how some problems are larger ones carried over the length of the story and others are smaller, situational events:

Basically, a narrative follows the O,C,R,C,R... pattern until you reach a point where all Cs have been paired with an R and the final R has an appropriate sense of finality about it. It's how creative you are in your Cs and Rs and how you string them together that goes a great way towards determining how good your story is.

Hope that's helpful. ;)

 

Thought people might be interested: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/la...ing-yourself-editing-20130119,0,3824129.story

 

http://www.wordcounter.net/blog/2014/3/dealing-with-negative-criticism/

Worthwhile/useful advice. ^_^

Also, updated OP to suit social forums update. Hopefully it would work for everyone.