Disclaimer
The framework built within this multi-part blog is for educational purposes only. It is presented only as an example. All rights are reserved (of course), but the author does grant permission for others to use it as an outline for practice and creation of derivative unpublished works in all media.How do you make a story? Individually, all the tips and hints you get about writing, while useful, are pretty much left for the writer to implement for themselves. This multi-part post is intended to be a live-as-it-happens exploration in how to put everything together to construct a story.
I want you to see one path to how to actually build this foundation. I’m starting from having nothing. I’m just going to be cobbling things together as they occur to me. I’ll stop when, hopefully, we have something that’s complete enough that a story could be written from it. I’m making no claims as to whether the framework built here will result in a publishable story (I’m making it up as I go)… it’s about the process, not the end result.
My goal is to present some reinforcement to the principles I’ve written about in other hubs about writing techniques. As more than one road leads to Rome, so too are there many more ways to build a story than what I’m going to develop here — I use any number of methods, myself. In any case, I hope you’ll take it for what it is, enjoy the ride, and maybe take something away that will help you with your own process of creation.
The First Broad Stokes
OK. First step, we should have a premise, the thing that the story is about. At this point it can be anything. Whatever we want. That being the case, let’s have a tale of professional and sibling jealousy set in a jewelry kiosk in the middle of a mall. Since I tend to prefer female leads, I’m going to make the siblings two sisters — aged nineteen and twenty-six. The catalyst that stirs everything up is a twenty-two-year-old guy who doesn’t seem to have any agenda other than to do his job at the kiosk.
It’s OK that we haven’t decided on whether this is a drama or comedy or tragedy, or whatever. That doesn’t mean that we can’t choose one at this point if we have a definite preference. It just so happens that I don’t, so I’ll wait on that.
Now that we have a premise, and some rough characters to help define that premise, what next? We need to decide how the story ends; what the final scene it. I’m thinking the sisters, exhaustedly sitting with their backs against the wall, each one covered in some sort of schmutz (to be determined by how the story goes), finding comfort in the other. The younger sister says, “I don’t think I ever want to get married.”
That’s a start. Now we can start working on either the plot or on the characters. If you have specific events in a story that you want to tell, it can’t hurt to work on the plot a little. In SF/F stories, this is also a good place to work on the rules of the universe your characters are going to inhabit. However, unless you have an overriding reason to do otherwise, I suggest you work on developing your characters first. Who they are will dictate how they act and react, so if you, the writer, have them as real as possible in your head first, then the plot seems to become more flexible.
Who are the sisters? What sort of background do they come from?
Since I don’t want to get too far outside of the culture I’m familiar with, I’m going to make them white Americans. Since that, in and of itself, is boring, I’m going to melting-pot-ize them a bit and stir up their ethnic stew.
Though ethnically mixed, both sisters easily pass as Caucasian, and consider themselves as such, but with an emotional leaning toward their mother’s Mediterranean heritage (she’s a Greek/Italian mix herself). Their father is the child of a Russian (Siberian) father, and an Amerasian (Japanese/Black American) mother. Why this sort of combination? No real reason. I pretty much picked them out of a hat. Might make them fun.
The sisters were raised in a house filled with loud love. Yes, it’s stereotypical for Mediterranean as well as Russian households to be filled with yelling, but what the heck. I’m also filling the house with love because I’m hoping to have the conflict in another area of the story — I don’t want to have too many areas of conflict. I figure that, even though it’s loud, the home can be a safe haven from the other complications that are created in the story. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be bones of contention within the family, just that they all know that they have each other’s backs.
What about the girls parents? What are they like? What’s their history?
The Mother
Their mother, Isabella Triana (Artemakis) Borda is the only sister in a family that has five brothers. She works part-time at her friend’s catering business as a cook. She grew up in a mostly Hellenic neighborhood and can speak fluent Greek as well as Italian. After graduation from high school, her family insisted that she go to the home countries of her heritage and really get in touch with her history. She crossed paths with Anatolyi Borda, who was in the middle of a holiday and hopelessly lost in the streets of Athens. She became his guide for the rest of his stay and they fell for each other. “Bella” followed Anatolyi back to Russia, and stayed with him and his uncle for the remainder of her European stay. It was quite the family scandal that she was with a non-Greek, but as she wasn’t pure-blood Greek they made allowances and gave their blessing for marriage. They married in St. Petersburg, honeymooned in Greece, and went to America once Anatolyi’s papers were in order. Bella started working when they returned, and it wasn’t long before they were blessed with child.
Why these choices? I’d already thrown in her ethnicity, and I ran with it. Greek communities tend to be tight knit and have a wealth of traditions (cf: My Big Fat Greek Wedding). It’s encouraged that Greeks go back to the home country to see where they come from. So I figured that if the girls’ father was going to be from Russia, then having him be in Greece on holiday was a reasonable enough thing to do. That his English wasn’t great made for a convenient path to have Bella become his guide while in Greece. Then I let young love take over.
The Father
Anatolyi Nikolayevich Borda was born in Siberia to a Russian father and an Amerasian (Japanese/American) mother who had emigrated from Japan. His mother is a paleoarcheologist, and chose to relocate to Siberia to forever be near her beloved dig sites. Anatolyi hated the cold of his homeland. Even though he loved his mother (he barely knew his father, who was rarely home and when he was there was usually warmed by too much vodka), all the times he spent miles from anywhere in the cold tundra made him want nothing so much than to go someplace warm and with people. He gained admission to a University in Odessa and studied computer science before the lure of the west caused him to drop out and explore Europe. It was during this trip that he met Bella. They lived with his father’s brother in St. Petersburg for several months before they got married.
When he emigrated to America, Anatolyi’s restless spirit, and his lack of fluency in English, combined to make finding steady work difficult. He started small businesses — often as a street vendor — in the hope of hitting it big, but he’d often be lucky to eek out a living. A venture at jewelry-making and repair seemed promising, but lack of expertise and his unquenchable spirit to move on doomed it to fail — until his daughters bought him out.
So, why these choices for Anatolyi? It’s purely arbitrary. I wanted his life to be that of restlessness. Of wanting to go over the next hill to see if the life there was better. I did have to give some thought as to why a Siberian would be in contact with an Amerasian woman, so the academic thrust was a contrivance to make that happen. As she left Japan, and Anatolyi’s father was rarely around, I’ve set up a restless spirit within this family that might manifest itself in one or both of the daughters when I actually get around to figuring them out.
And I think that’s enough for Part 1. To this point most of our work has been in giving history and texture to the lives of our main character’s parents. It’s entirely possible almost none of this is going to be used directly in the story. However, all of this will tend to color the lives of our sisters. We now have family traditions to possibly draw from.
Back when I was talking about doing the work on the supporting characters, (CJ’s Creative Studio – Thoughts on Developing Interesting Characters) this is the sort of stuff I meant. As the story itself gets thought about more, I’m sure more details will come to light. What’s important now is that we have a framework from which to build our sisters…. which we’ll get to the next time.
Don’t forget to check out the other parts of this series:
Part 1 – Premise and Parents (this part)
Part 2 – Main Characters
Part 3 – The Support Character and Plot Happens
Part 4 – Building the Plot
