Develop Your Story

Once I Start Writing:

Once you know your publication’s audience or you’ve decide to write the story gnawing inside you regardless of whether it will be published, consider a few techniques you can use to strengthen your writing:

Beginnings: As with learning a language or your first weeks in your host country: take things slowly, keep it simple. Allow yourself to be awkward, be open to the new sounds, signs, structures rushing at you, confusing you. Try your hand at a simple opening with simple words like those you first learned when acquiring your new language. You were in a new place, seeing everything in a fresh way. Relive this. Revisit the very moment you entered through the thick wooden door with its stained glass panel of the Victorian flat that would be your home for the next year. Was your Welsh flatmate sitting at the kitchen table eating toast with butter and gooseberry jam, drinking Earl Grey tea? Could you hear your other flatmate playing the harp from her bedroom? Did you notice how sparse your room looked with only a bed, desk, and dresser compared to your cluttered dorm room back in the States?

Detail: Your study abroad experience is so rich that the real details of the way things were could easily fill up your 1200-word count. Think specifics:

—a short-squat “viejecita,” or wizened old woman, with peppery hair plaited into two long braids shifting to and fro on her rounded back
—women cook over fires and families eat the same unchanging meal of gummy millet with a thin leaf-flavored sauce almost every day

When someone else reads your article, he or she should know what it is like to be where you were. See the extraordinariness in even what may seem like daily and mundane details. To someone who has not been where you’ve been or done what you’ve done, these details may very well seem fantastic and fascinating. The reader should feel how you loved or hated a place, fought for a cause, learned to appreciate speaking German or studying marine biology—not because you tell the reader all of these things—but by your handling of the details. It is important to name names and to write the details of our lives and others’ lives. As a writer, you are the carrier of details that make up history.

Don’t tell, but show is a saying among writing professors. Don’t tell readers what to feel or what you felt (e.g. I felt love for my sister who traveled half way around the world to visit me because I was homesick; I was sad when my four months in Prague came to an end.). Show the reader the situation, in all its raw detail, and the reader will know what he or she feels and what you felt.

It’s not easy to stay with our senses and to avoid telling what we felt, but each time you find yourself doing it, go back to the memory and pretend you can hold up a mirror to reflect the scene.

Be specific: Nouns: people, places, and things have names. Tell us the names. You’ve lived in a place that your reader may know little about. Instead of saying, “I awoke to the gift of fresh fruit at my doorstep…” say, “I awoke to the gift of fresh oranges, papaya, mangoes, and guavas at my doorstep.” Specific words or phrases like “cold-bucket shower” gives us the immediate scene and the image we need to build a picture. You took the time to learn the names of your host country’s flora and fauna, foods, buildings, language. Put them to use in your writing.

What to avoid: There may be a time and place for some or all of the following, but only in moderation at most.
Cliches, adjectives (especially glittery, flowery, or overused words like shimmering, wondrous and roseate, magnificent), personification (Do mountains really call out to you and buildings smile?), condescension, and vague and indefinite words and phrases (e.g. perhaps, maybe, somehow). See what happens if you go to the extreme and eliminate these from your writing.
Also, revisit questions. Why didn’t you answer a question yourself? Is it intended to be a hook or a cop-out? Could you tell the reader something definitive if you went a step further and looked deeper? If you can answer the question through further critical thinking or reflection, it’s best to keep probing.

Make your writing active and alive. You studied abroad. You are a proactive person. You weren’t distanced from your host family during your first week in Burkina Faso; you distanced yourself from your host family. Make your writing run, jump, leap. Look at the nouns in your story. A simple but effective exercise is to take a character in your story such as the politician for whom you interned or the farmer whose crops you helped harvest. What verbs describe their work? The politician debates, writes, travels, campaigns; the farmer plants, tills, digs, sells. When your sentences start sleeping, wake them up with the studying, working, playing, and living you and your characters engaged in.

Use the crafts of fiction:
•Point of view—Think about how you will angle the vision from which the people, events, and details of your story are viewed. The available points of view for nonfiction narrative are first, second and third person. First-person is most common whereas essays and journalistic pieces often use third person. Also think about time and what tense you will write in. Unless you are purposefully AND CLEARLY switching between tenses such as distant past and past, be careful of carelessly changing mid-stream.
•Character development—Unlike the fiction writer, you have the advantage of already knowing your characters—the main character may in fact be you. You at least visited with these people or possibly even studied, worked, and lived with them for an extended period. You can help the reader get to know them and feel committed to them through specificity and detail. If someone painted your character’s portrait which physical features would you notice first? What subtleties did you observe (think of their mannerism sand way of speaking, whether their hands are rough or smooth, whether they smell of cigarettes or lilac perfume)? How do they stand? What do they carry in their pockets? What do your characters teach their students, children, community? What are their politics, religion, or traditions? Why should we care about them?
•Plot is a narrative of events depending on causality; it grows out of character. If you concentrate on developing the people in your article and involve the reader in their lives, the development of relationship and events will create plot. Keep asking yourself, “What happens.” In Bird by Bird Lamott writes, “…there is no point gathering an audience and demanding attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive.”
If you have difficulty narrowing your plot and finding your focus, you might consider Alice Adam’s formula for short story writing: ABDCE for action, background, development, climax, and ending. Begin with compelling action (perhaps an anecdote) to draw in the reader. Background is where you briefly introduce us to your characters, how they’ve come together, and possibly what was happening before the episode your story focuses on. Then develop your characters, so that the reader learns what they care about. The plot—which consists of drama, actions, and tension—will grow out of that. You move the story forward until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for your characters in some real way (again, the main character may be you). The ending focuses on how the characters have changed, what happened, and most importantly, what does it mean?
Dialogue is a great change of pace from description and expository if it is well integrated into the story and recorded exactly as the person would say it. If you speak another language or knew enough of the foreign language in the country where you studied to incorporate words and phrases in a foreign language, use it where it has a purpose and can be easily understood by the reader. Or, use it if there is no English translation for what you are trying to get across. Do be careful, however, of dialogue that is written in dialect, as it is difficult to pull off (e.g. writing dialogue for a person who speaks in broken English).

When you think you are done, go further. Your thesis is not finished after your first draft. Very often writers’ conclusions are just the beginning. Suddenly your writing just stops because you’ve reached too complicated, messy, or scary a place. If you were climbing a mountain and gave up at 10,000 feet feeling afraid, tired, stuck, you’d have no choice but to go down or up. At the thought of down, you’d likely say to yourself, “but I came all this way. I can’t turn back now.” So too should it be with writing, but unfortunately, with writing, you can escape your situation. You can take an easy out, using a clichéd phrase like “and so I had the time of my life…or studying abroad was the best thing I ever did…or despite the difficulties I am grateful I had the opportunity to....” Don’t be hasty in trying to wrap up your writing neatly. The process of writing is complicated and challenging like study abroad itself—go for the grit.

If you spent your whole article talking about how you wanted to discover your host people’s traditional culture only to find their traditional culture no longer exists, maybe that’s the point you need to start from. Maybe that’s where your real message is and what was a light and entertaining story should be just an anecdote. How do you fit into this picture of a culture disappearing? Why the resistance in writing about it? Do you not know enough about it? What more can you learn? Maybe you discover you need and want to go back to your host community to do further research or to take action. Make such realizations part of your story, and maybe in time you will even follow through on these realizations.

Revision: All good writers devote themselves to revising their work, sentence by sentence. Keep in mind the adage that “art is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.” Once you have your novella in progress and realize the reality that you intended to write a magazine article, start cutting. Be ruthless. Rework your writing until it is at a manageable stage where you can check that every paragraph, sentence, and phrase counts. Don’t be in such a hurry to submit for publication an early draft, because it will be in danger of rejection. Magazines and newspapers are not going anywhere. In fact, your story could very well sit in an editor’s inbox unread for months if it’s only mediocre and the editor has to work on stronger manuscripts that need attention for more immediate publication. Instead, use the extra weeks or months that your article would have sat in the editor’s inbox to revisit and revise it until it’s as brief and polished as possible. Such a carefully crafted, developed, thoughtful article will get an editor’s attention. In The Writing Book, Kate Grenville says, “When does revision come to an end? Only when it's too late to make any more changes: when the story is set in print.”