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Title: Using Memories to Wake-Up the Muse Post by: Daniel Franklin on October 26, 2007, 03:26:58 PM Do people really want to read a story about your family vacation? Or when your cousin Bertha came to stay with you for six months? Probably not every single little detail, and not exactly the way it happened. With a fiction story, you don't have to stay true to the actual events. Take the basis of the story and expand it. That doesn't mean your family vacation wouldn't make a good story. For example. Let's say the first day you drove for eight hours, and everybody, except the driver, was sleeping. That won't make a good story or chapter, but the second day you meet a very interesting person, a local eccentric artist who has his paintings set up outside a local cafe. Now, that sounds like an interesting thing to put into a story.
The fiction comes in when you change what happened the first day. You could either say the first day you meet the local artist, or write something more interesting for the first day. Perhaps on your way to the destination, you have a flat tire and have to camp out for the night. You had planned on staying at a hotel so you don't have any camping gear. You have to rough it sleeping under the stars and fighting off a bear. Of course this didn't happen, but it's much more exciting than the whole family sleeping the first day of the trip. Unless you are writing a biography, autobiography, or a journal, it doesn't have to be true. One of my short stories, The Ransom Note, is a good example of using a memory for a story idea. In this story, Kristyn's favorite doll is kidnapped and held for ransom. The ransom: To clean her messy bedroom. True parts of this story: Prized possession was hidden, a ransom note was left, the ransom was to clean up, and the person in the story who hid the prized possession was the same as in real life. Fictional parts of this story: My prized possession was not a doll, and the motive for leaving the ransom note was different. Also, the names and ages were fictionalized. I'm not sure how old I was when this happened to me. I just picked the main character to be twelve because that's the age group I was targeting for this story. Another way of using memories in fiction is using a memory as one scene or one aspect of the story. For example, in a novel I just recently finished writing, there is a scene where the family is going vegetarian. The main character doesn't want to be vegetarian. He's thinking about how he has to have dinner at his best friend's house just to get a piece of meat, and what he wouldn't give for a turkey leg at that very moment. This happened to me. My family was going vegetarian and I didn't want to be one. I would eat at my friend's house because she always had meat for dinner. I intertwined this situation into the novel I was writing. It fit the character and the story perfectly. Let's use the example of the family vacation above where we met that eccentric painter. This is a memory of something that happened on a trip and can be added to a novel. Let's say you're writing a murder mystery. Well, the plot is pretty obvious, and since you're neither a cop, nor a serial killer, this plot isn't taken from either your past or from a memory. Let's say the murder took place across the street from the cafe where the eccentric artist was painting. The detective in the story interviews the artist in one scene, and you've just woven a memory into your story. So dig deep into your memory and you'll be able to come up with all sorts of ideas you can use! Articles Source - Free Articles About the Author Elizabeth Wrobel has had both fiction and non-fiction published. If you want to know more about her and read more of her writing, visit her blog: Little Cottage in the Northwoods (http://www.elizabethwrobel.com/littlecottage/) |