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Page 2 of 2 When and where Ruth Rendell Do avoid those over-worked describing words like “fantastic”, “stunning” and “lovely”, which actually tell us nothing. Instead choose adjectives that help your reader to see or share your experience of the scene. Tune in to the associations of a word and let them work for you. Hovel, house, mansion – three ways of naming a dwelling, but what different pictures spring to mind as we read them! If the story is set in the past, you will probably feel comfortable telling it in the past tense although the use of the present can give a feeling of immediacy and involve the reader closely in the action. Another decision you’ll need to make involves the teller, for every tale has a teller in addition to the author who wrote it. Is there a narrator, someone outside the action who relates the events, or will the story have more impact if it’s told in the first person – “I” – which was the method chosen by Edgar Allan Poe for his best-known horror story The Fall Of The House Of Usher? Finally, we come to the plot. The novelist EM Forster said that, “Story is a series of events strung like beads on a string. (This happened and then this happened and then...) Plot is a chain of cause-and-effect relationships that constantly create a pattern of unified action and behaviour. Plot involves the reader in the game of ‘Why’?” Stories that involve a twist in the tale are examples of carefully contrived plots and those written by a master of the genre, Roald Dahl, are both intriguing and amusing. How easily we smile with Mary Maloney as the police tuck into the leg of lamb with which she killed her unfaithful husband in Lamb to the Slaughter! There’s a market for twist stories and if you are lucky enough to have that kind of mind, it’s worth developing it. Beginnings and endingsA short story needs a lively opening, something that captures the reader’s attention and makes them read on. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it does need to start moving forward immediately, giving the background that leads to the climax or turning point in the story. Sometimes stories start just before the big scene and then unravel at a more leisurely pace.Ruth Rendell, queen of crime writers, lures us into her terrifying tale An Outside Interest with this chilling confession: “Frightening people used to be a hobby of mine. Perhaps I should rather say an obsession and not people but, specifically, women. Making others afraid is enjoyable...” It ends with the words, “Her rescuer, her murderer. Then what was I?” leaving us to decide on the extent of the man’s guilt. Open endings invite us to speculate, and not all readers will reach the same conclusion. They can add subtlety to your writing, reminding us how unfathomable human nature can be, but you can’t just stop because you’ve run out of ideas. The ending must be carefully paced. The reader should sense that the narrative is winding down and not feel cheated by a sudden halt. The most over-worked ending of all is “...and then I woke up and it had all been a dream”. To teachers of creative writing this signifies an unplanned story, one that ran away with the writer who ran out of time or words, or simply never thought the plot through to the end. Don’t use it! A student once reminded me that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends in just such a way, and of course 100 years on it remains a universal favourite. But my defence is that children’s books are the exception that proves the rule.
Look upon the title as a label that sums up the theme of the story without giving away the ending. If your story is published you might find that the title has been changed, so don’t spend too long agonising over it. Susan Hill sometimes uses the name of her central character as a title – Ossie and Missy – in her collection A Bit of Singing and Dancing. Susan Hill |
