I am very pleased to post this guest essay by the indubitable Jeffrey Osier-Mixon, author of the award-winning short story, How To Roll a Perfect Cigarette:

There is an old saying that writers cringe when you ask them where they get ideas for stories. This hasn’t been my experience with writers in general, nor is it with me.

In fact, as fiction writers know, it doesn’t matter whether a story is true or not, or even whether it makes logical sense. We recognize good stories because of our humanity, not because of our training, skill, or talent. I think most people come up with ideas for stories all the time — as jokes or real-life stories to tell to friends, as interesting diversions, as instruction, as a reflection of one’s internal life. Storytelling is a part of every human culture. Narrative seems to be ubiquitously human.

The hard part is finding the natural boundaries of a story — where  it begins, how it unfolds, and where it ends. Some of the best writers have difficulties with these stages. There are many nuances of writing that can be developed and improved, as Victoria’s blog makes clear, but a story really need strong bones if it is going to hold together.

Being able to discern these boundaries take practice, but there are a few basics that have withstood the test of time. In the 1800s, Gustav Freytag, a literary scholar, analyzed Greek and Shakespearean stage drama and came up with what he called a dramatic pyramid.

This pyramid has five components:

• Exposition, in which the characters are introduced and the scene is set
• Rising action, in which the characters experience some conflict that needs to be resolved
• Climax, the turning point at which the resolution becomes inevitable
• Falling action, in which the conflict unravels and the resolution is presented
• Dénouement (from the French for “to untie a knot”), when all the loose ends are tied up

In writing stories, particularly short stories (3000-7000 words), I prefer to distill this five-act classic structure down into three stages: Beginning, Middle, and End. I like to joke that this is because I have a hard time spelling “dénouement”, but in truth writers were using this three-part structure for a while before Freytag — a long while indeed, as even Aristotle says in the Poetics, A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

The Beginning

Stories always begin at the beginning, but that point is not always where the writing starts. Anyone who has read Henry James knows that chapters can go by before anything of substance happens, even in absolute classics. So where does it start?

The story always begins when the main character does something that impacts the rest of the tale. Whether the story is long or short, you as the storyteller must know where the action starts and then work backward to find the shortest number of words you can use to get the reader to that point. Sometimes that point is zero and you leap into action, introducing the characters as you go. Sometimes, particularly in emotionally dramatic stories, the back story is necessary in order to understand the movement. But don’t get so caught up in the back story or in the descriptions that you lose sight of the actual beginning.

The back story plus the first action is what Freytag calls the Exposition. It’s the first act of your play.

In practical terms, sometimes you have to creep up on a story to find out where it begins. Start writing at a time point earlier than the action, ignoring the back story for now. If your narrative is about a day in someone’s life, start the afternoon before. You might discover that something important happens that evening. Be willing to experiment with the beginning, and be willing to write several alternates.

The Middle

Once things have begun to happen, they have to keep happening or the reader wanders off. As a species, we have a very short attention span.

Freytag calls this part the Rising Action and the Climax, the second and third acts. In a short story or a play, the action might well follow the classic rise to a climax shown in the pyramid. In a novel, however, and even in a short story, the rising/climax/falling theme might be repeated over and over in several small sub-plots, each of which moves the main story one step farther.

I think the important thing to remember in the middle, just as on a journey, is that each step is an important story in itself, as well as a step on the path toward your final conclusion.

The End

Endings are tough to locate sometimes. It is easy enough to locate an end to substantive action, but rarely does a good story simply stop. (There are exceptions, of course.) This is what Freytag calls the Falling Action and Dénouement, when the conflict into which you have taken your hapless characters is finally resolved, one way or the other, and any unsatisfied plot points are brought to a conclusion and usually explained.

Although Freytag’s diagram shows the End as equal in size to the Beginning, this is not always accurate. The End is typically smaller than the Beginning, just enough to drop the reader where the author wants, and this results in a skewed rather than a classical triangle.

The action stops at the End, and that is as important to remember as in the Beginning when the action started. Just as it is wise not to bore the reader with a ton of back story at the beginning, it is paramount to send them off with their blood moving.

Conclusion

So when someone asks you how you write stories, you can tell them there are only three things you have to really work on: the beginning, the middle, and the end. Other than that, storytelling is easy.

Jeffrey Osier-Mixon is a fiction author and senior technical writer. His short story, How to Roll a Perfect Cigarette, won 2nd prize in InterText Magazine 1994, and he co-authored The GNU Binary Utilities, iUniverse 2000. He presents on the subject of documentation and online community at Summits and Embedded Linux Conferences in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Please visit his webpage at: http://jefro.wordpress.com