Before we dive into the exercises,
we're going to talk a little bit about what makes a story.
I think you need two elements to get started on your story.
You need a scenario or a premise
or what I like to think of as a "what if".
What if I win the lottery?
What if an asteroid hits tomorrow?
What if I wake up one morning and find that my entire family
have been replaced with another family?
What ifs. And then you need a character.
You're going to have more than one by the time you're done
but you need one character to get you started.
So you need your premise and you need your character.
I like to think of this
as the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup method of storytelling.
The scenario, the "what if", is your peanut butter.
It's sticky. It holds everything together.
It's your foundation.
The character is that extra sweetness, that special sauce.
It is the chocolate.
And the two together are your story.
I think if you walk into a bookstore
and you see the hundreds of thousands of books,
it can be overwhelming.
But if you break it down,
there's really not that many kinds of stories.
Here's a fun exercise.
Go into your local Barnes and Noble
or your local indie bookstore and look around.
And start looking at the backs of books.
I think you're going to find
that there's some commonalities there.
That though there are thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of books,
the stories themselves fall into certain categories.
So here are some popular, general categories
that you'll see over and over again.
A very popular one is the unlikely hero,
rising to the occasion.
"Lord of the Rings", "Harry Potter", "The Hate U Give".
Misfits find a place.
The person who doesn't fit, finding their people.
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower",
"Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine".
Obstacles to love.
Something that's in the way of your love
and those things keep changing.
"Romeo and Juliet", "Giovanni's Room",
"The Time Traveler's Wife", "An American Marriage".
Confines of the conventional world.
And you'll note that conventional world keeps changing
as the world changes.
"Revolutionary Road", "Little Fires Everywhere".
Turns out you had the story all wrong,
which is a retelling of a popular story,
maybe from a different perspective.
"Wicked" or "Circe" or the many retellings
of "Pride and Prejudice",
like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"
or Ibi Zoboi's "Pride".
Bildungsroman, which is a fancy way of saying,
a coming-of-age story.
"Catcher in the Rye", "Huckleberry Finn",
every book I've written.
Obviously these are completely different books.
What makes them unique is the world
that the writer has created
and the character they have populated the world with.
Let's take "Harry Potter"
and "Lord of the Rings", Frodo and Harry.
Essentially, you have these two characters
who do not think they're anything special
who suddenly have this great eight responsibility
thrown on their shoulders
and they have to rise to the occasion.
Completely different worlds, completely different stories.
But they start with these characters.
It's these characters
who you fall in love with and root for
that make you want to go on this epic journey with them.
Take obstacles in love.
Let's take two of the books we mentioned,
"The Time Traveler's Wife" and "An American Marriage".
Both of these stories have characters, lovers,
who are kept apart by circumstance.
In "The Time Traveler's Wife",
it's something fantastical or metaphysical.
It's literally space and time.
And in "An American Marriage",
it's something much more grounded in reality,
it's institutionalized racism.
It's the prison industrial complex.
Completely different stories,
completely different characters.
But the core of both of those books
are two lovers who are kept apart by circumstance.
What distinguishes a novel is the characters.
And what distinguishes you is your experience,
your way of looking at the world,
your emotions, your thoughts.
And those will be translated into your characters.
Only you can tell your particular story
through your particular lens
with your particular experience.
It makes you uniquely qualified to write your story.
Your lived experiences. They feed into your work.
They provide the backbone, or really, the soul of your work.
And so we're really going to try to tap into those,
even if the story you're telling
is nothing like your true experience.
It's the emotional experience that we're looking for
because that is what is going to give your story
a sense of authenticity.
So even if you are writing about something
or someone completely different than you,
you're going to want to tap into what you know to be true
and how you feel to create those characters.
That is what is going to give them life
and make them feel real
and make readers want to follow them.
Even if you don't think you have a "story-worthy" story
in your life, you've had things that have impacted you,
that have made you think and feel.
That is what you're going to want to tap into
no matter what kind of story you're writing.
Here's an interesting example.
Tayari Jones, in interviews,
has talked about the inspiration for "An American Marriage".
And it was overhearing a couple have a conversation.
And that inspired the book.
But surely her own life experience
and what she wanted to think about and talk about,
looking at race in America right now,
informed that wonderful book.
I often get asked if I put myself into my characters.
Even if I didn't want to, I couldn't help it.
If you are writing a story, your personal background,
your way of looking at the world, your lived experience,
is going to inform every single character you write,
from your hero to your villain.
I'm going to be guiding you on ways
to take your own lived experience,
your own emotional experience,
and use that as the sort of cornerstone for your story.
It doesn't mean you're going to write memoir
or barely-veiled fiction.
It just means you're going to take the things
that have happened to you
and the way they have made you feel and think.
And you are going to use those to make your story specific
and unique and authentic and yours.
Now that we've established what makes a story.
And, more to the point,
what makes you uniquely qualified to tell your story,
we are going to launch into a free writing exercise.
This exercise is meant for you to tap into some things
that maybe you don't even know are inside of you,
to have some fun, to take some risks.
It is not goal-oriented.
I just want you to have fun and write.
After the free writing,
we're going to launch into some more specific exercises
to help you come up with a "what if" scenario, your premise.
And help you come up with a character or characters
to put in that premise.
These exercises, aside from being fun, have a purpose.
They are meant to give you the seed of your story,
to help you find the thing that you want to write about.
I'm going to be introducing an exercise
and then I'm going to be doing it with you.
So we are going to go through this process together.
Okay, are you feeling inspired or excited or nervous?
Great.
It's time to get started on the first exercise.