Write what you know: ten story idea starters

In high school, creative writing assignments (short stories and one-act plays, in my case) tend to generate out-of-this-world story ideas. Settings that students choose might range from deepest outer space to the inner workings of the Kremlin in the old Soviet Union. Invariably, students have little or no firsthand knowledge of these places, and they would be much better served to write about the world they know. With that in mind, I wrote the following ten story starters that live a little closer to home.

1. Students are standing in the serving line in the cafeteria, or sitting at a cafeteria table. Perhaps they start out by complaining about the food. Then a more important issue arises -- perhaps a dispute between two students, or a boyfriend-girlfriend issue. Perhaps a food-fight erupts (maybe this tale is a farce)? The cafeteria aides could be characters too.
2. Students are riding on a bus. Are there differences among the students based on where they sit on the bus (social hierarchy)? Perhaps there is a traffic accident, or perhaps the students see something incredible or remarkable going on outside the bus? How do they react?

3. Students in a writing group are trying to brainstorm ideas. This could be a story about the story your group is trying to write right now. Do they disagree? What conclusions do they reach? This could be a real mind-blower (a story within a story)!
4. A boyfriend-girlfriend emotional conflict could be central to your tale. The other friends could be characters as well. Rumors and arguments circulate and could be part of the dramatic action.

5. Students are in the detention room / in-school suspension room. Perhaps something happens that causes a conflict between two students, or between a student and the detention supervisor. Perhaps two characters find they have something in common or come to a new understanding of, and respect for, each other. (Yes, I know this idea is very derivative of the film The Breakfast Club…)
6. Fans are in the stands at a high school sporting event. Does something exciting happen during the game? How do the fans react to this event? Confine your story to the bleachers.
7. Students are in a classroom, and the teacher leaves the room and never comes back during the course of the story. What do the students do? What happens?
8. A fire drill occurs. Perhaps it leads to a mysterious discovery of something or someone outside the school. What happens next?
9. What happens during a dodge ball game (or pick any other sport of your choice)? Do two students in the dodge-ball game have a “history” and are in conflict? How does that play out during the game?
10. Thanksgiving dinner brings out issues and conflicts and relationships in a family. How are these situations resolved?

Or simply think of the myriad other situations students encounter on a daily basis: the SAT tests, going to the school nurse, a class in the art room, a school concert, etc., etc. In college, it might be the student union, a school club, the dorm, etc., etc. The possibilities are (literally) endless.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Write what you DON'T know (yet)

One of the platitudes that instructors repeat in creative writing workshops is "write what you know." There is good reason to heed this rule. Usually enforced in fiction writing workshops, “write about what you know” helps prevent 18-year-olds who grew up in middle-class American suburbs from submitting wretchedly unrealistic drafts of stories set in sub-Saharan Africa, or the trackless Amazon rain forest, or outer space. These students would be better served to set their stories in a suburban American high school, or their own family homes, environments about which they could speak with some accuracy and authority.

Of course, I have my own humorous anecdote about naively writing "what I didn't know." I still vividly recall a day 35 years ago when our inspirational 10th-grade English teacher, the late Dan Dinicola, popped open a leather briefcase in class and read to us a passage from an original short story he was writing and planning to submit to a magazine for publication. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but the idea that any ordinary person could sit down and write an original piece of fiction and try to have it published was a major revelation to my provincial, half-awake, adolescent mind. So, fired with inspiration, I rushed home after school and took out my portable typewriter (yes, this was pre-internet, pre-PC, pre-smartphone 1979...) and immediately ran up against the brick wall of a lack of a topic to write about. Now, I was a precocious reader and had just finished John Kennedy Toole's cult fiction novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Today, I recall almost nothing about this book, but I think it was set in New Orleans. So I cobbled together an "idea" about a young man journeying to New Orleans aboard a passenger train. This would be the subject of my brilliant story! Two major problems with this idea: 1.) I had never been on a train in my life, and 2.) I had never been to New Orleans in my life and knew nothing about that city. Did I just hear the conductor shout, "Next stop: total lack of verisimilitude!"? It is, of course, laughable. But I didn't stop there -- fueled by youthful hubris, I mailed off my typed manuscript to a magazine. Which one? Oh, just the most prestigious periodical in America, The New Yorker (which, by the way, I’m pretty sure I had never read a single issue of). Needless to say, the rejection slip for this story written by a 15-year-old was returned in record time!

Well, this digression down Absurdity Lane brings me to my main point: if I had bothered to conduct some research about passenger trains and New Orleans, it might have been possible (though unlikely, given my inexperience) to write a competent story on these subjects. Certainly, it would have been a better story. And in nonfiction writing, it's important to write about topics beyond your personal experience. But you must first put in the work (reading, studying, researching, interviewing, traveling) to collect the information you need and gain that experience. So don’t limit yourself to writing about what you know; write about what you don’t know … yet (after you know about it, of course!)

PS -- There is another micro-lesson in the goofy tale of my first attempt to write a short story. I didn’t allow that rejection slip to make me stop writing. Never give up. Never quit. Bad writing is a prerequisite of good writing. In the end, the only writers who fail are those who stop writing.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

A unique perspective (remembering Robin Williams)

Source: photo taken by the author.

The recent tragic suicide of actor/comedian Robin Williams made me reflect on one of his early movies, Dead Poets Society, which I still show in school to 11th graders. Many film critics have lambasted this movie, and I too acknowledge its over-Romanticized depiction of the teaching and learning process, but I think the movie’s harshest detractors are being too cynical. Dead Poets Society speaks to teenagers who crave the inspirational while confined to an institution (school). One scene in particular -- when the teacher, Mr. Keating (portrayed by Williams), has students stand on his desk to deliver the message that “we must constantly look at things in a different way” -- made me think about the importance of going beyond the obvious and questioning conventional wisdom in college-level writing.

To find a college-level topic idea and develop an original thesis statement, you need to go beyond the obvious. Parroting conventional wisdom will not earn you a satisfactory grade in college. Deborah Tannen, in a fascinating essay titled “The Roots of Debate,” explores the “argument culture” that has overwhelmed modern life. Seldom do we listen to each other anymore, but instead we search any opposing arguments for holes and then attack with our counter-arguments. Our minds are already made up. Nowhere is this more evident than on cable TV news programs, where the “talking heads” can barely restrain themselves to listen for five seconds before shouting their own already-hardened ideas, and it’s not long before this “discussion” devolves into a simultaneous shouting match without anybody pausing to listen to anyone else.

In her essay, Tannen describes one college anthropology professor and her simple but ingenious method for prompting students to venture beyond conventional compare-and-contrast thinking. Tannen writes that this professor:

… makes a point of having her class compare three cultures, not two. If students compare two cultures, she finds they are inclined to polarize them, to think of the two as opposite to each other. But if they compare three cultures, they are more likely to think about each on its own terms. As a goal, we could all try to catch ourselves when we talk about “both sides” of an issue -- and talk instead about “all sides.”

Here’s one great example of a writer (in this case, a journalist) who went beyond the conventions of “pack journalism” in order to find a unique perspective on a subject that everyone was writing about. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the defining public event for a generation of people, just as Pearl Harbor was for an earlier generation and September 11 for a later one. As would be expected, journalists covered this story exhaustively. Jimmy Breslin, a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, realized that he couldn’t just write the same story that everyone else was writing. He needed to find a different perspective on this story, what people in the news business call an angle. He needed a unique angle. So Breslin interviewed the employee whose less-than-glamorous but solemn job it was to dig President Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The resulting story about Kennedy’s humble gravedigger provided a unique perspective on the shared suffering and grief of our nation -- a perspective no other writer had glimpsed.

So remember, in college, sticking to the conventional no longer cuts it. Instead of hunching over your desk and recycling the same, chewed-over ideas, hoist yourself up onto Mr. Keating’s desk and look around. Something startling and original awaits you.

PS -- here is Breslin’s story about JFK’s gravedigger -- you should read it! -- http://www.newsday.com/opinion/digging-jfk-grave-was-his-honor-jimmy-breslin-1.6481560

Topics, topics everywhere … but only one to pick!

...with apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the title of this post…

You may remember high school when your teacher would unearth (from deep inside the belly of some ancient filing cabinet) that musty old list of suggested writing topics. You’ve seen it, photocopied so many times that it’s barely legible anymore. A page full of clichéd “pro-and-con” topic ideas, such as capital punishment, euthanasia, gun control, the military draft, abortion, the drinking age … and on and on.

In college you will never see this list again. Good riddance! From now on, you will think of and develop your own writing topics. But with freedom comes responsibility. Without the crutch of a teacher-approved topics list, you’ll be forced to think for yourself. This makes it seem like you’re all on your own, but you do have some resources, such as...

Your own topics list. Take out a piece of paper (or open an electronic document) labeled “Topics List” every time you are reading, participating in class discussion, or listening to a lecture in any class, not just English. Whenever a statement you’ve read or heard (or said) strikes you as interesting, jot it down on your list. Do it right away; don’t wait because you’ll forget about it later. Don’t censor yourself at this stage. Even if an item sounds ridiculous now, later on (perhaps when combined with another, ostensibly unrelated idea), it might turn out to be profound. Don’t worry about “stealing” another student’s idea in a class discussion. Their idea will prompt you to think of a related, but different, idea all your own. If the idea is a professor’s from a lecture, however, that idea is the professor’s intellectual property, so be sure to get his/her permission to use it and cite it properly. Remember, your topic idea must transcend what you’ve read or heard so that it becomes your own original idea.

It pays off in the end to spend extra time and front-load your effort in topic selection. Choosing a topic that interests and inspires you will make the writing process much easier and will aid you in writing a more engaging paper. This is especially true if you continue on to graduate school and must write an 80-page master’s thesis or a 300-page doctoral dissertation. With a work so lengthy, you’ll likely be sick of that topic by the end of the researching, drafting and revising process even if it interested you at the beginning. So if the topic didn’t interest you at the outset, then stand by for excruciating tedium.

Once you have chosen a topic, you’ll need to engage in a process to narrow your broad topic idea down to a focused, specific thesis statement. But that’s, as they say, a topic for another day…

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.