Writing Stories

In the Lamott packet, there is one so called 'chapter' all about characters. It goes into detail about how to make a character in your story and how to make others enjoy reading about your characters. One point he made is "a person's faults are largely what make him or her likable." It may be hard to remember to make your characters have some type of fault. No human is superman, we all have faults of our owns, and characters should display some of these faults. This also helps the reader relate to the character when they are reading about them, which always makes the reading more enjoyable to read. I believe when characters seem to invincible it makes the story seem very unrealistic. With my writing I will have to remember that characters are to portray real humans, and real humans have many faults.

One section I really found interesting in the Lamott packet, still in the character section towards the end was when he said, " One final reminder: you probably won't know your characters until weeks or months after you've started working with them... just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple." When I read this passage it made me think that once you start writing, never think too far ahead in the story line. Let the thoughts and ideas just come to you as you write. Let your characters change throughout the story, don't even have a set schedule for them because it may not turn out the way you first planned. Be open to your characters and allow yourself freedom to have your characters change. When I would write stories in high school I'd try to figure out the whole story line before I even started writing instead of letting my mind wander while I wrote. Lesson learned, always give your characters freedom to change and develop throughout the story.

The first writing assignment we had was to change the words in one of the short shorts that we read and then add on to it. When I first started I just let my mind wander and went along with the first words that came to my mind. I didn't have a certain path that I wanted to take, and honestly didn't know what the topic was until I was already halfway done. Instead of stressing out about trying to pick a topic and then choose words to fit that topic, I just picked words that popped into my head first and then when I got farther along in the writing I stopped and reread what I already had. After I did all that I finally decided to pick a topic. I felt that this was much easier to do because I wasn't trying to find words that fit a certain topic, instead I picked a topic that matched the words I already had down.