Back to Basics

It’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been working on a writing project which has kept us pretty focused on our own little world. But we’re poking our heads up again, and looking forward to connecting with others!

One way we’re doing that is by writing an original story (each of us) every week, just to get in the habit of telling stories. These aren’t really serious stories, really just writing exercises – but they’re exercises that create a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

There are lots of ways to do this, but for the moment we’re using what we’re calling the Mary Robinette Method.

You can learn all about it from this guest lecture Mary Robinette Kowal gave during Brandon Sanderson’s course at BYU. If you have 45 minutes, you can watch it below. If you only have 30 minutes, skip to the 11-minute mark and start there. If you don’t have half an hour… come back when you do.

We have lightly modified it into the following steps:

1. Opening, 4 minutes, about 3 sentences showing:
   • Who (using action and attitude)
   • Where (using sensory details)
   • Genre/tone (specific promises about kind of story, esp. using MICE)
2. Conflict, 3 minutes, about 2 sentences showing:
   • What the character is trying to do (Goal)
   • Why it matters to them (Stakes, Motivation)
   • What Obstacle is stopping them
3. Development through Try-fail cycle(s), 6 minutes, about 5 sentences showing:
   • The character tries at least one thing, but no more than three things
   • For each thing the character tries, they either:
     • Fail, and the situation gets worse (“no and”) — OR
     • Succeed, but their success makes the situation worse in some unexpected way (“yes but”)
4. Resolution through a single Try-succeed cycle, 6 minutes, about 5 sentences showing:
   • The character tries one last desperate effort to reach their Goal
   • The result is that they either:
     • Succeed, and it turns out better than expected (“yes and”) — OR
     • Fail, but it resolves the problem better than success would have (“no but”)
5. Denouement, 4 minutes, about 3 sentences showing:
   • Who (using action and attitude)
   • Where (using sensory details)
   • Genre/tone (how you’ve fulfilled the promises of the Opening, esp. using MICE)

We made a few changes, primarily adding a minute to each stage of the short story. We’ve also loosened the restriction on the number of words. Every time we do this, we use some random idea generator (of which there are many on the internet!) to come up with the Person, Object, and Genre prompts.

We’ll start sharing our results regularly, and we’d encourage you to share yours as well!