Story Drills: Fiction Writing Exercises

The Storyteller’s Toolbox

Story Drills: Fiction Writing Exercises

Copyright © 2018 by Melissa Donovan

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Edition, 2018

Published by Swan Hatch Press • Melissa Donovan

ISBN 10: 0-9976713-2-7

ISBN 13: 978-0-9976713-2-2 

Other Books

by Melissa Donovan

ADVENTURES IN WRITING (SERIES)

101 Creative Writing Exercises

10 Core Practices for Better Writing

1200 Creative Writing Prompts

Get all three books in one volume:

Adventures in Writing: The Complete Collection

THE STORYTELLER’S TOOLBOX (SERIES)

What’s the Story? Building Blocks for Fiction Writing

Story Drills: Fiction Writing Exercises

NOVELS

Engineered Underground (Metamorphosis Book One)

Melissa also writes children’s books under the pen name Emmy Donovan.

The Storyteller’s Toolbox

Story Drills:

Fiction Writing Exercises

Melissa Donovan

Swan Hatch Press | San Francisco

Introduction

Learning any craft requires study, practice, and introspection. The craft of storytelling requires a whole lot more.

Many people think stories come pouring out of authors, words flowing, characters fully formed, and plots totally developed. But the truth is that telling stories is hard work.

A story—especially a novel-length story—is composed of many different building blocks: characters, plot, setting, theme, chapters, scenes, action, dialogue, exposition—not to mention point of view, tense, style, tone, and voice. There’s more, but you get the idea: stories are complex, and writing good stories requires a wide range of skills.

We need to understand what makes characters tick. We need to engineer intriguing plots and develop meaningful themes. And we need to structure our stories to be interesting, to keep readers turning pages. We need to choose the best possible narrative. And then there’s grammar, spelling, and punctuation. A story has a lot of moving parts, and they all need to be in sync for the story to flow smoothly.

Everything matters in storytelling. There’s a lot to learn, and once we learn the basics, we need practice—lots and lots of practice—before we can hope to truly master the craft.

What You’ll Find Inside This Book

This book takes you through the core elements of storytelling, including characterization, plot, setting, and theme, and then it guides you through story structure and narrative writing. You’ll explore literary devices and narrative techniques, and you’ll experiment with methods that will help you develop your best writing process. Finally, you’ll learn how to deconstruct stories and study them to strengthen and improve your own work.

Each exercise in Story Drills includes a comprehensive description of a storytelling concept followed by three exercises. The Study exercises show you how to examine stories to better understand each concept; Practice exercises prompt you to apply the concepts to your own work; and Questions offer inquiries for further contemplation and deeper understanding of storytelling concepts and techniques.

Story Drills also includes an appendix packed with worksheets that you can use to plan and develop stories of your own.

How to Use This Book

When we need to write but find ourselves at a loss for words, writing exercises can inspire us. Exercises can also help us keep our writing muscles in shape when we’re between projects. But most importantly, fiction writing exercises impart useful tools and techniques that will strengthen our storytelling skills.

There’s no right or wrong way to use this book. If you’re struggling with a story and need help with a particular problem, jump to the section of the book that addresses it. If you’re feeling uninspired and need a little motivation, open to any random page. If you want to sharpen all your storytelling skills, work your way through Story Drills from beginning to end.

Story Drills is designed to be used by individual writers or in the classroom. It includes over a hundred fiction writing exercises that build storytelling skills, taking aspiring storytellers through the most important elements and steps of crafting a story.

To learn more about the Storyteller’s Toolbox—a series of books on the craft of writing fiction—visit writingforward.com.

PART I: CHARACTERS

1

Characters with Purpose

Each character in a story needs a purpose, a function they fulfill that is necessary. For example, the antagonist’s purpose is to provide obstacles and challenges for the protagonist. Many protagonists find themselves under the tutelage of a mentor; the mentor’s purpose is to impart skills, gifts, or wisdom that the protagonist will need as the plot unfolds.

Not every character gets a high purpose—some function as props or part of the setting—a bartender, a taxi driver, and a host of other characters that are usually unnamed often appear in only one scene and have no real bearing on the story.

However, most named characters play a vital role in a story, and this role may not be clear to readers until they reach the story’s end. Throughout most of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, we believe the Wizard of Oz is a great magician with the power to grant Dorothy’s wish to return home to Kansas. It’s not until the story nears its ending that we realize the Wizard of Oz is a fraud. He can’t grant Dorothy’s wish because he’s not a magician. His function in the story is to act as a foil or a trickster, a character that misleads other characters.

Characters that lack purpose can cause a story to feel weak or watered down. Multiple characters who share a single purpose can also weaken a story. One strong, vital character will enrich a story more than two weak, vague characters that work together to perform a single function.

Usually we can determine a character’s purpose by analyzing their relationship to the protagonist and examining how they assist or impede the protagonist or how they move the plot forward. A good test of a character’s purpose is to think about how the story would be affected if the character were removed.

Study:

Choose a story that you know well, make a list of the ten most important characters in the story, and note each character’s purpose to the story.

Practice:

We’ll start with a protagonist—a city detective working on a burglary case. The antagonist is an FBI agent working on a federal drug bust. Their paths collide because the house that was burglarized is connected to the drug bust. Develop five supporting characters within this story, writing a sentence or two about each one’s purpose to the story. As an alternative, feel free to come up with your own story premise: create a protagonist, an antagonist, and five supporting characters with clearly defined purposes.

Questions:

Can you think of any stories that include unnecessary characters with no essential purpose? If they were removed, how would the story change? Would removing them have made the story better?

2

Character Arcs

In storytelling, an arc is a path of transformation. A character arc is the journey that a character experiences throughout the course of a story, which leads to a significant change.

Changes can occur internally or externally. Characters can acquire or lose knowledge, skills, or emotional strength—or they can gain or lose relationships, material possessions, or status. Some of the best character arcs are a combination of both internal and external transformations.

A character’s arc can be positive or negative. Most heroes emerge from a story wiser, stronger, or better off in some significant way. However, some characters experience a downward spiral—they are on top of the world when we meet them, and then we watch them fall. A character’s arc can also wind through the story’s events—up and down—only to lead back to where they were at the beginning.

An arc is common—some say essential—for a protagonist, but any character in a story can experience an arc. In Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, the protagonist, Luke Skywalker, undergoes significant growth, but supporting character Han Solo also gets a meaningful arc that is critical to the story.

At its core, an arc signifies transformation and gives the events of the story deeper meaning—after all, stories are about conflict, and what good is conflict if it doesn’t produce meaningful change in our lives?

These changes range from deeply significant to superficial. Some characters will start out as store clerks and end up as store managers. Others will save the world.

Character arcs don’t appear in all stories. Stories with minor or nonexistent character arcs are usually plot driven. For example, police procedural series tend to focus more on showing the detective solving crimes in each installment without undergoing much meaningful personal transformation.

There are some common milestones that characters experience throughout an arc, especially the protagonist; these include establishing goals or realizing that they want or need something; facing conflicts and challenges; making difficult decisions; and experiencing the consequences of their decisions (good and bad). As a result of these experiences, the characters are transformed by the end of the story.

Study:

Choose a character from a story you know well and plot the character’s arc, noting the choices the character makes as well as the gains, losses, and transformations that the character experiences. Make sure you note the corresponding story event with the change that it effects in the character.

Practice:

Start with the following premise: A child’s mother dies while the father is overseas on a top-secret mission. The child is put in foster care for almost a year until the father returns. Make a list of five plot points and describe how each one changes the protagonist. Then write a paragraph describing the protagonist’s arc over the course of the story. Feel free to come up with your own story premise for this exercise.

Questions:

Can you think of any protagonists that don’t change over the course of a story? Can you think of some supporting characters who experienced significant arcs? How does a character arc enrich the reader’s experience?

3

Protagonist vs. Antagonist

We often think of them as the good guy and the bad guy or the hero and the villain, but those terms are misleading. A story’s protagonist is the focal character—the character whom the story is about. Protagonists usually have a goal, encounter serious challenges, make difficult choices, face consequences, and undergo meaningful transformation. Protagonists aren’t always benevolent. The anti-hero is an example of a protagonist that doesn’t embody the classic traits of a hero, such as strength, morality, or courage.

A common misconception is that an antagonist is a villain. Villains are almost always antagonists, but not all antagonists are villains. The antagonist is essentially an obstacle that prevents the protagonist from achieving their goals. For example, if the protagonist and his best friend are vying for the quarterback position on the football team, the best friend will be the antagonist but not a villain.

The antagonist and protagonist can also be embodied in a single character, which occurs when the only thing standing in the protagonist’s way…is the protagonist.

The antagonist isn’t always a character. In a story about a natural disaster, the antagonist could be a hurricane, a tornado, or an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. Most of these stories also include human antagonists that provide a source of conflict and drama, but a storm alone can function as a story’s sole antagonist.

Study:

Make a list of ten books, movies, and TV shows. If you’re feeling up to it, make a list of up to twenty-five. For each story, jot down the protagonist and the antagonist.

Practice:

Sketch three sets of protagonists and antagonists, writing a one-paragraph description of each. Remember, these two characters have a fundamental conflict with each other. What is it? Make your first pair a traditional hero and villain. Make one of your pairs friends or family members. For the third pair, create a nonhuman antagonist. For extra practice, summarize a story premise where the protagonist is also the antagonist.

Questions:

Have you ever encountered a protagonist who wouldn’t be considered a hero? What about an antagonist that wasn’t a villain? Why is the conflict between a protagonist and an antagonist so important in storytelling? Do you think it’s possible to tell a story without a protagonist or antagonist?

4

Archetypal Characters

There are dozens of character archetypes that populate the universe of storytelling. Each archetype has a core function to perform in the story they inhabit. Today, we’ll look at eight common archetypes, all of which are found in the Monomyth (Hero’s Journey), which was discovered by Joseph Campbell. Here’s a brief overview:

Hero: The central figure of a story who embarks on a journey, which results in personal transformation (and usually transformation of the world as well).

Herald: A character that signals change. The Herald often appears near the beginning of a story and marks the commencement of the Hero’s Journey. In Alice in Wonderland, it’s the White Rabbit.

Mentor: The Mentor bestows wisdom, skills, or essential gifts to the Hero.

Threshold Guardian: The Threshold Guardian’s job is to try to block the Hero from getting from one