FICTION AND DRAMA
Creative Writing
October 2, 2014
The Creative Writing Handbook
B E G I N N I N G S, M I D D L E S, A N D
ENDINGS
Even the shortest short story can be packed
with developing power.
For Sale: baby shoes, never worn. Ernest
Hemingway
The set-up, achieved in the first two words,
orients the reader to the world of the piece: this
is a small newspaper ad. The middle of the piece
its third and fourth words answer the question
posed by the set up. Its fifth and sixth words
deliver the devastating climax.
D R A M AT I C S T R U C T U R E I N F I C T I O N
Act 1 : Set-up
Act 2: Development Story
Climax
Act 3: Resolution
DRAMA:
DISTILLING REALITY
Creative writing is not about simply taking a
chunk of reality and putting it on a page. Very
little happens in reality for long periods.
Authors use core-value progressions, driving
character arcs, to describe the meaningful
changes that crises provoke, whether theyre
sudden and sharp crises or festering for years.
To create such meaning in our work, creative
writers focus on a distilled reality.
PRACTICE 1
Consider the entire lifespan of each of the following:
A successful entrepreneur who, speeding between
meetings, kills a child.
A tree that destroys a house when it falls in a
hurricane.
The entrepreneur could be bringing water to a Third
World community or running a Ponzi scheme. The
tree must have been around a long time, and seen
plenty of people around it, to cause that kind of
damage when it falls. Remember to show and not tell!
PRACTICE 2
So what kind of stories are you telling?
What are the core values highlighted by your
successive choices in each story?
THE NOVEL
George Orwells 1984 is a novel that continues to
resonate with readers the world over.
Written as a heartfelt warning, at the start of the
cold war between the US and Soviet superpowers,
Orwells novel envisions a high-tech world that
enslaves its citizens: a dystopia.
1984
In this future world, an interactive
screen is installed in every dwelling,
both to feed constant lies to members
of the public and individually to
scrutinize them.
Its become a crime, punishable by
torture and brainwashing, to question
anything at all in life.
1984
The novels hero is Winston Smith, a man
whose job is to erase the past. Working at a
government ministry, Winston spends all day
rewriting old news reports: ones that
contradict the truth as peddled currently.
Winstons job is both high-risk and souldestroying: if an assassinated politician needs
to be airbrushed from an old photo, and the
caption rewritten, Winston does it.
1984
Winston longs to be free. He
wants to live and love and
experience. He wants to be true
to himself as a man, even as hes
forced to erase truth for a living.
ACT 1 - 1984
Orwell is working with the core value: loyalty.
Winston opens at the position of split allegiance.
Winston is caught between his own humanity
and a state that seeks brutally to suppress it.
Winston purchased, at great risk, a journal
and pen on the black market. He puts his
thoughts on paper and hides them.
1984
Orwell begins the progression
for his protagonist at split
allegiance.
Winston is trying to find a way
to be loyal to his own sense of
self, and theres a positive
progression to come.
1984
Winston has been spurred into writing a capital
crime in this dystopia by a fleeting moment of human
contact, the first Winston has experienced in decades.
At a public event, in the midst of a seething crowd, a
senior official made eye-contact with him, and for a
second Winston felt a kindred spirit.
Neither man could acknowledge the other further at
the time, but the incident was Winstons first glimmer
of hope in a life largely devoid of it.
1984
The officials name is OBrien, and hes so high in
the pecking order that no one knows what his job is
yet this man has shared a few seconds of eye-contact
with Winston. As the novel opens, he is feeling for
the first time that he may not be alone in life.
Winston also meets a young woman named Julia and
begins a clandestine affair. This is punishable by
certain death for them both. The protagonist begins
to feel like the kind of man his soul demands to be.
ACT 1 - 1984
In Act 1, Winston moves form
split allegiance to loyalty.
SPLIT ALLEGIANCE
>>LOYALTY
ACT 2 - 1984
Winstons character arc has made an
enormous progression. From feeling
run down in everything that he does,
hes found a way to be himself.
Split allegiance (push-pull) has been
overcome as Winston finds loyalty to
himself in his actions, and the human
emotions they evoke.
ACT 2 - 1984
Winston rents a secret place and shares a
fantasy domestic life with Julia that they can
never have in the real world. They fantasize
about overthrowing the system and wonder if
there are others like them.
Officially, there is an underground rebellion,
led by a hate-figure called Emmanuel
Goldstein. Winston and Julia think that
Goldstein is a fabrication drawn up by the State
to justify its repression.
MID -ACT CLIMAX
OBrien, the government bigwig who shared a silent
moment with Winston early in Act 1, re-enters the frame.
Out of the blue, he stops Winston in the office canteen,
compliments him on his work, offers to lend him a helpful
book if Winston will drop by his quarters that evening.
There, at OBriens luxury apartment, the first building
Winston has seen without room-by-room surveillance, the
powerful man tells Winston something astounding.
MID -ACT CLIMAX
Goldstein exists and so does the resistance
movement. The book OBrien lends Winston is
actually Goldsteins manifesto, a secretly
circulated analysis of how power is enforced
and why.
Winstons progression to a position of loyalty
is reinforced now he has a partner, a cause
and a movement of men to be loyal to.
ACT 2 CLIMAX
The next logical progression kicks into gear. Julia and
Winston read Goldsteins book to each other, and discuss it
passionately, fantasizing about what an overthrown state
could mean for humanity.
It feels like they are living in a new kind of reality, blissful
and hopeful while it can last.
Then reality reasserts itself. As Winston and Julia share
an intimate moment in there secret rental, a voice barks
suddenly from a hidden microphone. Storm troopers kick
in the window and door and flood the room.
ACT 3
From a position of reinforced loyalty, this
sudden action sends the value progression into a
sickening lurch:
SPLIT ALLEGIANCE >>LOYALTY>>BETRAYAL
OBrien is the betrayer. It turns out theres a
reason no one knows his actual job title: hes
chief torturer for this brutally repressive state.
In the novels final act, he physically tortures
and emotionally manipulates Winston.
END OF THE NOVEL
By the end of the novel, Winston is broken
and brainwashed. Hes a man who accepts the
States lies without question. Julia endures a
similar fate, and when she meets Winston
again, they have nothing to say to each other
except to agree that when youve been made to
betray someone else under torture, you feel
numb toward them afterward.
END OF THE NOVEL
Winston began as a man determined to live life. Now,
after torture and brainwashing, the only thing hes able
to feel is love for his oppressors:
the novel ends with him weeping with adoration at a
propaganda broadcast.
His dehumanization, by an inhuman state, moves him
to the end of the line.
SPLIT ALLEGIANCE>>LOYALTY>>BETRAYAL>>SELFBETRAYAL
THE NOVEL
There is no easy route to writing a novel. But,
at heart, all successful novels play out coherent
core progressions. Theyre concerned with
human values, and how these find expression;
their value progressions echo those we
experience or fear or long for in real life.
THE NOVEL
In 1984, the four possible positions
on the value of loyalty drive a powerful
character arc and a resounding,
engaging story. The value progression
directs the plot.
PRACTICE 3
Scenario: A young person moves from a small town to a big city
and finds acceptance and a sense of identity.
Use incidents from your own past to sketch this story out briefly,
before you begin writing. Include enough incident to power an
opening movement, a middle section, and a concluding movement
to the story.
If you get stuck, think about the set-up phase as the move to the
city and what triggers it; the development phase as the joys of
freedom versus the strains of trying to make it in a city; and the
resolution as what happens to make your protagonist either stay in
the city or leave.
PRACTICE 4
Where is your protagonist at the start of the story?
What value is your story exploring here?
What happens when this value is progressed?
What is the Act 2 climax? How does this value
progression break down now?
Will this be an up-ending story or down-ending
(like 1984)? Will your protagonist defeat the forces
of antagonism or be broken by the antagonist?
