January 11-17th Weekly (Writing a short story) Intro: Time for short stories! For all of you that don't know, short stories are a great way to express feelings and themes in a short amount of writing, similar to flash fiction, but a little longer, and similar to books, but a little shorter, short stories are fictional, and are just bite-sized enough to finish in 30 minutes, which is one of the charms of it. For people who procrastinate too much to be able to write a whole-chapter book but still want to do something similar to that, short stories are for you! So whether this is your 1st short story or your 88th one, let's get started! Section 1: Making your characters (Campers will make at least 2 character bios with personality traits about each one) Hey everybody! So in order to write a short story you first need to create interesting characters. After all they are the most important part of your story. For the first section here write at least two bios for character's for a total of 400 words. Make sure to include personality traits and other interesting details. Here's an example below. Name: Sage Atoll Age: 17 Physical Description: Tall with long wavy brown hair and hazel eyes. She usually wears mechanics overalls and her favorite boots. Likes: reading, running, sweets, fixing and building things Dislikes: bugs, crowds, and bananas Personality Traits: shy around people she doesn't know, caring, a bit of a short temper, likes to listen to others talk Section Two: You may have interesting characters, dynamic world building, or a complicated magic system, but without a plot, the story doesn't truly come together. Plot is the series of events that occur in the story, from the beginning to the end! One of the simplest ways to organize plot is by creating a “story mountain” that has each of the different plot points displayed. Normally, there are five to six main points on a story mountain! The first part of the story mountain is the exposition, or the start of the story. Here is where characters and the setting is introduced. At the end of the exposition, there is something known as the “inciting incident.” This is the event that forced your characters to take action, leading to the rising action. The rising action is usually the part that takes up the most space in any story, and is the plotting, the planning, and the building to the main, final showdown or event, called the climax or turning point. The tensions are at the highest, and things are so close to wrapping up… then we fall into what is known as the falling action, or the events after the climax heading to the resolution. The resolution is when things are all tied up in a neat bow… or not, if that is how you chose to end things!
Section 3: Starting the outline (Using the story mountain and bios to start writing a story) Now that you have a good idea of what your story will be like and the characters in it, it's time to actually start writing! Though it's always hard to hear the click-clack of the keyboard, here are some things you can try to do to loosen up before starting. 1. Take a break before you begin, think about what you're going to write and maybe even jot down some ideas for how to start your story. 2. Just start typing! Don't worry about how it's going to sound like, the important thing is to get your ideas down before you forget them. As this is only an outline, everything can be changed later, so all we're doing here is making the main structure of the story. The details will come later. 3. Check back at your story mountain and bios whenever you can! Since you've already made these tools to help you, why not use them! Try your best to implement traits that you included about your character, or conflict points that you drew on your story mountain. Write at least 500 words in this section, and remember, you don't have to finish your whole short story in this weekly as this is only the beginning and you can always add on whenever you'd like too! Section 4: Reread, Rewrite, and Edit! (Edit the story and make final touches) You've made it to section 4! Almost there, I swear <3 Now it's on to the final step! Reread, rewrite, and edit! First, reread your story once and edit any changes or grammatical issues that you notice! You can also add on if you feel like it's necessary, or cut stuff too! Next, post your writing piece in the main cabin and trade with someone else. Give them at least a 200 word critique, and in the end you should have an unedited version and an edited version that should be slightly different from each other, so make sure to have those two different versions of your piece saved as proof. What you should have in the end is your unedited version, a critique to someone else, and your edited version! Conclusion: This marks the end of your journey here writing a short story. I hope that you've learned something from the various tips and tricks we've given, and now all you have to do is to check this checklist to make sure you have everything before posting this in the main cabin and earning 1500 points for your cabin! - 400 words of 2 different character bios with their traits written down - A story mountain drawn and uploaded on scratch - 500 words of your outline of your short story - 200 words of critique
