It's easy to get carried away with your storytelling sometimes, so that things get bigger and bigger, and more and more unwieldy for you as the writer. You'd think big ideas would make for a great story, but that's not always the case. In fact, HUGE stories can be kind of boring. So ...
Don't be afraid to start with a small idea and make it even smaller.
2 comments:
This is so true Michael. Kids sometimes think so big the story gets away from them. Got any great examples I could share with The Writer's Club?
Thanks Beth. A typical thing kids (especially some boys) do is have dozens of characters involved in a story that unfolds over a huge amount of time and covers an vast territory.
My advice to those kids is to limit the number of characters to five max, to shrink the timeframe down to somewhere between a few minutes and a few days, and to have the action unfold in a backyard, house, school, shopping centre or neighbourhood, rather than across the globe.
Some kids are resistant at first because they feel the story is going to become boring, but once they get the hang of it, they realise their story's just as interesting (maybe moreso) and now they're actually able to manage it.
(hey, did you get my email about the organ?)
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