{"id":89,"date":"2016-04-18T05:12:59","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T05:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2020-12-26T17:14:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-26T17:14:59","slug":"89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Writing: Advice for Beginning Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"war)of_the_worlds_cover_art_2\"Each year I taught the Science Fiction class in the high school, I asked my students to write a science fiction story, but it was a literature class, not a creative writing one, so I didn’t have the time to have them do the exercises that a writing class would do.  They had to write the story with very little instruction.<\/p>\n

The first exercise to get them into the story telling mode was to write their own “Global Dispatches.”  This was a follow up to studying H. G. Well’s The War of the Worlds<\/em>.  The students were to write their own version of what they experienced during the week-long invasion of Earth by the Martians as if it happened in Grand Junction today.  The idea was that their story would be a bit of oral history, as if a historian came to town after the invasion to talk to the people who made it through to the end.  I got the idea from Kevin Anderson’s brilliant anthology, War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches<\/em><\/a>, that told Well’s story from the point of views of famous personages who were alive when the invasion would have happened had it been real.<\/p>\n

The objective of the assignment was to get the kids into story telling mode, but I needed to boil down the instructions to what I thought was the essence of making a story interestingly dramatic (because without instruction, most of them would write tons of exposition that didn’t read like a story).<\/p>\n

Here’s the advice I put up on the board for them as they worked on their narratives:<\/p>\n

Writing Stories that Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

– Write in scenes–don’t summarize!<\/p>\n