(See “ Show, Don’t (Just) Tell.”)ĭrawing on your own real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a “personal essay” topic. (Your reader should care about the protagonist’s decision, and ideally shouldn’t see it coming.)Īn effective short story (or poem) does not simply record or express the author’s feelings rather, it generates feelings in the reader.
At the climax, what morally significant choice does your protagonist make?. (Narrators in stories aren’t looking at video being live-streamed from a floating drone that follows them around everywhere, so they can’t report “A smile lit my face” or “My eyes darkened.” See Writing Dialogue.) Facial expressions of a first-person narrator. “As I filled Slim in on what I had just seen in the saloon, he dropped his show of apathy and his fingers clutched at his revolver.”) Omit scenes where character A tells character B exactly what we just saw happening to character A. What details from the setting, dialog, and tone help you tell the story? Keep them! But…. (Will the unexpected consequences force your protagonist to make yet another choice, leading to still more consequences? How does your protagonist change over the course of the story?) What unexpected consequences - directly related to the protagonist’s goal-oriented actions - ramp up the emotional energy of the story?. A short story can’t possibly tackle that kind of character development, but a character who faces internal obstacles and must negotiate messy moral trade-offs is more dramatically interesting than the hero in the white hat who has to use the right weapon to defeat the villain in the black hat.) Yes, Harry Potter defeats Voldemort, but first he has to mature into a leader with the moral clarity and teamwork skills necessary to defeat Voldemort. (Simply having a rival is not that interesting. What obstacles must the protagonist overcome in order to reach the goal?. (Your protagonist should already have made a conscious choice, good or bad, that drives the rest of the story.) When the story begins, what morally significant action has your protagonist taken towards that goal?. (The athlete who wants her team to win the big game and the car crash victim who wants to survive are not unique or interesting enough.)
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