An Encouragement to Novice Writers About the Power of Small-Scale Practice

This won’t be revolutionary, but I still find that the thing novice and hobbyist writers need to hear the most is: start small. Many new or casual writers start a story with the intent to finish a novel, and that’s like trying to make complex origami without mastering paper cranes. You might pull it off, but will it look as good as if you’d put in your 10,000 hours?

In many cases, people get a lot of experience starting stories but very little practice completing them. Finishing a narrative is a different ballgame requiring its own set of skills, particularly in the editing process, especially if you intend to publish somewhere. Many people end up with a single project they keep coming back to, locking themselves into decisions they’ve already made unless they abandon their work-in-progress for something new. Thus they end up lacking experience in a variety of topics, tone, style, etc. As a novice, your primary goal should be experimentation.

Consider filling a page with stories told entirely in one sentence. All you need is a character with a tangible goal, a plan to achieve that goal, a conflict that disrupts their plan, how they address that conflict, and the resolution.

John wanted a bushel of apples, so he rode his bike to the market, but it got a flat tire halfway there (forcing him to walk the remaining distance), and when he arrived the apples were all gone.

It’s not the most compelling story, but it’s a complete story, and you can go back to edit and revise it until it sounds just right. But what happens if we turn each of those independent clauses into its own sentence with conflict and resolution?

John wanted to make an apple pie but was short on apples, so he needed to go to the market. Traffic was bad this late in the day, so he took his bike. As shoddy as it was, he had a flat tire before the halfway point, forcing him to walk even as it started to rain. When he arrived, there was one bushel of apples left, but a girl who was clearly having just as bad a day wanted them for her sick mother, so John did the noble thing and insisted she have them. She was so touched that she offered to walk him home, sharing her umbrella, which he graciously accepted.

It’s not exactly the same–we introduced a second complication, for one–but it is still a complete story, and it has more characters, more conflict, and more meaningful decisions. You could also expand each of these sentences into its own paragraph to arrive at a piece of short fiction. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but the fundamentals are there for a cathartic ending.

We’ve introduced a (presumably compatible) boy and girl into our story and given them a meet-cute, so you probably want to see them end up together. Let’s consider that our paragraph above is a story arc. What happens next? Start spitballing. John wants to get the girl (tangible goal), but some conflict must make that difficult: a possessive ex-boyfriend, an overbearing ill mother, the inability to pay for a nice date, John’s own time-consuming responsibilities.

Our first arc ends in a way to set up further story, and your choice of conflict for the next arc must also set up further narrative progression. John must find a way to prove himself to his love interest’s mother; or by neglecting his responsibilities, he has let down his family and must make it up to them. Perhaps both are true, and one becomes a subplot, just one of several threads the story explores. Now you’re starting to see the emergence of simple themes regarding how family dynamics tie into the pursuit of romantic relationships.

But start with sentences. Do enough that you could only ever develop a fraction of them, then take the few you like most and turn those into paragraphs. Expand those paragraphs into one-page stories. If one won’t stop inspiring you, turn it into a 3-5 arc narrative. Avoid doing anything longer to begin with; you will be tempted by scope creep, and that kills projects. It may very well be that you already have the idea for a wonderful novel, but many of the greatest and most prolific writers reused ideas to expand on them. Right now, you’re just learning how to finish a story.

I want to return briefly to this idea of catharsis. In ancient Greek stageplays, the word referred to the process of stirring negative emotions in the audience that were “released” at the end of a tragic ending to “purify” the viewers. It’s a weird metaphor, but the Greeks were right that indulging in and then releasing sadness through fiction could make a person happier, at least in the short term. In our case, the word broadly refers to the feeling of satisfaction that an audience member gets at the end of a story where tension (the rise and resolution of conflicts that keep a character from their ultimate goal) is resolved sensically. For an ending to be cathartic, the conflicts and how characters address those conflicts must feel natural given each character’s motivations, and the driving question of the story (e.g. Does John get the girl?) must not be answered until late in the narrative as the last (or nearly last) thread to be resolved.

The most important fundamental you’re practicing with this method is developing endings that logically follow from character actions. When it comes to larger narratives, many writers come up with the beginning (in the form of a premise or inciting incident), followed by their desired ending, and then how the story gets from A to B is discovered in the writing process. Occasionally the author finds the narrative has organically drifted from the ending they had in mind, and while some are wise enough to follow the story’s lead, there are plenty of examples of jagged course-correction that kills catharsis. Consider how nobody was happy with the jarring ending to Game of Thrones, or how The Rise of Skywalker “needed” to end with Kylo Ren’s redemption-and-then-death despite it being incongruent to how he was written in the previous two films. So when you sit down to expand your page-long story into a 3-5 arc narrative, don’t be afraid to start with an ending in mind, but don’t hesitate to throw it out if the story veers in another direction. As long as the ending conclusively resolves the driving question in a way that makes sense given who the characters are, you’ll have a cathartic ending.

And if it doesn’t feel quite right, that’s fine! Failure doesn’t mean you’re bad, it just means that what you tried this time didn’t work. The point is to practice again and again as a way of building creative muscles. You may struggle with character motivation, or making conflicts feel natural to the situation, or discovering the organic themes in your setup, but you will get better with practice.

As you grow, you’ll develop your own methodology for the growth and release of tension instead of just using the six-point summary I shared above. You may even seek to experiment with un-cathartic endings or having more driving questions in a story. I myself am constantly evolving my writing style, as is any prolific writer, and who knows how I’ll feel about the six-point summary a year from now? But by giving yourself short, tangible, attainable goals, you’re getting a jumpstart on discovering your process by creating plenty of opportunity to experiment.

Thanks for reading.