Remarkable Choice

Focus

Think big about small events and keep your time frame tight. Discover what can be learned from simpler, less dramatic experiences in your life.

Transformation

Protagonists must grow and change—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, socially, psychologically. Change springs from conflicts, wants, problems. Choose an experience that helped you see something in a new way; changed the way you felt about yourself, another, or the world; strongly affected your emotions; gave you new knowledge or understanding; had important consequences in my life (then, now, or future). Transformation is the same thing as a choreographed conflict..

Sympathetic Protagonist

Create an imperfect but likable character—with well-defined needs, skills, and flaws—who faces and overcomes a series of obstacles. Dialogue, action, and description show the reader a complex main person.

Insight

Narration

Share your insights, dreams, triumphs, and disappointments. Study shows that provide “narrator insight,” such as Everybody Hates Chris, Malcolm in the Middle, Bernie Mac, Gray’s Anatomy, etc. Narrate the plot with commentary, explanations, analysis, feelings.

Theme/Truism

Develop a view you have about the nature of life and how people behave. Theme is your message, opinion, observation, lesson. Structure your story around this theme.

Voice

Tone

Choose words and structure sentences so that they create an attitude toward your topic, characters, and reader. Popular “teen” tones: humorous, ironic, self-effacing, sarcastic, light-hearted, solemn, angry, nostalgic, hopeful.

Punctuation & Font Tricks

Create drama, suspense, excitement, emphasis, and many other emotions through the use of em dashes, ellipsis, colons, italics, quotation marks, polysyndeton, asyndeton, and more.

Sentence Fluency

Create rhythm and meaningful repetition to enhance tone by starting sentences in different ways and by varying how long or short sentences are—including decisions to use fragments.

Detail & Elaboration

Word Choice

Choose words that are precise, specific, and accurate. Use a balanced of both sophisticated and simple vocabulary. Consider connotation and word charge.

Imagery

Choose words that recreate smells, sights, sounds, tastes, textures, feelings, ideas. Be specific. Showing your life story is much more interesting than just telling it. Imagery should be so intense that it makes the reader feel as if s/he is in the middle of the action.

Figurative Language

Choose words that create original and interesting comparisons and contrasts. Common techniques include symbolism, simile/metaphor, allusion, personification, hyperbole, irony, and, juxtaposition.

Dialogue

Listening “live” to what the characters say. Dialogue enlivens your story, adding texture and depth to both plot and character development (especially as culture impacts character and setting). Dialogue advances plot. It increases or decreases energy in a scene. And it also reveals tone and information about you or other characters.

Echo

A symbol, image, idea, or word that planted in the story and then “echoed” at least one more time somewhere else in the story to emphasize your insight. Motif is a synonym.