Category: Craft Of Storytelling

I have been keeping a swipe file even before I knew what a swipe file was.

A swipe file is a notebook or a folder where you keep all the fantastic ideas, inspiration, prompts, quotes and bits and pieces of information that you’ve come across over the years. Think of it as a professional scrapbook designed to inspire your writing.

My swipe file started with collections of quotes at the age of thirteen. I still have that tattered diary in immature handwriting (it still hasn’t improved much).

I filled it with ideas or words of other people. It kind of felt right to keep that ‘intellectual loot‘ somewhere where I can get back to it again and again. I started with notebooks and moved on to A4 size journals, A4 size diaries with pockets. Ring binders, clear-plastic sleaves, and zip-seal document cases housed newspaper and magazine clippings and as my collection of online articles grew so did my pile of thumb drives.

My swipe-files are my comfort food. Just like I reach for the cookies-jar when stressed, I go to my swipe-files when I am looking for comfort.

Not just that, they are the one I scan first when my mind is begging for stimulation. It reminds me of an idea or a piece of writing I read years ago and have forgotten about it. Reading again, it invokes different emotions and brings new insights.

The idea of a swipe file is nothing new. The creatives in every field have been using them to overcome almost any professional hurdle.

Keeps a swipe file. It’s just what it sound like – a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others.

See something worth seatling? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file.

Newspaper reports call this a “morgue file” – I like that nave even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.

Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist

The more complete your swipe files are, the more powerful your resource will be.

How can a swipe file help you improve your writing skills?

If you want to grow as a writer, the easiest way to do that is to keep a swipe file.

Professional writers use swipe files as a learning method to improve their writing. They study other people’s content and create a collection with proven examples.

A swipe file helps you understand writing techniques as you can see how others write. It also provides templates for your own writing. A swipe file can even help you overcome writer’s block and save time, as it provides suggestions for sentence structure, dialogues, description of settings, facial features, mannerism, interesting anecdotes and much more.

If something catches your attention, the chances are that it will have the same effect on others.

For a long time, I kept on believing in the advice of reputed ‘writing gurus’ that if you read a lot and write a lot, and you’ll become a better writer. But it didn’t work. My writing was not improving fast enough. But when I started learning from other people’s writing, sometimes copying, other times imitating, yet another time structuring my sentences based on sentences that caught my attention, my skills improved at a much-exceeding rate.

Is that plagiarism?

The exact definition of plagiarism is – the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

While the purpose of a swipe file is to study techniques and templates and get inspirations and ideas other people writing will invoke. Since you can’t keep all you read in your head, you have to have a place where can go to later when you need it.

You don’t copy other people’s writing, neither do you claim their ideas as your own. But you do use their prose to understand how to apply different writing techniques. Swiping is a legitimate and effective method to improve your writing skills, and to become a more persuasive and engaging writer.

How to organize your swipe file?

Although you might start in a haphazard way, you need to organize your swipe files in such a way that makes it easy to find the guidance you need when you need it most.

There are several ways to do that, and I have listed some below, but you need to select the ones which work best for you.

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• A scrapbook. cut and paste things into it
• Notebooks. Separate ones for separate categories such as metaphors, quotes, stories, etc.
• Folders. Chuck clippings, photocopies in it and organize in clear plastics sleeves.
• Reference cards. The writer Anne Lamott swears by it.
• Mobile phone. Take pictures and sort by using albums.
• Digital swipe files. I have started using Evernote which has an excellent search facility and easy to organize in categories
• Pinterest. You can create boards with different categories and save hundred of pins other people are sharing freely.

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To make sure your ideas and inspirations don’t evaporate in thin air, have a trusted system for managing them. Swipe files are a great tool for that.

Take that little bit extra time at the end of each session (reading or writing) on filing so you can find what you need when you need it.

Besides, you will find that keeping swipe files is the most enjoyable activity you will engage in as a writer.

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It is cold, windy and dark. A few people are sitting around a fire. They are eating and drinking and talking when suddenly a young man gets up and speaks in a loud voice, “Do you know what happened to me today when I went hunting?” Everyone stop whatever they are doing and look at him. The young man doesn’t say till someone asks. “What? What happened to you?” Everyone is all ears wanting to know what happened.

Can you picture the scene in your mind?

It is happening 50,000 years ago, where a group of humans is sitting around a fire and a young man is about to tell a story and everyone wants to hear it.

The setting might be different, the people might be different but human desire to listen to stories hasn’t changed.

We, the humans, know how to tell a story since cave days. The art of telling a story is still the same since humans invented the language.

We all have the skill to tell stories. It is inbuilt in us.

The only problem is we have not been practicing them enough. That is because we don’t have campfires every night anymore.

But we have other means. We talk on phones, we interact on social media and we tell stories at the watercoolers and cafes. We are all proficient in telling stories orally.

Every time you are telling someone what happened when the fire came close to your property or how your son narrowly escaped a magpie attack, you are telling stories.

But when it comes to writing our stories, that we panic. We think we need special skills to write stories from our life.

The techniques of writing a good story are still the same as telling a good story and we learned it in the caves 50,000 years ago.

Let’s learn it from the young man in the cave who is going to tell a story.

1. Hook the audience

The first element of a good story is to hook the audience. If you are able to do that with your first sentence, you have them.

Let’s see what the young man did to hook his audience? He asked a question. Not just any question but a simple but clever question. His question was, “Do you know what happened to me today when I went hunting? ” In this question, he is promising two things – one I have a story to tell and it is going to be an interesting story because you can’t imagine what happened to me when I went hunting.

We, humans, are suckers for stories.

Of course, we want to hear your story, the cavemen must have felt, and it better be a good story now that you have our attention, young man.

So the first element is the hook the second element is the promise.

2. Make a promise

Very early in your story, you need to make a promise that your story is going to be worth their time. Even in cave days, the audience didn’t have time to listen to the worthless stories.

Imagine if the young man in the cave proceeded by telling them that he got lost and was tired, hungry and cold walking all the way back in the rain. Would anyone have kept listening?

Definitely not.

He is breaking the ‘implied’ promise he made in his first line. This is going to be an interesting story guys, better listen. And he uses a special oral technique to make that promise. He pauses.

A pause in oral storytelling evokes interest. It brings involvement. When another caveman asked ‘What?’ it showed he is interested.

In written stories, it is achieved in the same way by arousing the questions in the reader’s mind. Look at some of the opening lines I picked randomly from the books around me.

Recently my twenty-two-year-old daughter asked me what message I would give to my own twenty-two-years old self if I could travel back in time. – Anna Quindlen – Lots of Candles Plenty of Cake

The beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think. – Anne Morro Lindbergh – Gift From the Sea

In the country where I now live, there is no word for home. – Isabel Huggan in Belonging

Once you have made the promise you have to keep it. But you keep it in such a way that it keeps your audience interest. You do that by creating suspense.

3. Create Suspense

Suspense is the third element of a good story.

Let’s see how the young caveman achieved it.

I was standing behind a tree, ready with my bow and arrow, looking towards the river, at the point where the animals come to drink water when something towards me. You wouldn’t believe what it was?

Okay, you want to know what he saw. The caveman has used three techniques to create that suspense – by giving details (tree, river, bow, arrow), by adding in the wait factor ( standing behind a tree, ready) and by leaving it hanging (you wouldn’t believe what it was).

The suspense keeps readers wanting more. A story with suspense is never boring. Suspense takes the readers right inside the story and now they are ready for the journey.

4. Take them on a journey

That is right. Good storytelling is about taking your audience on a journey. They need to see what you are seeing. They need to smell what you are smelling. They need to be in the conflict with you and experience your

I couldn’t make out what it was. It was of the size and shape of a dear but its color was of the sun at mid-day and my eyes dazzled with its glow. I straightened my bow and pointed the arrow at him. He saw me. He knew I was hiding behind the tree. He looked straight at me but he wasn’t afraid. Instead, he signaled me with his head as if asking me to follow him. He then ran in the direction of the forest. I pushed my bow on my back and ran after him.

Now the rest of the cavemen are on the journey with the young guy. They are in the story anticipating what is going to unfold.

5. Give it a satisfactory ending

Nothing disappoints readers more than an unsatisfactory ending.

An unsatisfactory ending can make a good story go flat while a satisfactory ending can make a story memorable.

What is a satisfactory ending? One the deliver the promise you made at the beginning of the story. If you promised a suspenseful tale then a satisfactory ending would be that suspense is resolved. If you promised a romantic tale than then relationship issues are resolved and a happy state is reached. If you have promised an entertaining tale then humor is well-knitted in the story and the punch line delivers the surprise.

He disappeared in the forest. I couldn’t find him. But I found myself in a meadow full of lush grass where a lot of animals were grazing in the open. I took out my bow and aimed at a chamois. It lay dead at my feet. You are eating him right now. Fellow cavemen, I think I know how to get to that meadow. We don’t have to worry about food for years to come.

When we are writing stories from our life we are taking events from our lives and combining them with our thoughts, feelings, and reactions. Then we tell them in such a way that it evokes readers’ interest, entertains or educates them, and delivers the intended message.

It is as simple as the caveman’s story.

Find some story from your life and try telling it to a friend incorporating all these rules. Don’t get disturbed if it doesn’t come out well in the first go. Most of the storytellers practice their craft over time. Keep in mind that a comedian tells the same joke multiple times before he perfects the timing, delivery and punch line.

For the past few days, I have been working on the character development of my novel. There are a few techniques I have learned which I am going to share with you in this post.

Figure out how your character looks like.

Knowing how your characters look physically before starting writing about them makes them come alive. The tool I have used to find their physical appearance is Google images. I would go to the images section of Google and do some random searches. More than usual I will find a picture that matches the character I have in mind.

There could the eye color you might be looking for or a jawline or maybe the hair color. The only thing I knew about my protagonist was that she has long black hair. When I searched the term ‘long back hair’, I found a picture of a girl who I knew instinctively was my protagonist.   

Find pictures not only for the protagonist but also of the antagonist and all major characters. Once you know how they look like, it will be very easy to write about them. Keep in mind you will have to describe their physical features to your readers so they can also picture them in their minds. The best way I have seen it done is by tagging them.

J. K. Rowling goes to a lot of trouble to create characters with very distinct physical tags. Harry Potter has green eyes, lightening-shaped scar, glasses, and messy hair. Ron Weasley can be very easily pictured with red hair, freckles, and long nose, so is Hagrid from his size shaggy hair and a bushy long beard.

You don’t have to go to a lot of lengths to describe your characters. You can use very short descriptions when you first introduce them and tags are a great way to do them.  

Tags can include physical features, body marks, clothing, hairstyles, characteristic mannerisms, facial expressions, manner of speaking, jargon, noises the character makes, or even odor – anything, in fact, that a person interacting with the character would notice about him.

Do a Personality test for each of your main characters.

To save your characters from falling flat, give them rich personalities. Figure out what they like and dislike, what that think, say and how they react. You can give them behavior traits like real people and the best way to access a vast majority of data on people’s behavior is through personality tests.

The Myers Briggs Test was the first one of its kind (compiled by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers-Briggs) based on psychologist C. G. Jung’s work. Since then several others have come into play. The one I used is called 16 Personalities because it is free and it also has a vast database based on millions of real-life people.

When you take the test, you get access to both the positive and negative traits of that personality type. The trick is to answer the questions as you think your character would have answered them.

You will get about twenty pages of information. You can use whatever you like and discard the rest. You don’t have to stick with it completely, can add other things on top of what you got. The outcome will be a close to life, three-dimensional character.

Interview your character.

Interviewing is a great way of finding the voice and also the mannerism of your character and I find it very easy to do.

Settle at a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for some time, close your eyes and invite your character to come and sit with you. See him standing across from you. He will be reluctant initially but if you are kind and show compassion, his resistance will break and he will accept your invitation.

Start with easy questions. Have a conversation with him. How are you? Thanks for coming today. I am sorry I have been ignoring you, but I am here now and want to know you better.

Tell me how have you been lately. Tell him the bits you already know about him. I know you have been upset when your father spoke so badly to you, why do you think he does that? You will find he will start talking. Note his mannerisms and start writing (or typing).

You can open your eyes now. You will find the conversation very easily move from your mind on to paper. Write everything you see or hear. Keep asking easy questions keeping the hard one for the last. You may find that he doesn’t answer the hard question and leaves the interview. That is fine. He will tell you next time when there is more trust between the two of you.

Then he will tell you everything, even the things you haven’t imagined for him.

That is when he will come alive.

Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash

When I started writing my first novel, I didn’t have any story. I just had one incident in mind that I witnessed as a little girl back in India.

The son of our landlord, who lived in England, came to visit his parents. At their insistence, he had to marry a local girl before he left. A wedding was hastily arranged and we kids had a ball participating in festivities.

Once back in England the reluctant son wrote a letter to the girl that he was already married and had two children. He said he can’t get her to join him in England and she was free to do whatever she wanted.

I was too young to understand all the details (why didn’t he tell his parents that he was already married) but months later I visited that girl with my mother. I still remember her face. She was beautiful. I couldn’t understand how anyone could leave her in the lurch. My mother was furious though. How could someone destroy a life like that, was her infuriation. Her life was ruined for sure. She would always be treated as a second-rate woman.

This incident became the first plot point for my novel. I just added a twist to it with a “What if” question.

What if the girl went abroad and then found out that her husband was already married.

The second plot point also came from another real-life incident. Years ago an acquaintance of mine confided in me the ‘most weird thing’ that her boyfriend had done to her. I can’t disclose it here (it will give away the twist in the novel) but I knew instinctively that I have to use it in the novel.

The third plot point came from a single shot of a TV series that I had watched as a teenager. It was an image that implied more than any amount of dialogues or skillful plotting could (again disclosure will give away the story). All I had to do was to combine it with a number of real-life scenarios I was aware of and it would give a perfect ending to the book.

At this point, I had a loose storyline. What I needed was a method to plot it and to turn it into an outline.

I used three methods rather than just one. Each one of them strengthened the story in a different way.

1. A combination of Three-Act Structure and Seven-Plot-Points Method

The Three-Act Structure is a narrative model that divides a plot up into three sections – setup, confrontation, and resolution. These sections represent rising and falling action. Although it is time-tested, easy to master structure that is the basis for almost every Hollywood movie, its main drawback is that it is too broad and it doesn’t give much help in plotting the story.

It is best used in conjunction with the Seven-Plot-Points method which entails – the hook, the first plot point, pinch point 1, the midpoint, pinch point 2, second plot point and the resolution.

The following diagram beautifully blends the two methods.

At this point, I had no outline in place. The ‘what if’ scenario gave me a storyline and I was able to write a few more chapters. But then I stalled.

2. The Snowflake method

The strength of the Snowflake method is that it forces you to think of marketing first. It

In nutshell the method is:

• Step 1- Write a one-sentence summary of the novel.
• Step 2 – Write a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel.
• Step 3 – Write a one-page summary sheet for each major character.
• Step 4 – Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book will end. The whole thing should be no more than one page.
• Step 5 – Write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters.
• Step 6 – Expand the plot synopsis of the novel developed in step 4 to a four-page synopsis.
• Step 7 – expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character.
• Step 8 – Use the four-page synopsis to make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel – write one line about each which includes point-of-view character and what happens.
• Step 9 – Take each line and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene.
• Step 10 – Commence writing the novel.

The first step is the hardest. But if you can write the once sentence summary of your book at the onset, you will not waste days or months (or maybe years) figuring out what your novel is about.

Once the summary is done, the Snowflake method is an excellent tool to expand and discover the story in manageable chunks.

But there was no way to know whether the storyline had enough ups and downs. Whether it will keep the reader’s interest.

This is when I came across the book Save The Cat by Blake Snyder and learned how to balance the story and keep the momentum.

3. Save The Cat Beatsheet

Though written mainly for screenwriters Save The Cat gives an excellent tool to present the story in such a way that it keeps the readers interested.

The book divides the story into 15 beats. These beats are well described in Jessica Brody’s Beatsheet.

Once I familiarised myself with the 15 beats, it was time to apply them to the outline of my novel.

I did that in four steps:

1. Estimated how long is my novel was going to be.
2. Divided the number of words into acts.
3. Divided acts into scenes.
4. Figured out where the story beats should go.

Let’s say my book is going to be 80,000 words long.

By the 3 Act Structure

• First Act represents about 25% of the total word count
• Second Act represents about 50% of the total word count
• Third Act represents about 25% of the total word count

So, that means the breakdown for my 80,000-word book will be:

• First Act (80,000 x.25) = about 20,000 words
• Second Act (80,000 x.50) = about 40,000 words
• Third Act (80,000 x.25) = about 20,000 words

An average scene is about 1000 to 2000 words long, with the sweet spot being of 1500 words. I estimated how many scenes I was going to have in each act and ultimately in the book.

• First Act (20,000 words / 1,500-word scenes) = about 14 scenes
• Second Act (40,000 words / 1,500-word scenes) = about 28 scenes
• Third Act (20,000 words / 1,500-word scenes) = about 14 scenes

That means I am going to have approximately 56 scenes in the book. Now I can start figuring out where each of the 15 story beats will go.

In Save The Cat Blake Snyder lays out where each beat should go:

1. Opening Image – 0% to 1%
2. Theme Stated – 5%
3. Setup – 1% to 10%
4. Catalyst – 10%
5. Debate – 10% to 20%
6. Break Into Two – 20%
7. B Story – 22% )
8. Fun and Games – 20% to 50%
9. Midpoint – 50%
10. Bad Guys Close In – 50% to 75%
11. All is Lost – 75%
12. Dark Night of the Soul – 75% to 80%
13. Break Into Three – 80%
14. Finale – 80% to 99%
15. Final Image – 99% to 100%

So, to figure out where the beat should go in my novel I took the total number of scenes and multiplied it by the percentage listed above.

For example, the Midpoint occurs around the 50% mark of a story, (56 scenes x .5 = Midpoint occurs in the 28^th scene).

It can also be done with total word count (80,000 words x .5 = Midpoint occurs around 40,000 words).

To learn more you can go to the beautiful post written by Savannah Gilbo How to Outline Your Novel with Save the Cat!

Hope this will help you to outline and plot your novel.

Do write to me about your experience or your way of outlining your novel.

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

I wish someone had told me how to outline my novel when I started writing the first draft of my novel.

I was expecting that the year-long novel writing course I signed up for would help me flesh out the story first before embarking on – making an impact, structure, backstory, characterization, narrative types, the middle, scenes, chapters, amazing endings – but it didn’t.

Instead, I became the first one in the group (volunteered by the course leader) to bring the first chapter for group critique.

Although my chapter was well received as it had lots of drama, action and a cliff hanger at the end, it put me on the wrong path.

I became a pantser. I was discovering the story as I was writing it. It worked fine for a while but then it stalled. I had no idea how to take it forward and whether it was going in any direction.

That is when I had to stop and learn about outlining.

And learn I did.

Kate Grenville wrote that she had 100-page research material before writing ‘The Secret River,’ her best known work. Margret Atwood admit time write 70 to 80 page outline before commencing her books. But Robert Ludlum beat them all. He writes a 100-page outline for all his books.

I used to think 100-page outline is over the top. It is a killer. But if it was something that could help my novel see the light of the day, I am up for it.

And so should be you.

Midway during writing my novel, I am on a mission to write 100-page outline and see whether it will take out of the rut and help me finish it.

I am researching and sharing everything along the way starting from how to outline.

There are many ways to outlining. One is not necessarily better than the other. But what works for one writer may not work for another. Also, it depends upon the story you are telling.

I was going to write a lengthy post to describe different ways to outline but then I found the following video. In sixteen minutes it gives a summary of the most prevailing outline methods by some of the great writers on this planet.

God bless Michael La Ronn for creating this video. He has got many more on his channel.

And if you still want more here are three links but you will have to read the text. There are no videos.

• Check K.M. Weiland‘s method here.
• Check Glen C. Strathy’s method here.
• Check Kristen Kieffer‘s outlining method here.

What method do I use, you may ask.?

I use a blend of The Snowflake, Scenes & Sequels and Save the Cat Beat Sheet methods.

There is plenty to take in from all these links. I will talk more about my method in the next post.

I must admit that my approach to novel writing so far has been wrong. So wrong, that I haven’t been able to finish the damn thing in five years, even though the plot is clear and characters are living in my head constantly chattering, impatient to see the light of the day.

Not only I, but most of my writing group buddies have chosen the obvious but wrong approach to write our novels.

The usual and amateurish approach is to come up with an idea, flesh it out, identify the main plot point and start writing. Character development is done on the fly. Research is non-existent. The point of view is selected at the beginning and is very hard to change because we are already into writing chapters.

Believe it or not, this is what most amateur writers (including myself) do when it comes to novel writing. And then we expect, whatever that comes out of our pen to be of publishable quality.

There is a better way to write a novel.

The way of professionals.

I first read about this approach in the ‘Searching for the Secret River‘ the book Kate Grenville wrote about writing her most admired novel ‘The Secret River. 

The last night I was watching a documentary on Margaret Atwood, an all-time great writer of our times, and she admitted to the same approach.

As I researched more writers, successful writers who have written several books, it started becoming evident how they are able to write so much consistently while the amateur writers struggle to finish one.

The secret lies in your first draft.

I always thought the first draft is very much like the final draft with the perfect opening line, a cliff hanger first chapter and then page-turning subsequent chapters leading to a satisfying end. All this is left to do in the subsequent revisions is polishing the language and filling any minor gaps.

I couldn’t be wrong.

I had written 12 chapters of the book even before I had fleshed out all the characters, their wants and desires, their motivations, and their quirks. I hadn’t figure out the subplots and I had no idea how to fill in the middle part.

This is where Kate Grenville’s revelation came to rescue. She said when she had a hundred pages worth of material from the research she was doing for ‘The Secret River,’ she knew she was ready to write the book.

Think of it, one hundred pages worth of material before starting the first chapter. All her research was done prior to writing the book.

Remember ‘The Moby Dick’, the 400 hundred page novel. Herman Melville talked to the survivor of the shipwreck and wrote down the whole story. He knew the whole story before he commenced. He didn’t have to figure it out as he went along.

The first draft of a novel is where you tell the story to yourself to figure it out. And I do mean tell not show. Just like you would tell the story of a movie you recently watched on TV that your friend missed out on.

This is where you will ‘fish out’ the story. You will create characters and you would figure out everything about them. Where were they born, where did they go to school, how they reacted to childhood traumas and what their motives are. This is where you will capture all the research you would do. You will find gaps and fill them. You will make the storyboard and figure out the mirror moment.

This is like writing a synopsis of your story but not after finishing your book but before commencing it.

And it is for not for agents or publishers but for yourself.

Some people call it a detailed outline.

Tomorrow I will talk about different approaches to write a 100-page outline of your novel.