The Craft Of Storytelling

The Craft Of Storytelling

The best short stories for me are those that manage to encapsulate a whole new world in a short space – a world that initially invites and then imprisons the reader until the very last word has been read.

Something that I find particularly fascinating is an author's understanding of place and character, and the synthesis between the two. I also think that conflict is the key to good storytelling. Of course there are other elements that are also important – the narrative construction and believable protagonists; cadence and the length of sentences, and choice of words evoking emotion.

Depending on the mood of the writer at the time of writing, a short story may pour out effortlessly in half an hour, or it could take significantly longer as each word is critically evaluated, challenged, and changed.

Aren't words wonderful things? Almost as good as chocolate!

Just rambling (whilst dunking a chocolate biscuit)

flopsy

Yes ... or give a new insight into a perfectly 'ordinary' world.


Without conflict there is no story - just a sequence of events, and I think that's particularly true of spanking stories. I used to tell my students to use 'contrast' and give the analogy of painting ... if you paint white figures on a white background, there is nothing to see; if you paint black figures on your white background, that's interesting! (My pupils tended to write stories featuring 12 girls, all called Sharon and Tracey, who all wore the same clothes and liked the same things)

Realistic dialogue is important for me. While I know I'm a stickler for correct sentences, I also realise that people just don't speak in complete sentences most of the time, nor does everyone speak 'proper' English. So a Scottish comprehensive school boy might realistically say, "Gie's a daud o' yer chuggie, pal." However, he is unlikely to say, "I say, old bean, may I have a piece of your chewing gum, please?"


Oh yes! My word of the day ... 'hebdomadal'. My challenge: write a snippet using 'hebdomadal'.

"Something that I find particularly fascinating is an author's understanding of place and character, and the synthesis between the two."

I second that, and this is the challenge in our stories on this board. Here's the fascinating conumdrum. When you write in a contemporary setting, you have to be aware of the societal constraints on spanking as a disciplinary activity. If it's just about sex or a "scene" piece no problem, but if it's discipline that's another matter.

If you write in a historical setting or even just back to the 50's or 60's, there are fewer cultural constraints as regards physical punishment but, you have to get the tone and dialog right. As an extreme example, you should not have a 14th century princess roll her eyes and say, "Whatever."

And if you are going to world build you have to make it internally consistent. This is why I shy away from English boarding school dramas. I have no clue as to how they talk or what really goes on. I write about what I know or can pick up quickly.(In fact everything I know about English boarding schools I learned here! LOL). For example I often catch myself using figures of speech from a different era than the one that is my setting. And characters have to act like people did in that time and culture. It's the same in movies and TV. One huge problem I see is that on some TV shows people neither act nor speak like they did in the era of the show. Mostly they are too "modern". I see this even in a highly rated show like Mad Men.

And to the second point, conflict is esential. In every good story there is conflict that must be resolved, one way or another. And from my point of view there should be a little mystery too...or a sly twist.

What? Eating and drinking in the library?

Isn't there some sort of...penalty for that?

Guy

I usually avoid period pieces due to the amount of research involved. When I wrote the Purdence stories, set in late 19th century Oklahoma, I found myself having to stop every five minutes to look something up.

The earlier eras are much more suited to corporal punishment stories though.

I feel that some sort of empathy to the "made up" characters is requirred, and I like the challenge of trying to write from the female perspective.
Or trying to show the emotions, and needs of both the spanker, and spankee.

I remember reading Wind in the Willows as a child of seven and loving the book so much I wanted to be there on the river bank. That is what the best writing does, it takes you to another place.

There is a wonderful and diverse spectrum in the library covering just about every aspect of spanking stories and I'm not sure that I have anything significant to add to Flopsy's [other than my own] ramblings but it seems to me that the power of a good story or plot works by stimulating our curiosity, then by further engaging and entertaining with the overlay and weave in the construction, dialogue and descriptions.

If from the first few words we are drawn into the writer's world finding, if not empathy, some sort of understanding or bond with the characters drawn, we'll continue on the journey; a fine example being the absorbing serial "The Girls of Cropton Hall" by TheEnglishmaster.

Some of the writing in the library, as with Blimp's work, paints a perceptive portrait often describing a moment of realization or rite of passage, rich in texture.

Whereas, in contrast, Barrethunter creatively and, I think convincingly, assumes the persona of an insensitive misogynist, allowing us access into a bleak soulless world where forced sex by a road lay-by is celebrated.

On the other hand, Grace Brackenbidge has written well over a thousand stories without finding any need to change the plot line, brilliant in their simplicity.

Maybe the value or weight of writing relates to how we reflect upon it but I've come to no real conclusion, just wanted to add to the conversation.

"That is what the best writing does, it takes you to another place."
Yes, indeed, Blimp - and it also has the power to persuade you that you are another person.

I'm really keen to try to take up the 'hebdomadal' challenge, but before I start will have to nip out for some biscuits to dunk!

There's an old adage - "Show, don't tell". I find that dialogue helps to show, but dialogue sometimes has its own problems...

I've read stories where backwoods types (throwbacks who think nothing of take a sassy city girl over their knees) talked in perfect English. Where younger people all talked in perfect English. Where everyone sounded like an English professor (or at least a grade 8 English teacher). Seeing something like that in a story generally spoils the mood.

There's a time and a place for perfect English, and it's during narration as opposed to in dialogue. "Yes" is always the proper word to use, but having "Yeah", "Yah-huh", "Yup", and "Yep" in a dialogue makes it sound more believable. I've lost track of the number of times I've been proofreading and changed something in the dialogue, only to change it back because fractured and / or run on sentences make sense for the character. Something like:
"We were down by the bridge and Sally's mom showed up and Sally's mom's was really, really mad and Sally tried to hide but her mom saw her and called her over and then Sally's mom -tou aren't going to believe this, but then Sally's mom..."
-is something that should be chopped into several sentences, but who hasn't heard someone saying what happened in an endless run on sentence?

Breaking the rules of English can be hard - especially when your word processor flags things as wrong, but people don't use perfect English in conversation. We start sentences with conjunctions. We talk in sentence fragments and use run on sentences. Sometimes dialogue has to break those same rules to be believable.

And Capitalization! Sometimes when someone is talking it makes sense to use incorrect capitalization to convey tone. Something like:
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said through tight lips.
or
"SALLY, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said through tight lips.
Both sentences have too many capitalized letter but both convey a tone. You can practically hear the short, clipped words.

Also, adding things that describe the way a person is speaking can really help.
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said through tight lips.
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said teasingly.
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said laughingly.
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said with mock anger.
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said crossly.
"Sally, I said for you to Come Here Right This Minute!" She said in an exasperated tone.
- the same words, the same focus on the same words, but when you see how she said those words you see different tones.

Then you have dialect. I wish I could offer good advice on this one, but I can't really do dialect well. To really capture it you have to misspell words consistently and I have a problem with that consistent part.


Another thing to consider is world building. Let's face it - we don't live in a world where spankings are given at the drop of a hat. Sometimes you have to, well, twist the world a bit, but it's important to let the reader know how things have twisted. For example, when I wrote a story called "Returning To..." I devoted a lot of words to explaining how the world had shifted to allow parents to spank their adult children who lose their jobs and return home. I could have just said "it happened" or something like that, but instead I described a world where things slid in that direction. A few other times I've invented worlds out of whole cloth, such as the one for "A Model Prison" - which is set in a world where the political parties have fragmented and buried in the small print of one small party (one that wins at the county level) is how they will reform the justice system for women, adding corporal punishment to woman's county jail.

If you use a different setting, try to describe it as part of your story. Maybe have a character thinking back "to the good old days" before society shifted or something along those lines. If you're using the real world, you might want to stress that in the town of X they feel Y which is why spankings are common there or say how the Evil Mrs. Jones took over the school board (or county government, or mayor's office) and brought with her a new way of doing things. Just a few little things like that can make a huge difference in a story.

Setting something in the past can sometimes be a problem. Sure, spankings were more common back then but before certain dates no one had cell phones - if you were out of the house then you missed the call. The internet shouldn't play a big role in any story set before the mid 90s and computers weren't common in the 80s. Editing out those common features of everyday life can be a headache.

One thing you have to decide is how 'authentic' you want to make a historic setting. The further back you get the less politically correct things are - or rather the politics of the day changes to things that we don't accept today. Setting a story at a time when a man could be expected to take charge and lay down the law (and a good spanking) to a female character (his wife, daughter, secretary, etc) means going back to a time that was repressive, patriarchal, xenophobic, and very non-politically correct. For example, before Vatican II Catholics were strongly encouraged to keep to themselves and not mix with those godless heathens who called themselves protestants. Back in the 60s it was illegal (and a mental illness) to be gay. Minorities (be they racial, cultural, or religious) were rarely treated as equals and few people saw anything wrong with that. Express the wrong political opinion and you could be blacklisted. If you came from the wrong side of the tracks you probably weren't as good as someone from a "proper" family and teenage males who weren't toeing the line were often sentenced to join the military... Okay, sentenced is too strong a word - the judge might ask if you really, really wanted to hear some charges read or if you were ready to serve your country and enlist today. As for sexism, there were some jobs that everyone knew a woman just couldn't do - not shouldn't, couldn't. As in they weren't capable of doing some of the things that a man did.

In short, there were many ugly things. "That's just the way it. Some things will never change." was a common answer when someone pointed out injustice. You have to decide how much to include in a story and how much to gloss over. For example, a story set in the 50s that doesn't mention the races of any of the characters is much more plausible than one that includes different races being treated equally.

One good way to get a handle on the past is to watch old movies and TV. The story lines might be good or boring, but you can see the social norms in most of those pictures. Yes, they are often whitewashed or idealized social norms, but they can give you a feel for them. For a slightly less white washed view there's the current show 'Mad Men' when they take pains to point out how different things were back then.

Another way is to read old books - since they weren't made to the studio code they could be more true to life. Something like "The Godfather" (yes, the book is better than the movie) can really convey the sense of a time. Even how they say things can show you how different things used to be. For example, the other day I was I reading a book written in the mid 70s (I'd finally tracked down an old one from one of my favorite authors) and one of the characters said:
"---- you!"

That's right - it was printed in the 70s and instead of using a naughty word it had dashes. Back then the F bomb was a much bigger deal, so big that a book set in a post apocalypse world filled with killing and sex couldn't be published without replacing letters with dashes.


This is getting a bit longer than I intended, so if I had only one piece of advice it would be to try to make the setting plausible. Set things up so if the reader accepts X and Y as true (eg: "young adults are returning home" and "there is a legally enforceable contract that allows their parents to spank them") then everything else in that story should make sense in that context (eg: the returnee has to agree to sign the contract, once she does she can't easily get out of it, 'babysitters' are needed for the returnees, etc). The more internally consistent a story is the less you have to suspend disbelief.

Goodgulf