Fiction writing involves creating believable stories through elements like characters, plot structure with exposition, rising action and resolution, dialogue, description, and point of view. Successful fiction explores themes through characters that undergo changes resulting from internal or external conflicts. Writers employ various techniques to immerse readers in the fictional world including developing rounded characters, crafting compelling narratives, and employing literary devices like symbolism and metaphor.

1. Fiction
Creative Writing
ENG 211

2. Definition
• Fiction writing is based on fictitious
events; however, the story is written
in such a way that it takes on a
realistic quality to become believable.
• It includes literary prose such as
short stories, novellas, and novels.

3. Where to Start When
Writing Fiction
• One of the first places you may want
to start is with what you know.
• Look at events in your own
experiences or with stories you were
told by someone else.

4. Continued
• Writing fiction allows you to discover
character types, humor, personal
themes, the nature of your
imagination, and many other critical
details needed for story
development.
• You can find ideas from
poems, dreams, and conflicts.

5. Elements of Story
• Classical story structure is:
– set-up or exposition
– increasing of the complications by
moving forward in actions
– Climax or highest point of action
– Reversal where action may go back to
the beginning
– Resolution that ends or brings the story
to some type of closing

6. Continued
• Stories usually come in three-part
structure
– Beginning where the characters and
exposition (establishment of events or
actions that happen before another did)
are given. This is also where the
reader’s attention can be won or lost.
– May need to be being right away by
introducing the conflict of the story.

7. Continued
– Middle where plot development occurs
through different actions and possible
conflicts the protagonist will have to go
through while he/she is trying to solve
an issue.
– Resolution that brings the story to a
conclusion of some type or the resolving
of the current conflict the protagonist
is going through.

8. Ways to Begin
• Routine-disruption
• The Chance Encounter
• Entering of a Mysterious Stranger
• The Shattering Statement
• Expectation Vs. Actuality
• The Road Story

9. Other Elements of
Literature
• Tone
• Language
• Ideas
• Atmosphere
• Character
• Theme

10. All Stories Need
• All stories need
– exposition to let the reader know that
something does not occur in
isolation, but there were previous
events to occurred before the action of
the story.
– development where the reader sees the
disruption of the routine or the inciting
of the incident.
– drama that depicts the struggle the
protagonist will go through.

11. Moving to the Second
Act
• One of the most challenging parts is
making the middle as vital and
focused as the opening to keep the
action moving forward.
• The problems for the protagonist
become so urgent that a climax is
forced through the choices the
character makes and the actions
taken.

12. Continued
• The middle is where the writer
follows through on the complications
established in the beginning of the
story.
• It is also where the end is being set
up.
• There is a beginning to the middle as
well.

13. Act Three or the Ending
• The third act of the story or the
ending is where the character will
reach his/her goal, or where the
events after the climax happen.
• A protagonist may not fully resolve a
conflict, but the story will come to
some type of ending.

14. Basic Plot Line
• Exposition: The start of the story.
The way things are before the action
starts.
• Rising Action: the series of conflicts
and crisis in the story that lead to the
climax.
• Climax: The turning point. The most
intense moment (either mentally or in
action.

15. Continued
• Falling Action: all of the action which
follows the Climax.
• Resolution: The conclusion, the tying
together of all of the threads.

16. Theme
• The theme of a piece of fiction is its central
idea. It usually contains some insight into the
human condition.
• In most short stories, the theme can be
expressed in a single sentence.
• In longer works of fiction, the central theme is
often accompanied by a number of
lesser, related themes, or there may be two or
more central themes.
• Themes should be stated as a generalization.

17. Other Elements
• Allusion: a reference to a person, place or
literary, historical, artistic, mythological source or
event.
• A symbol represents an idea, quality, or concept larger
than itself.
• Irony: a difference between what is expected and
reality. (Verbal, situational, and dramatic)
• Style: a writer’s individual and distinct way of writing.
The total of the qualities that distinguish one author’s
writing from another’s.

18. Continued
• Structure: the way time moves through a novel.
• Chronological: starts at the beginning and
moves through time.
• Flashback: starts in the present and then goes
back to the past.
• Circular or Anticipatory: starts in the
present, flashes back to the past, and returns
to the present at the conclusion.
• Panel: same story told from different
viewpoints.

19. Ways to Jump Time
• Writers cannot give all the event
because a story would be too long and
involved, so there are places where
time bridges will have to be created.
• Types of time jumping include:
– Flash forward
– Flashback

20. Characters
• Characters are the people the events
happen to.
• Characters mainly need to take on
rounded qualities to give them depth
and dimension.
• Also want to avoid cliché or
stereotyped characters.

21. How to Develop
Characters
• Research characters.
• Play around with original conceptions.
• Write sympathetically about all
characters.
• Give Heroes or Heroines a flaw.
• Avoid sentimentality.

22. Characters Continued
• Characters must be believable.
• Don’t give everything there is to
know about a character, but leave
some things for the reader to
imagine.
• Reveal personality traits and
characteristics through what the
character does and says.

23. Continued
Types of Characters:
•Round Character: convincing, true to life.
•Dynamic Character: undergoes some type of change
in story.
•Flat Character: stereotyped, shallow, often
symbolic.
•Static Character: does not change in the course of
the story.

24. Methods of
Characterization
1.Direct: ―he was an old man..‖ (The Old Man
and the Sea)
2.Own Words and Actions
3.Reaction of other Characters
4.Physical appearance
5.Own thoughts

25. Dialogue
• Dialogue is the talking that takes
place between characters and by the
characters.
• There are several types of dialogue
that can take place within a story.
• Dialogue should be infused with
exposition and description as well as
characterization.

26. Types of Dialogue
• Direct (dramatic/real-time) dialogue:
this is the dialogue that happens at
the scene in present time.
• Indirect dialogue: where the
narrator reports what someone says.

27. Continued
• Stylized dialogue: it’s an illusion;
flows through time without giving a
full cinematic picture.
• Asynchronous dialogue: tension and
drama in the dialogue increase as the
characters’ disagreement increases
and they respond in an unscripted
manner.

28. How is Dialogue Killed?
• Letting characters say what is
already known.
• Characters responding as if they
knew what each other was going to
say—predictable.
• Telling scenes explicitly instead of
revealing through the tone and word
choice characters could use to reveal
feelings.

29. Half-scene and Scene
Snippets
• Half-scene is the use of scenic
devices and present-action moments
in the midst of summary or
narration.
• These make summary more
alive, less static or informal, and
more dramatic.

30. Continued
• They can accelerate or facilitate
movement through time.
• Snippets give details that make
narration moments more vivid.

31. Types of Action
• Routine action is basically a summary
type action of something characters
do all the time.
• Present action is the action that
happens at a particular time.

32. Creating Tension
• One of the best ways to create
tension is to follow the actions of one
character while another is off-scene
taking part in different actions that
could have an adverse effect on the
main character.

33. Description
• Setting deals with time and interior
& exterior placement of where the
story is happening.
• May need to give at least three
sentences describing the setting
before introducing the character.
• Helps to include
metaphor, symbolism, and point of
view through the details given.

34. Types of Information
• Primary information: the main
information given that advances the
narrative.
• Secondary information: provides
context, metaphor, idea, etc.
• Cannot stray too far or for too long
from the real world or the story is
not believable.

35. Continued
• Leave out what is already known
and keep what you don’t know.
• Try something new.
• Make sure the reader always
knows where the character is and
use the setting to help tell the
story.

36. Point of View
• First-person narrator: limited to one
individual and told by the character
him/herself.
• Third-person narrator: can have total
omniscience or limited omniscience
(knows conscious of one character).
Knows the outcome of the
story, while the protagonist doesn’t.

37. Continued
• Second-person narrator: telling to
someone else. Usually is used in ―how-
to‖ type stories. Not highly used.
• When choosing POV, decide what
would work best with the material to
be presented.

38. Types of Conflict
• Man vs Man
• Man vs Nature
• Man vs Society
• Man vs Technology
• Man vs Himself

39. Revision
• Need hard revision—revising several
times.
• Parts of revision:
– Motivation
– Significant details
– Repetition of detail
– Recounting of story events