This document discusses the art of writing stories and provides advice on incorporating artistic elements beyond just craft. It argues that the best stories have an artistic quality that transcends good structure and crafting. Some key points made include: considering concepts like madness, beauty, risk-taking, and serendipity; experimenting with perspectives, characters, and narrative voices; focusing on a single character-defining gesture or playing with expectations of an ending; and emphasizing style over shock value when including sensitive topics. The overall message is that writers should challenge conventions and take creative risks to bring an artistic element to their stories.

1. The Art of Writing Stories.

2. Is writing stories a craft or an art?
• When I first started writing stories, I was told
it was a craft like building a rabbit hutch.
• But when I started to think about it, I thought
well let’s analyze some stories. True enough
many were well crafted and fulfilled the
requirements, but the best had something
else beyond the good structure. They had art.

3. What do I mean by art?
• Good question. At art college I was taught art
is a concept made tangible through a material.
Ironically when you look at the origins of the
word originally it meant craft, but over the
centuries we see the definition moving away
from this, art now includes all those qualities
that transcend craft. Back in 2012 Maria
Popova in the Atlantic collected a short
omnibus of definitions from artists, etc.

4. The Points of Art
• Madness
• Beauty
• The unknown
• The means to unite people
• The way to find oneself
• Risk
• The extra

5. ART IN THE STORY
• True you must craft the story. It must fulfil the
requirements for publication, but you must
factor in ART for it to be something special.
The first few sentences are not a pitch. Relax
even in a small compass such as a short story
you can afford to linger over description.

6. Serendipity
• The concept of serendipity is something to
bear in mind. Take a risk once you have the
semblance of a structure in mind or finished
kow-towing to the conventions of your chosen
genre. Mix it up. The success of Anton
Chekhov was down to challenging society and
literature.

7. Getting Ideas
• Edward de Bono has excellent methods for
brainstorming. My favourite is to get a
dictionary and at random select ten words.
Use them to plot and for characterization.
Lateral thinking takes you into the
unpredictable world, even into the land of
Edgar Allan Poe.

8. Go against yourself!
• Write a story from outside of your experience.
• Naturalize the narratorial voice like method
actors do.
• Research, but, as Oscar Wilde warned do not
over do the immersion into the location or
character!

9. The Character.
• One single gesture like a brushstroke can
delineate a character.
• A character in a story can be the whole story.
Can be from the outside or from the inside, or
both.
• You need not like your characters.

10. Narrative Voice
• The writer Stephen Hudson (Sydney Alfred
Schiff) wrote novels in first person (I) , second
person (you), third (he)person and even with a
super-ego (He, She & I). Try to write stories in
different persons.
• Be reliable or unreliable. There is no contract
between you and the reader.

11. Sense of an ending
• The story can continue offstage or into
another story.
• You can play with expectations. Sign post the
ending then either reward or disappoint. You
can end anywhere.

12. Humour
• A comic story is much more difficult to pull off
than tragedy.
• Do not try too hard. Like all the great comics
study the form of the great comic writers. Do
not steal from them.
• Just because your friends laugh, is not
enough. Study all kinds of humour.
• You are a sit down comic.

13. Tragedy
• Our existence is by definition tragic. Washing
the dishes can be tragic. Robert Carver
exploited that rich seam of the extraordinary
in the ordinary.

14. Sex
• Henry Miller and Anais Nin wrote
pornography for its ownsake and incidental
pornography like D.H. Lawrence. We live in the
post-Kinsey Report Era, everything has been
written about – mostly to shock. Describing in
detail nose picking and eating snot is more
shocking than describing fisting. So think of
style more that crudity.

15. The Plot
• Imagine a story is a fish. If you cut out the plot
it could still swim. It would still be a fish.
• If you have a plot in mind. Muck around with
it. It is not the number 42 bus. You are free to
go where you please