Reflect and respond
1. creating a poem
look around you. notice something you’ve never noticed before. how does noticing this thing make you feel? for instance, suppose you noticed the silver underside of the leaves blowing in the wind outside your window. perhaps the leaves inspire you with their beauty: they make you feel more aware of the joy of being alive. on the other hand, the leaves may depress you because you realize that the beauty is going to exist only briefly. the leaves will fall when the weather turns cold, and this makes you all the more aware of being mortal.
write a few lines of poetry describing the thing you’ve noticed. make sure to use vivid nouns and verbs. try to make the reader see, hear, smell, taste, and touch what you experience. in this way, try to make the reader feel what you feel without explaining what you feel. for instance, if you use the leaf example, you may want to make the reader feel joy at being alive, without using those words.
2. developing characters for a short story
why do most people read fiction? to find out what happens next to the characters in question. so if you wish to try your hand at fiction of any genre, keep these two goals foremost in mind:
create interesting characters so readers will want to know more about them.
give one or several of your interesting characters some sort of problem or obstacle to overcome. the problem or obstacle may be internal (from inside themselves) or external (from outside themselves), or both.
for instance, here’s an interesting character: a man who’s so brave and good at everything that he’s almost perfect, except for one thing: he has a paralyzing fear of spiders. that’s an internal problem, and one that makes the reader like him because who likes a perfect but the fear of spiders becomes an external problem one day when the character gets home from work to find that his house has been invaded by—you guessed it—spiders. black widows, in fact. he’ll have to overcome both his fear and the spiders themselves in the course of the story, and the plot will focus on his internal and external struggles. remember that fiction is frequently about struggles, and you’ll be able to plot successfully.
plot a short story in which an interesting character has to overcome a conflict within himself or herself so that the character can overcome a problem outside of himself or herself. in one or two sentences, describe the character. in several more sentences, describe the main events of the story.