Writing Skill: A Fond Farewell

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

Bookings close in just three days!

This week's Writing Skill is A FOND FAREWELL, to play with the final four topics of the course: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. It's also a delightful way of using epistolary fiction (stories told through documents) to make a short story, with a side-helping of exploring subtext, reveals, and voice.

Your character is writing a farewell letter – in which they are (rather badly) hiding that they're in love with the person they're writing to. Their badly-hidden love becomes increasingly clear to the reader, but they remain convinced that they're managing to hide it.

If you prefer writing to discover, you can just leap straight in and find out the rest through writing. Start "Dear H—," and just keep writing. If you get stuck at any point, then have a glance at the suggestions for planning below, to feed in further ideas.

If you prefer to plan a bit first, then take a few minutes to brainstorm / jot down notes around these three things:

• How they're leaving (eg ship, train, plane, etc: whatever appeals to you for vibe / time period)
• Why contact will be difficult once they're gone
• How they know each other (eg visited town, holiday, friend of a friend, roommate, working together on something, went through some hardship together, etc)

I suggest you start writing once you have those bits of info, and let more details emerge through the writing. Planning can be useful to give us enough of a springboard to start writing, but never plan so much that you don't get to make discoveries through the process of the writing itself. Discovering through writing is part of the joy, and what we come up with that way is often more organic. Don't worry if your letter seems to go "off topic": follow it and see where it goes.

If you need more ideas of what to write about, then you could include... 

• their supposed purpose in writing (eg to thank the person, clear something up, info they forgot to pass on when saying goodbye)
• reminiscences of particular moments, objects, etc that they treasured
• things they discussed together before leaving
  
• references to people they both know
  
• their current surroundings and the contrast of that with where they've left
  

Sometimes we can find a story's end through pure writing-to-discover; sometimes we need to step back a moment and do a bit more planning. So...

Towards the end: To make it a short story, you need some sort of pithy ending. Some possible endings you might consider are:

• a reveal (to the reader) that the other person loves them too, though the character writing the letter remains unaware (SO TRAGIC 😭)
• a postscript of how / when / where the letter is found, and by whom (that could be tragic, untragic, or anything in between)
• a factual detail that gives the reader foresight (eg if the ship they're catching is The Titanic) – that could be a date, a place, a specific transport with a famously disastrous end, etc (the delicious chill of prescience)

or anything else that occurs to you!

Why this skill?

This Skill is a lovely organic way to explore the final four elements of stories: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. A letter written by someone in love immediately gives you its theme, whichever approach you take to it, and the intense focus of love, how it latches onto and treasures the smallest objects, will spoil you for choice with symbols. That same focus also allows you to explore detail & dialogue, because every texture of every moment and every word of the beloved's means so much, when a character is smitten – and, of course, the letter itself means you're using the character's voice. Making it a short-story of a letter also lets you explore the possible endings. And through that ending, the letter itself can become a subplot of a larger context: of the person who finds the letter, or the factual detail that tells us the inevitable end.

These are the final four elements we explore in the Story Elements course: live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here.

Things I've learnt: endings and emotional honesty

Rope of Words is a limited fine-press edition of numbered, handbound books, the result of a collaboration between me and the artist, Lin Kerr. I wrote the story over a period of 5 years: this series of blog posts is about its writing process and the various illuminations that came from sailing straight into the rocks at every turn. At least I have the advantage of hindsight, to know the story did work out in the end - the artist who illustrated it, Lin Kerr, shared her process from the outset, with no such reassurance. You can see excerpts and images from the book here.

Words have a life of their own

The Woman who was a Bitch

'In broken words, she tried to explain how she’d been reduced to those increasingly desperate acronyms and abbreviations.
“You still let go,” he said, in the words of one syllable that were left to him.
They sat on the silent moonlit moor where nothing beside remained.
“So what will you do?” he said at last. “Will you go back?”
“Back to the golden valley?” She shook her head.  “It burnt down.” She thought about all the words she’d collected and their electric charge.  “I think I burnt it.”
His face, until then as hard as an exhibit behind glass, turned uncertain. “I don’t think it can burn down.”
“It did. I saw it. I was there. Well – some miles above it and accelerating fast, but I saw the trees catch fire. Lightning hit the tower. It was very striking.”
None of their truncated words were adequate to that task.  They lay down, a careful distance apart, to sleep.  She balanced the angels’ phial against the two unwanted words that stood between them.  And they slept.'

Writing prompt: 3 story seeds and endings

Three story ideas and three different types of endings: use these to map out a story idea, write the final scenes, or both. Working backwards from a type of ending can generate surprising new ideas.