(Last of 3 Parts)

One subject that I miss teaching is Creative Writing. As an English and literature teacher, I consider it an ultimate challenge to teach the subject. It is quite challenging to lead a study of the different forms of discourse to develop the student’s ability to write narrative, descriptive, expository, and argumentative compositions. What adds to the challenge is making the students understand the principles of stylistics, literary criticism, and linguistic and literary devices. As course requirements, I required them to submit a movie review, a short story analysis, two essays, and a short story.

When I created the syllabus for the course, I intentionally did not include poetry. It wasn’t just possible for me to cover both prose and poetry in one semester. It would be difficult for them had I included a poem among those they should submit at the end of the term.

My students had struggles with writing stories. It was easier for them to produce essays. They just toyed with the movie review and short story analysis. Yes, it was easy for them to deconstruct a story and break it into its different parts –  the so-called elements of fiction. But most of them had difficulty putting those component parts to construct their own stories.

I told them that I had the same struggles when I began writing. My first stories then were terrible (I hope they are better now.) Writing a story is a skill that would require time to develop. I explained to them that the most famous and talented writers had to hone their craft over a period of many years. I didn’t have statistical data to support that statement, but it was (and still is) safe to assume that the literary greats had “burned oil in many midnights” before they attained their greatness.

I did not mention Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, for it might instantly extinguish any flickering hope of any of them to become a writer. Perhaps some of them may have bumped into that idea later on. If, during those times, I had already known about Kaufman’s 20 hour-rule, I would not be mentioning it either, for I don’t like to give them false hope that it would take that so short a time to become good at writing stories.

To become good at writing stories, you have to attain a certain degree of fluency or proficiency in the language you are using to write your stories. If saying that your sentences should be syntactically correct is a mouthful, then let me just say that they (your sentences) should be correct and comprehensible.

You already have an advantage if the language you intend to use to write your stories is your native language. You very well know how important vocabulary is in writing. Consider this: Native-level fluency (this is from Wikipedia) is estimated to require a lexicon between 20,000 to 40,000 words.

But it doesn’t mean that being a native speaker of that language automatically makes one a good writer. If so, we could have had lots of Shakespeares, Hemmingways,  Tolstoys, Hugos, Tagores, Xuns, and Rizals.   Many native speakers of their own languages could not write a simple story or a poem.

Proficiency in a language is only one of the many skills you have to develop. There are other skills necessary to write well, including choosing the right words to develop related ideas, organizing those ideas into a cohesive whole, and creatively combining and contrasting those ideas. And as I reiterated in part 1 of this 3-part series… “Writing stories require that you should be able to knit together the elements of fiction within the frame of the plot, to make sure that the most important element of fiction – conflict – is laid down clearly and passes through exposition, complication, crisis, falling action, and resolution.” 

In short, writing stories is an art, and I doubt anybody could learn it in just 20 hours. Just developing proficiency in a language, if you are not a native speaker of that language, is not achievable in 20 hours.  However, you might think spending 10,000 hours to develop a specific skill would probably be too much – unless you want to acquire true expertise in a specific field. If you do it for 5 days a week, because you might need a 2-day break, that’s 4 hours a day in nine years. 

You probably would like to start developing your writing skills for at least one hour each day. That’s what I have been doing. It works for me.

Before writing the short story, I would require my students to submit a 10-sentence storyline of the story they plan to write. One time, when I was giving them examples of storylines off the top of my head, one of them asked me where am I getting ideas for my stories.

Before answering that question, I asked them to, again, define literature. Then one of them gave exactly the definition upon which I intended to anchor my answer to the question one of them asked  – “Literature is a faithful reproduction of life executed in an artistic pattern.”

I explained that what we read in stories mirrors the things happening in real life. Writers draw ideas for their stories from the experiences of people around them and from theirs as well. That’s how I do it.

“Literature,” I added, “is an artistic expression of significant human experiences.” (I can’t recall anymore who said that.) That’s why when we read stories or watch movies, we feel like it’s our personal story being told.

I told my students I rarely borrow someone’s experience to write a story because my life is a fountain of many storylines.

As I wrote the last part of this article, I could hear Fortunato saying, “For the love of God, Montressor.” Fortunato hoped those words would stop his friend from slowly walling up the niche where he was being buried alive.

Part 1

Part 2