Short Story Gold Rush: Write your Way to the Treasure
Ruby gives us an exclusive look into material from her upcoming course, Short Story Gold Rush which starts online on March 1st 2022. You can find out more and book a place here.
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When we’re trying out characters and playing with potential story events, we might start worrying about whether what we’re doing is original in any way. How do we know the reader won’t have seen it all before?
My quick answer is: be wary of thinking about “theme” too much at this stage. Start small and focus on the concrete details.
If we zoom right out to the “big idea” level, the overarching themes of our work are always going to be familiar. Grief, memory, betrayal, class conflict, the extraordinary lengths we might go to for love, etc etc – there probably isn’t a theme that hasn’t been explored in literature. Readers have seen a lot. But they won’t have seen your particular execution of a theme.
The key is to be authentic to our own “particularity of storytelling” – our story material, our sentences, our details.
To do this, we’ll have to be willing to write “up” from the little details on the ground, rather than “down” from big ideas floating in the sky. It takes a bit of courage to trust that those small details are going to be enough to create our big story, but it really is the key to creating something original.
A story starts with a tiny seed and goes through several stages of development, growing in complexity all the time. This means that as we work up from small to complex, we make hundreds of creative choices, and more and more opportunities to be original. If we try to start at the other end, with something too big on a pre-conceived theme, we don’t get those opportunities to be more and more original; you’re more likely to end up reaching for something ready-made or clichéd.
If you really develop an idea through its granular detail, you can be confident that no-one else’s mind will have followed quite the same path yours has.
It’s fine if we know what our story’s “about” already, but if we keep our heads in the “big idea space”, it can be hard to move the story forward. You can’t move forward if you’re running with your feet off the ground. To make progress, I need to hold my themes lightly to one side, and focus on the detail instead.
In summary: Originality comes from detail, not theme, and both originality and forward progress can be boosted by writing from the small to the big, not the other way round.
Short Story Gold Rush with Ruby Cowling starts online on March 1st 2022. You can find out more and book a place here.
