Screenwriter, and Creative Writing teacher of Morningside Writers, Kendall Williams, likens crafting stories and novels to setting about to make soup.
We discussed the two processes in our a today’s special segment of Book Talk, Creativity and Family Matters, Savory Writing: Character and Plot.
Two essential ingredients to a savory and aromatic story or novel are characters that jump off the page and who entice the reader to care about them, and a suspenseful and riveting plot.
Setting about to find, create or get to know them is for the fiction writer much like going the market to ascertain ingredients for making a pot of soup.
A screenwriter and actor, Kendall is gifted with the ability to craft dilemmas and create characters with warts and fault, crevices and cracks that provide open spaces in which for actions and responses to the situation’s dilemma to dwell and thus evidence and reflect the character’s personality but also propel it to evolve alongside the deepening of plot.
Part and parcel to a deepening of plot, there must be a revelation of character, the unearthing and exhuming of dimensions and aspects of character that we may suspect but as readers witness played out upon the page.
This is what we call drama.
For the cook making soup, the cast of correct ingredients that when brought together over the hot, orange eye of an electric or flame of a gas oven, creates a tasty soup with delicious aroma drawing family members from a bout the house, their tongues bearing the question, “What is that? Something smells good?”
Fiction writers seek to create stories and novels that so engross our readers that those around our readers can’t help but ask, “What is that you’re reading? It looks interesting?”
Hopefully our readers will stop momentarily and explain some part of our protagonist’s dilemma that we will have written it so well, displayed it upon the personalities and actions of our cast that the reader cannot but stop and tell.
But also return to our words upon the page that so holds them and feeds their longings and yearnings.
How do you make soup?
What is your process for writing a story or novel?
To learn more about the ingredients that go into a tasty soup click here Savory Writing: Character and Plot and listen.