What story should I tell?

I’ve always enjoyed creative writing in school…and whenever I get the chance (which isn’t often for an IT major), I like to write about the future, how things are different, how far technology has brought us…I’ve made a few variations that include the Earth with separate nations much like it is now, as well as Earth united searching for other worlds, people, or trying to find a new home from lack of resources and so on.

Usually in my creative writing, it will focus around a few different groups, government officials, as well as a couple average family type people too.

The great part about telling a story is you have complete control and can do whatever you want in this story. Make it your own.

I can write. I can imagine a future. Or a past. I can tell a story—if I have characters.

I have no idea who these people are. Not a clue. Nothing about how they look, or what they do. Help!

just try to think of favorite characters you’ve seen in a movie and make one like them. Use your imagination. Blonde hair, blue eyes, tall, with a moderate build, muscular build, thin and scrawny, emaciated, etc. You can really just start to make an entire group of friends up that may be what you have right now. Make yourself a character, and your best friends, your family…I’m sure you can describe them really well.

Many authors do use people in their lives as reference for their characters. It’s a valid approach, although it might be interesting/lead to discussions if that person reads your work and figures it out. Still, if you’re having a hard time making original characters, start by describing yourself and your family and your friends to get the ball rolling.

If you haven’t read any storywriting how-to books, it’s well worth doing. These books outline the three major kinds of conflict in stories (man vs nature, man vs man, man vs himself) and go into the basic archetypes that many stories follow. For instance, one of the more popular ones is: strong lead male protagonist that has flaws which he overcomes in the end, female side kick that starts hating the lead pro but ends up loving him, third character to add comedic relief or to kill off if need be, and some powerful antagonist that hates the lead protagonist for whatever reason. Personally, once I read such an archetype, I can start visualizing what the characters look like, how they might act, etc.

A third way is to go to a site that has pictures of people, such as this one, pick a picture and summarize that person’s life story based on what you see in them. This cuts the character creation in half, as you are only describing their story, their physical appearance has already been determined. For instance, let’s look at this guy. Why are his glasses like that? What does that say about his character or his life so far? Maybe he has one bad eye and one good eye, so he popped the lens out of the other one. Maybe his other eye doesn’t work at all. Maybe it got taken out by the protagonist in an event a long time ago (that guy looks a bit like an antagonist to me). Go a step further and change that guy into a full fledged antagonist: add some scars on his face, a deep voice, a supervillain outfit perhaps, and a scimitar he carries around from when he was in The Great War. OK, now my mind says he’s a retired general from an army who met the protagonist a long time ago and was wronged by him, causing the loss of his eye and the gaining of an arch rival. It’s taken all these years for the General to track down the protagonist, and now that he’s getting close, the General will never give up. Now I’ve discarded that source picture and am working with the version I’m developing in my mind.

I don’t know but pets are always good for comic relief!

I’ve always liked Westerns because the good guys and the bad guys are well defined and of course the good guys always win.

You (daloon) and I discussed recently the relationship between language and thinking, so I know this is something that interests you. Maybe there’s some potential there for a story.

I just read an article about the Piraha people of Brazil. They’ve become somewhat famous in linguistics circles because their language, which has no known relatives, appears to violate some widely accepted (Chomskian) principles regarding how the architecture of the human mind predetermines language. Only a couple of outsiders have ever managed to get even a rudimentary grasp of the language.

Among its peculiarities is that much of the syntax is carried by pitch and interval, so that its actual words can be dispensed with altogether. A conversation can be had by whistling or singing alone. They also have no vocabulary of number, and seemingly no capacity to even conceptualize quantities greater than three. Nor do they have any fixed names for colors, and speak of colors by making ad hoc comparisons.

But aside from these mechanical curiosities, there are more fundamentally exotic characteristics of their very way of thinking about the world. The first is a complete rootedness in empirical reality; if something is outside of the realm of immediate experience – temporally, spacially, or culturally removed – it’s of no concern to them. This manifests in their lack of art forms as a way of recording visual imagery, and in their lack of any institutional memory- no tribal history, no creation myth. If they can’t hear a first-hand, eyewitness account of an event , it has no reality for them. In their world and language, someone doesn’t just “go away”, they “go out of experience”.

But the feature that drives linguists nuts is the apparent lack of recursion in the Piraha language, the nesting of thoughts inside other thoughts to build more complex thoughts (they would be unable to say “I saw the dog that was down by the river get bitten by a snake”). This has been theorized to be a universal element of human language, but the Piraha didn’t get that memo. It seems to defy our concept of the hierarchical organization of the mind.

Not in the least related to story-telling, but Harp’s response ^^ is one of the most elegant and easily-understood little essays that I have seen recently.

I lurve Harp’s writing.

what is this story for? Or rather, who is it for? The easy way is to take a story you know and play with it a little, changing it but not quite. That’s how we end up with all these princesses in the fairy tales (and if you read Andersen you’d get confused about who is who).

For example I like the story of the evil pig and the three little wolves, or the one where a poor wolf is trying to eat a grandmother and the evil little grandchild in the red cape steals his lunch.

My daughter often asks those hard questions that children do when they’re 4 and I usually make up some story to answer. For example, how did the prince become a frog in the first place in “The Princess and the Frog”? I said the witch who had cursed him had done so because he was selfish, and used that as a moral to make her share her toys with her friends.

All this assuming you’re talking about a children’s story, but of course it could apply to grown-up fiction too :)

The Piraha would make an excellent central group in a story! How they react to changing circumstances, a broader view of the world as a whole…endless possibilities, there.

Or, you could just write about Ben and Andrew. They’re pretty fascinating fellows, too.

Milo here: If we’re going to get personal, what about me?

How about a futuristic story where the Piraha end up taking over the world because the stress that everyone else is under eventually drives them all to distraction. I bet that none of the Piraha suffer from depression. The very idea of it is probably inconceivable to them.

Harp, that was very interesting. I wondered, since so few outsiders had even a grasp of their language, how were they able to figure out everything you wrote?

And more importantly, if they can’t conceptualize quantities greater than three, would they not appreciate lurve? Maybe great questions, but not great answers? :)

Story ideas are always around you. That old man in the mall who is sitting on the bench may be a secret agent in disguise. That mother trying to rein in her temperamental two-year-old could have a hidden secret that would shock most people.

But story ideas don’t always have to come from people. You could take today’s current economic news and turn it into a plot by terrorists to undermine the infrastructure of the entire world. Maybe a bird could spark your interest and turn into a fantasy world where animals are human and humans are animals.

Even the sky is not the limit.

I’m afraid it will easily fall into memoire, and I can’t be public about myself. On the other hand, when telling the kids stories, I am constantly making up these characters (although they are always grossly exagerated).

@TL
The first Western insights into the peculiarities of the language came from successive teams of missionaries sent to live with the Piraha over the past 5 decades. The first couple said that it took a couple of years to even acquire the beginnings of a grammar. They eventually managed a crude translation of a Bible story, the “Prodigal Son”.

After 6 1/2 years, they were replaced by another couple. The husband was a trained linguist, who began to communicate his odd findings back to American linguists. His consultants insisted that he must simply have been overlooking key elements of the language and urged him to dig deeper. After 10 years with the Piraha, he was overcome by anxiety at his slow progress, and ceded his post to a new couple.

This next pair, the Everetts, are really the source of almost all we know about Piraha. Dan Everett is considered something of a linguistics prodigy. According to one acquaintance, after about twenty minutes of listening to an unknown language he can outline its basic structure and how its grammar works. They have been working with the Piraha for over thirty years now, and are the only Westerners to have acquired anything approaching proficiency in the language (she still lives with them, I think, and he’s also teaching linguistics at Northern Illinois University).

Through Everett’s connections with the linguistics establishment, several linguistics gurus have trekked to the tribe to study specific aspects of the language, using Everett as interpreter. Some used simple tests to understand their numerical concepts, such as putting nuts under a can, removing them one by one and asking if there were any left in the can (they could manage this with up to 3 nuts). Others used software-based tests that are employed universally to measure and rank linguistic traits. These are tests that can even be administered to apes. The tests use simple syllables to attempt to teach the subject increasingly complex forms of grammar, the most basic of which are extremely intuitive (unless, apparently, you’re Piraha), Only one Piraha subject, a 16 year-old girl, was able to grasp “phrase-structure” grammar, considered to be a minimum threshold for human language.

All researchers insist that these anomalies aren’t indicative of a general lack of intelligence. There’s plenty of evidence of their ability to solve problems and perform complex tasks.

Just as an aside, I was amused by the following anecdote: Keren Everett, after many years, finally managed to translate the New Testament into Piraha. This accomplishment was met with zero interest on the part of the Piraha, which would be in keeping with their general disinterest in the historical and non-empirical. They responded to the accounts of Jesus by persistently asking “But have you seen this?”. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Dan Everett is now an avowed atheist.

@Harp, that is absolutely fascinating! Thanks for sharing! Daloon, any stories in there?

Did you ever get a story to tell? Will you share it with us?

Ok. Tell a story about me and how TOTALLY awesome I am. Everyone will love it lol. No, I’m not really that concided, don’t worry.

I don’t think we’ve helped daloon all that much but I’ve sure learnt a lot about the Piraha through this thread (I’d never even heard of them before). Fascinating stuff! :)

Yes, you’ve helped. I’m not sure yet, but these ideas are helpful. CathyBryant’s idea lead to my rain question.

Harp’s idea is pretty cool. It will take a lot of research to carry it off. Although, I could use my experience with dance to convert it a bit.

Tell the one about when we fought that squid and you got tangled in the rigging. It’s my favorite!

@Foolaholic: I think that’s been told pretty well, already. Please don’t call me Ishmael. I’ll call you.

Urban myths are much fun. When I was in high school there was some author who came in and told us a story about an evil grandma but he told in such a way that the whole class went into a bored trance and just when we were lulled into a false sense of security he shouted the final words of the story making everyone jump. Still amuses me to tell people the same story to this day. Great for the campfire :)