Paragraph After Paragraph: How to Keep Your Stories Fresh

Each paragraph is a small piece of art for the writer. Julia Cameron taught writers that, in order to write, we must allow the page to dictate to us. There is nothing quite like experiencing a paragraph coming into shape on its own. Still, we can follow a few strategies to keep our stories fresh, developing a lead for each paragraph, and not jumping around too much.

To make a story fresh we need the human perspective. If the article is a journalism piece about a singer, the writer has it easy. All they need is a few simple details (he drinks coffee this way before he touches the guitar) and a way of telling a life story in short. The fiction writer is in a different boat when it comes to paragraph organization. That sounds boring, but we can improve upon each paragraph by developing it as its own small story. All writing is about telling the small stories. Peter David wrote in "Writing For Comics With Peter David" that small stories will encapsulate just about anything. The journalist can tell the small story easily by going out into the world and discovering the jazz musician, the guitar player, or the politician. But, when writing fiction, the author can work in hundreds of these small story fragments. The freshness can come from introducing new characters-like a love-or telling of the setting in which the characters are in.

Developing a lead sounds like non-fiction, but it can be used with fiction too. We need something to grab the reader. There are countless possibilities. We could write "This is how I became insane" and would probably spark some interest in the reader. Or we could write "this is the tale of how I died." These are leads, just in fiction. The non-fiction writer often toes the line of boring the writer's readers. A good lead that starts the article, and followed by a lead sentence for each paragraph, could make the difference between something that sells and something that doesn't.

Writers often have hundreds of ideas floating around in their heads. To work, we need to find the right ideas in order to engage the reader. We also have to stay focused on the piece. If we are talking about killing a monster in one section, and then introduce a new character, the storytelling elements will be gone. A simple transition could work here if the story is to succeed.

Writers should approach each paragraph with a desire to entertain. If we follow some of these guidelines, along with a few of our own, the stories will not only write themselves, but be read.