Week 1 Overview: Plot

In Week 1 of the Writing Foundations course, we introduced the structure of the course and began exploring the first key foundation of creative writing: plot.

 

Free Writing Exercise

In the first session, we watched the video “Freewriting 101: How to Free Write” and then practice free writing in class. Free writing is a useful technique in creative writing because it helps writers generate ideas, explore characters, and overcome writer’s block by writing continuously without worrying about editing or perfection.

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You can read more about Free Writing and see some examples on the Free Writing page of the David Writing Tutor website.

 

Understanding Story Structure

We also watched the video “Kurt Vonnegut on How to Write a Short Story.” After watching, students discussed the ideas in pairs and then as a whole group, exploring what makes a story engaging and how narrative structure works.

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Plotting a Story Using the 5Ws and 1H

The class then explored a simple technique for plot development using the 5 Ws and 1H. These are the questions: who, what, where, when, why and how. We watched this video together "How to Write: Use The 5Ws & 1H" and then discussed it.

 

Using this framework, students began to outline the plot of their story. We also added three additional storytelling questions to help develop ideas further:

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• What if? – introducing a key story idea or conflict

• What is the worst thing that could happen? – raising the stakes in the story

• How might the story end? – thinking about possible endings

 

I shared an example story outline of a new story I worked on during the eight weeks of the class. This was  to demonstrate how this method can be used to plan a short story.

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This prepared everyone for week two – characters.