Exercise 2.2: Short Story
In this exercise, you will create a short story based on the outline you have developed in Exercise 1. This short story will help you to further elaborate on and set up a direction for your final project on this course. This will also serve as a source of inspiration and a guide for future projects.
Guidelines
Based on the outline you have created in Exercise 1, write a 1-page short story telling your characters "journey". Remember, a journey is series of situations, beginning, middle, and end, that generally depict growth or change to the main character. Keep your story simple and direct.
Steps to Completion
An easy way to start is to write your beginning sentence following Pixar's storytelling tip #4:
- Once upon a time there was ----.
- Every day, ----.
- One day ----.
- Because of that, ----.
- Because of that, ----.
- Until finally ----.
Expand on this initial idea and write your story so it is clearly organized in three acts:
- Beginning (Setting up the stage): Introduce your characters, their initial situation and their goals.
- Middle (Crisis): Describe how the situation changes and which obstacles appear, setting up a moment of crisis that shifts the current situation and requires an action from your main character to be solved.
- End (Climax): Describe how your character overcomes the obstacles presented. The character(s), now changed by their journey, achieve their goals, sometimes at a price.
It is important that you structure your story in this three distinct moments (beginning, middle, end) so you can more easily apply it into your next exercise (in Lesson 3).
Expand and rewrite, one more time. By rewriting your story you will get a chance to deepen your understanding of your own characters and their objectives, and refine your story to be more clear and relatable.
Post your final story as a PDF file to the course page following this naming convention:
art204_exercise2-2_lastname_firstname.pdf