Creative Writing Exercises For Dummies

Chapter 22

Expanding Your Ideas into Larger Narratives

In This Chapter

Building up a work with characters

Expanding your ideas via plot

Have you ever had the feeling that what you’re doing is not working out the way it should? For example, the cake you are baking fails to rise so you put fruit on top and turn it into a weird kind of flan, or a utility room turns into a second sitting room because you knock down the wrong wall!

You may encounter a similar issue in your writing. Perhaps you start out with an idea for a novel, but realise that it’s not going to be long enough or complex enough to satisfy readers, though it’s far too long to be a short story. But never fear, because, as I describe in this chapter, you have plenty of effective options for complicating and expanding the basic premise of your story into a longer and more widely satisfying narrative.

One approach is to work with your characters, adding new ones, developing others into bigger roles and complicating their lives. You can do this in the present by involving them in additional plot lines, or you can add information from the past.

Alternatively, you can expand ideas from the point of view of the plot or narrative, bringing in new themes to enrich the fiction or connecting different threads of the story to make ...