Lamott

This reading tells the story of how to write a story. Giving helpful tips and hits on how to easily write, or improve, your fiction writings. Starting off with how you first start your story or writing. Sometimes you need to let a story come to you, in a matter of pieces. Starting with one piece of the puzzle to help you start the idea and then slowly adding more and more to make the full story. Lamott describes it as a Polaroid. While developing, you can't tell what it is exactly, but once fully developed you see everything, even things you may have missed in the beginning when taking the picture. Lamott talks about going to the special Olympics and seeing the girl who had her crutches and slowly, but surely, finished the race she started. How he waited so patiently for her to finish even though he was starving. Then when going to find food, he ran into the cool guy. Who was obviously special, and showed him a picture of him and his two friends. Then later seeing that that cool guy was the star of the basket ball game. This cool guy was the start of Lamott starting his writing. Then the girl with the crutches was what followed. He used them as pieces in the puzzle of writing an article on the special Olympics.
Next was talked about characters. How to develop a character in a story. How to really focus on how a character feels, thinks, talks, walks, eats, writes, understands. To make a character up and give them a full personality is hard. And of course they are all going to hold a part of you in their personality. Some will get your good, and some will get your bad. Lamott gives you great ideas on how to pick what your character will be. Who they will be. What kind of person they are. Also, how a narrator is a key role in any story. If you have a good narrator who can connect with the reader and the reader feels they have a connection with them, then the reader is going to enjoy your book. Lamott said they could watch their favorite narrators wash dishes and still enjoy it. Because they connect and enjoy their work. Having a likable narrator is key. I thought of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' when I read this. Scout is the narrator of the whole book, and shes is a small child. She has a whole different perspective on life than most of the other characters in the book. Like when they go to court, Scout gives her intake on what is going on, and because she is young, she doesn't have as good of an idea of what is going on compared to an adult. But I still love this book. I just love the way she tells the story, and how innocent but very smart she is. I feel like I really connect with her whenever I read the story, and I think she as narrator is what makes the books so wonderful.
Plot was talked about next, and there isnt much to do with plot. Pretty much just dont focus on it. focus on characters and let the plot go from there. The characters are what matters. If you base your story on plot, your characters will not be as developed as you want them to be. But Lamott tells you how to write your plot once you have the characters down, and how to help the characters help develop your plot even more.
Dialogue was next, and how important it is to a story. If your story doesnt have good dialogue and flow well, then the reader isnt going to enjoy it no matter how good of a plot or characters it has. It has to flow smooth and just role of the readers tongue. Thinking about this remindes me of 'The Hunger Games.'. don't get me wrong, I love the books, but there were some parts of them that seemed to be very plain and just really boring. I found myself day dreaming while reading a page. I was really into the book and where it was going, but then suddenly I could care less about the exact details on something that did not matter. Writing a story should have you try and keep the reader entertained, and happy. when writing dialogue, you want it to flow nicely and easy to follow along.