How to write creative compositions and stories

  

Date Posted: 11/16/2018 7:16:26 AM

Posted By: SilviaMbugua  Membership Level: Silver  Total Points: 327

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I want you to come with me on a journey to the unknown. Drop all preconceived notions and a slight bit of your sanity just for a little while. I want you not to see the light at the end of the tunnel and not to sing along to the lyrics of my song because it has no bridge or chorus. We will veer off into the valley between light and dark, hot and cold, crazy and sane and hence forth our minds will embrace their true dualistic nature.

What I’m I trying to preach here? It’s the concept of chaos and duality in the creative process. The opposite of chaos is order and order is what we prefer and are taught to prefer for most of our lives. Order manifests itself as that teacher telling you to plan what you want to write about before you begin writing and dribble some rough notes somewhere on the back of your paper to help guide the structure and content of your composition. While that strategy works perfectly well for expository compositions where the writer explains a topic in a factual manner it is not the correct recipe for a brilliant story. This might be why teachers find that students wrote similar stories.

I want you to ditch those preliminary rituals you have been taught, they are not helpful. Afterward, I want you to embrace chaos. Chaos is random, it exists without constraints. It knows no rules and it knows no right or wrong, good or evil, light or dark, possible or impossible. It does not get dragged down by consequences. It just exists in its purest raw form, unperturbed.
I want you to sit down and let your mind imagine a chaotic story. The story has no beginning or end, plot or theme.

Its characters are just random participants in your chaotic world. Their actions too are just as random. Their surrounding atmospheres and moods too have no connecting constant. This participant weeps while the other cries and the other just stares…keep these as random as possible. There is nothing of importance happening and these are all your puppets. They are unaware of the world beyond that which you created for them. If they get hit by a bus and you dictate they will not get injured, it will be so.

Now it’s time to implement some duality to your chaotic universe. What do I mean by duality? Your brain exists in a dual state for that which can only have two fundamental categories, for example light or dark, pain or pleasure, good or evil and sane or insane. Now enter your random universe and make the characters carry out actions that fall on opposite spectra. I’ll show an example of what I have highlighted so far.

“The dog sits on the couch and floats like a bubble. The woman holds a riffle. The dish is broken and the pieces turn to ash. ‘Welcome to hell,’ the pastor preaches. I stand in front of a mirror and see a goat, with golden teeth.”
As you can see those sentences are random and make little sense. They don’t even constitute a paragraph because they don’t narrate a similar idea. Now it is time to implement some duality.
“The dog sits on the couch the annoyed child flings it into the air and it floats like a bubble. The woman holds a riffle and points it at the bear bottle. The dish is broken and the pieces turn to white and black ash. ‘Welcome to hell,’ the pastor preaches, the market goers stare. I stand in front of a mirror and see a goat, with golden teeth, it smiles as I break the mirror.”

Here the dog is “harmless” and the child is “harmful”, the woman is “the aggressor” and the bear bottle is the “victim”, the ash is white/black, the pastor is “insane” and the market goers “sane”, the mirror is “light” and the person that breaks it is “dark”. The duality does not have to always be literal like in the case of the mirror and the mirror breaker the duality of light or dark can be used as metaphors for the characters actions. Dark is a metaphor for how the mirror breaker hallucinates and hates their reflection, and light metaphor for how the mirror tries to cheer him/her with a smile.

Now one of those random scenes is going to be the start of your composition and you will curve your narrations so some of the things that cannot happen in the natural world make sense. From chaos, we are now starting to bring order to the unknown. We will try to make sense of these unfathomable scenes and will mold them into a story that fits the composition in question. Chaos gave you a ground to toy around with perturbing, out of context yet intriguing scenarios. It allowed you to come from a place of zero context to creating something, even if random. Dualism allowed you to give some context to your random universe and begin delving into a storyline.

We are not done yet, the best story is that which will engage the dualistic mind of their reader because they simply are unable to distinguish and categorize dual its concepts. What do I mean? You are simply walking on a valley between two mountains. You have blurred the lines of good or evil, light or dark, harmful or harmless so much that the reader just can’t categorize them. That is the main source of conflict in your story, rather than the classic and worn out tale of one or a group of characters possessing only one of the dual traits while the others possess its opposite. Hence, after you have made your random and chaotic world dual, proceed to scatter blur those lines as the story unfolds. This adds suspense and unpredictability to your work.

If you are fully engaged with your creative mind you’ll start to see patterns in your initial random thoughts and you may end up including them all in your narrative. Joining those dots is a thrilling experience and you’ll find the words just flowing as you write on to connect your bizarre ideas. It is really simple, check this out:

“The dog sits on the couch the annoyed child flings it into the air and it floats like a fragile bubble about to pop. It lets out a bark but does not deter the drunken woman who holds a riffle and points it at the bear bottle. She misses her shot and the dish is broken and the pieces turn to white and black ash. ‘Welcome to hell,’ the pastor preaches, the market goers stare, gossiping amongst them about the strange family. I stand in front of a mirror and see a goat, with golden teeth, it smiles as I break the mirror. ”

Although not perfectly done (I’m not writing an entire composition here) you can see how those sentences can be used to tell the story of a broken family. I like how it begins from a vague context but as you read on you can see its all connected. You can play around with duality of the situation and question the reader’s dualistic perception of the characters. For example, the mother might be a drunk because the husband is insane, the isolation by the gossiping market goers doesn't help either, but then again would any person want to associate with such a family? The child is aggressive to an innocent pet perhaps having observed the behavior from his parents and the dog’s innocence maybe debatable as it might have bit him in the past. The pastor or if you figured it out, the husband, might be insane but what he says may hold a fundamental truth because perhaps their world is a woeful place to live in.
In summary, if you want to be a creative composition writer, explore the limitless world of your imagination and proceed to make sense of it while adding the conflicting perceptions of your characters into the mix. Order and creativity appear to be on differing ends and hence your ideas must start from a place of chaos before you organize them into a piece of comprehensible writing.

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