Let George Orwell fire up your characters, inspire your scenes, create conflict.
I was looking for inspiration as to how to get my students to plunge a reader into a story through a character, and I remembered Winston Smith. Perhaps he’s not as famous as, say, Peter Parker. But he’s embroiled in quite a web, don’t you agree?
It’s been years since I’ve read (and reread) Nineteen Eighty Four, but there’s an impression of Winston I still remember. He’s shifty and nervous, has a slight limp, and even his eyes and skin are described by Orwell to set his main character in a bleak environment that becomes worse as dystopias go. His skin, I remember, is course. I went back to the book and found how Orwell describes it as being the result of rough soap and blunt razor blades. Just that tiny detail of ablutions helps define what he has been through.
What a way to build character!
Short story writing is particularly challenging. The sequence of events must begin quickly and end at some point soon, within about two thousand words.
So why am I using a novel to inspire short stories? Orwell’s novel is choc-a-bloc with vignettes that make a story more than a series of events. I’ll stay with just three.
Flashbacks. They include flashback sequences that reveal insight into (a) how a character got to be…
