In a post on Writer Unboxed, Kathryn Craft offers advice on incorporating real-life anecdotes into your fiction. “More often a writer finds herself in a situation that falls short of life-changing story, yet which still offers up dramatic or entertaining material,” she says. The catch, naturally, is you still have to find a story to hang the anecdote upon.
“Some writers, while intuiting correctly that a novel is episodic in nature, will mistakenly let a string of anecdotes stand in for scenes,” Craft says. To avoid this, don’t ask what happens next. Instead, ask what your protagonist will do next. “A novel’s structure is not driven by ‘things that happen to’ a character, but by choices that character makes in response to the ‘one big thing that happened to her’ near the beginning of the story, inspiring her to set a story goal she will act upon,” Craft writes. “Each scene of that novel will gain emotional import by giving the reader access to the ways the protagonist’s journey will forever change her.”
While you might try to tell a story using fragmented anecdotes on purpose, that approach requires heavy skill. You still need a story structure to bring your reader along with your theme. “An anecdote masquerading as a story would have us believe that what matters most is what the protagonist learns,” Craft says. “But in story, it’s much more about what a character must face in order to become. That arc of change, absent in an anecdote, is a story’s organizing principle.”
