There are a lot of science-based ideas expressed in everyday speech. This activity challenges you to identify some of those expressions, think about what they mean, research them to find out the science behind them, and then write about some characters experiencing those phenomena or expressing the emotions they describe. You might literally put a character in a situation governed by a scientific effect, or you might use the science as a metaphor for the person’s behavior. We often speak of people “having chemistry.” When you get to the stage in life where you start falling in love you may tell your best friend about this new love in your life that “I felt this chemistry!” They mean, they felt a strong reaction to the person, like bubbling chemicals in a test tube. People say of some couples that they are “so different,” but “opposites attract.” This is a reference to magnets. The plus and minus sides of the magnet are tightly drawn together, whereas you cannot get either plus/plus or minus/minus combinations to attach however hard you try. They “repell” one another. People will say of someone who shows big emotions that they “erupted like a volcano.” When an audience is sitting waiting for a speaker who they really want to hear they might say, “there was electricity in the room,” or “the atmosphere was electric”. This is the idea that the room feels full of pent up electrical energy—like everyone’s hair is standing up on end, or the pressure is high, as if there is about to be an electrical storm with all the drama of thunder and lightning. I want you to think of other expressions, like, “they don’t mix, they are like oil and water” and then do some research into the science behind the expression. Why don’t oil and water mix? What is really happening in a volcano? How do storms work, and what stages do they go through? Choose your science-based expression, gain a clearer idea about what the science is through some research, and then use these details to inform how you set your scene and portray the motivations behind your characters’ actions. As an example, under a volcano (which might look like a big silent hunk of rock most of the time) there is a molten pool of magma. You might think of this as a pool of tumultuous emotions. You will learn that before an eruption there is usually an increase in earthquakes in the surrounding area as the ground starts to shift. We usually can’t feel these shifts, but they are important to the science of volcanos, and helpful to a writer using volcanic activity as a metaphor. What is the role of the these earthquakes, what do they mean, and how might you show characters or a situation that is about to erupt like a volcano experiencing or displaying these more or less silent signs? To see an example of writing informed by well-researched knowledge of woodland animals and weather, read “Autumn Thunder”; or another, “The Highest Football,” that uses the idea “opposites attract” as a springboard for the rest of the story.
teaching writing
Writing Activity: Using the power of “show, don’t tell”
Writers often hear the advice: “show, don’t tell.” But what does it mean? Read and study a story from the Stone Soup archives to see the power of this technique, and then try it for yourself. Activity Eleven-year-old Ari Rubin’s story, “Lindy,” was first published in Stone Soup magazine in 1993, and it has been included in all the editions of our anthology, the Stone Soup Book of Friendship Stories, since then. To prepare for this activity, read “Lindy.” Consider the way that the story unfolds. You’ll notice that the whole story is “told” to us by a strong narrator’s voice. But he doesn’t explicitly tell us the real story underneath the story. He shows us the various events as they happened to him, so that—like him—we don’t understand Lindy’s bigger story until the very end. Then, we notice all the hints dropped along the way. We see the journey the narrator has been on, and how he got to where he is now in terms of his feelings about Lindy. This approach makes you want to read the story again. And then you see that the clues were there all along, cleverly laced in to the narrative. In “Lindy” the author brilliantly controls what he shows us, what he tells us, how, and when. This mastery of the content makes a complex emotional tale come across in an authentic voice that sounds simple and matter-of-fact. The author demonstrates how much more powerful it can be to reveal things to the reader through action and dialogue, instead of listing and explaining all the underlying thoughts and feelings in the order they happen. Read “Lindy” again with a pencil in your hand, and mark the points in the story where something happens, or a clue is dropped, that you only recognised as a clue when you read the story the second time. Now, take a look at one of your story ideas; one that you have developed enough that you know everything about your characters, where they are going in the story, and what happens in the end. Think about when you want the reader to know all those things. Think about how you might structure your story and what clues you might be able to give along the way, and where you might drop those hints. Try to identify the crucial events or moments in the story that relate to the ending, and think about what might your characters do or say or observe at those points, without the words that literally tell us ever coming out of their mouths. How can you give your readers just enough information to mean that the truth revealed right at the end has been signposted, but never explicitly given away, in the course of the story?
Writing Activity: working with dialogue
The most remarkable part of Lena’s story as a demonstration of the power of dialogue is the last quarter, where four characters respond to a traumatic event. This section, beginning with the “No!” spoken by the narrator and continuing to the end, depends heavily on dialogue. It could almost be a play. Notice that, although the lines spoken by Sandy, Carrie, Mom, the narrator, and Mrs. Hall are often very short, we get a clear sense of how each character differs from the others and how they relate to each other as family, friends, and neighbors. This is accomplished through the narrative that accompanies the dialogue.
