How do I put together a story?

I rarely draft outlines before I begin writing. What usually happens is I pick an idea (I always have a storm of them in my thoughts) for characters, setting, and something Stephen King calls the 'what if?'

My characters are an amalgam of various people I know or have met. As people I've known for many years, both in reality and through use of them in my stories, they become characterized with the idiosyncracies I know them to have. I find this very useful to invent characters that have a solid and believable identity. It also makes it very easy to write interactions of characters because, at one level I'm 'inventing' this but on another, I simple ask myself, 'What would (real person A) say in this situation?' or 'How would (real person B) react?' In other words, I find it a good way to animate my characters.

Settings are often also based on real life locations, or amalgams of various places. As with character animation, settings can be made more vivid when I add in memories of little details I might have noticed in the real world source. Often, as in real life, it isn't the big things that catch our attention but rather, small and seemingly insignificant details will pop out of the landscape. In other cases it might be something that is slightly incongruous to the setting -- an old-fashioned hat stand in an otherwise ultra-modern office, for example. It opens the gates to questions like 'Why is that here?' and 'What type of person wears a hat to work these days?' (refers back to characterization).

And lastly, the 'What if...?' factor. (Paraphrasing from memory) Stephen King describes it this way:

You take something you see every day that is so familiar to you that you never notice it. For example, one of those mechanical space ship rides you see in shopping malls everywhere. What if a five year old got into one of those and it really took him into space?

This approach isn't really any different to that used by researchers, except they refer to it as their problem statement or hypothesis.

So anyway, I wasn't sure whether this is Assignment 1 here, but there you have it -- how do I put together a story.

anonymouse