Two existing short stories were analysed at length to see how the author had used few words and dialogue to describe the characters and what the reader was meant to interpret from it.
All the participants took part in an exercise to first build the nucleus of a story by initially creating and describing two contrasting characters; then to provide them both with dialogue for a first encounter and finally to set out a thumbnail list of a plot.
We worked through a checklist to see we had all the essential elements of our story.
Ann explained that was necessarily a natural or the only way of creating a story and led to the age old question of “where do ideas for stories come from?
Ann’s preferred element is Poetry and she suggested ways that a piece of poetry could be reconstructed and made into a short story.
It was an interesting, hardworking and seemingly short two hours.
More about Ann MacKinnonat http://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/nae-flooers-by-ann-mackinnon/