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Composition Guidelines II

Now that I have put my point across, we ask: how to plan? Strict planning formulas are almost as bad as no plan. Indeed, there is no instant formula. No great author ever came up with an original work by filling in some table.

Just guide yourself with the following basic questions: Who, When, Where, Why, How and What. This is not meant to be a magic formula. The reason why I suggest these is because they are the most basic questions I could think of. The order in which you answer them is also not important except What is always answered last, and I will explain why later.

Who are the characters in your story? You? A 3rd party? Your friends / classmates / family / relatives? John? Who?

Pick your characters to improve your story. If the topic is A Day At The Beach, pick characters that will add to the story. Naturally, throwing in a sky-diving champion would be better than throwing in a lawyer. But what would be better than a sky-diving champion? A sky-diving grandmother? A sky-diving iguana? Don't take my word for it, try it out for yourself.

Where did it happen? In School/at the graveyard/in the toilet?

Of course sometimes you can be limited as in the example A Day At the Beach would have to happen at the beach. But a good student always asks, which part of the beach? A better student asks where is this beach? It can range anywhere from East Coast Park to Australia .

What day did the story occur? Yesterday? Your birthday? Last Christmas? September 1939? When?

Don't forget the time! What time did it happen? It is shocking how many students forget about the time. Obviously a story set in the afternoon would be very different from one set in the middle of the night.

When did it happen? In the morning? At night? While you were in the toilet? Eating cornflakes? Reading the newspapers? Doing all three?

Have fun with the facts. There is no limit.

Why? What do you mean why? If the topic is "A Heartbreaking Christmas", why was it heartbreaking? If it was "A Joyful Reunion", obviously it is not necessary to ask why it was joyful. All reunions are joyful except maybe old school reunions but that's another story. Why were they separated? Why did they take so long to reunite?

For some topics it may be harder to explain why. For example, "A Day At The Beach". Why were you there? Was it for a picnic or for some other reason?

How did it happen? This may overlap with "What" which I will explain later. Sometimes people have more fun reading how something happens than the fact that it did happen. Especially if the method is especially clever or amusing. Sometimes, you don't need to tell how something happened (how you went to the beach), sometimes you do (how the prisoner escaped from jail). Use your common sense.

Lastly, What happened? This is a step-wise description of your account of the whole story. In other words, it is a concise summary of everything you intend to put into your story. Once you have put together WHO, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW, you are now ready to say answer WHAT happened. It is like putting meat on the skeleton of an animal except without all the blood and stuff.

Back to the example of A Day At The Beach. One teacher I know told me about a student who wrote about a picnic he had with his friends. It began optimistically with them finding a nice shady spot to set up. It went downhill from there as he began to narrate they had sandwiches (nice delicious sandwiches), fried beehoon (nice delicious fried beehoon), fishballs (nice delicious fishballs) and packet drinks (nice delicious... you get the idea). By the time the teacher got to packet drinks, he could be in no mood to continue reading your composition.

By Raymond Ang and Oldschool