It’s voting day on the supergrid! The grid’s at the bottom of this post, along with some super important information on voting guidelines. Read those over carefully before you campaign or vote for your favorites.

On Tuesday, I talked about what story isn’t. Today we’re going to take a look at what story is. You already know you need conflict, and you’ve seen some excellent examples of how to achieve that. What you also need is a structure. Let’s dish about that.

Storytelling: Narrative Structure.

Forget the public speaking adage “tell ‘em what you’re going to say, say it, then tell ‘em what you said.” Sure, that’s one type of three-part structure. Story, however, requires a three-part narrative structure. And that is a different animal.

1.  Beginnings: Jump in, the water’s fine.

Resist the temptation to start your story with a preamble. If you tell your story well, you don’t need to waste words at the top providing context or offloading a big exposition dump.

Instead, immediately create tension, advance the action, and grab your reader’s attention.

Play around with different entry points into your story. Suppose you’re telling a story about dealing with a quirky customer at your summer job selling men’s suits. You’ve got 600 words. When does your story begin? With your application and interview? When you punched in that day? With a description of a typical workday, leading up to the main event?

You don’t need to start that far back. You can allude to previous events if necessary using literary devices like flashbacks. But for your story, start with the event itself. Some options:

• Open with a short line of dialogue that develops the customer’s character.
• Build tension by describing your nervous glances at a fitting room door that’s been closed for way too long.
• Set the scene with a sharp single sentence description of the bleak sales floor.

2. The Middle: Keep it from muddling.

Oh, the middle. Keep being you. Keep being hard to put in order and make flow.

Everything you include in the middle needs to be in service of the plot. Cut out your tangents, your asides, and your fancy language. Replace your adverbs with strong action verbs. Ruthlessly edit.

The middle is where your shapeless blob of marble becomes a story. We could spend a semester figuring out the middle. Here are a few quick tips for the main body of your story:

• Set the scene efficiently with just the right amount of detail.
• Sketch out your characters in deft strokes.
• Sample dialogue instead of including every word someone uttered.
• Show us, don’t tell us, what happened or how people felt.
• Balance all these components against your primary purpose: resolution of your conflict.

3. Endings: Stick the landing.

Be Kerri Strug. Don’t stumble out of your story. End when your conflict is resolved and not a second later.

How do you know when enough is enough?

Don’t tie everything up in a neat bow.

If you’re writing a post about how one kid threw up in the car, setting off a sibling chain reaction, don’t finish with a line like “Even when days get rough, motherhood is still the hardest job I’ll ever love.” If you’ve told your story honestly, your love – even on the crappiest of days – will come through.

Don’t become entranced by your own navel.

Even if it is a freakish outie. Suppose you end your post with a paragraph about how the event made you feel, or how you feel about it now, looking back. That’s navel-gazing. You’ve just tacked on a postscript full of stand-alone emotions. And that’s not story.

Don’t sum up.

Resist the urge to recap, or put the events in a larger context, or suggest to the readers how the story should make them feel. You don’t need a summary paragraph. Lop it off.

Keep telling us your stories!

And if you want some feedback on your narrative structure, boy do we have the place for you! Visit one of our summer series lounges, where editors and yeah writers are workshopping pieces in a supportive environment every day.

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The summer supergrid is open for popular voting!

The summer supergrid crowd favorite and top row winners will be determined by popular vote. Be cautioned: yeah write isn’t an Internet clicking contest, and the votes are moderated for fairness. Read each post before voting.

Everybody gets four votes

We use scaled voting each week for the challenge grid. This week, we each get four votes because there are between 31 and 40 entries. Click on the thumbnails to read each post before voting. Click on the nifty heart-shaped voting icon to vote for the post after reading. Do not vote for your own post, please. We’ll delete your vote if you do. We’re not kidding. Trust us, it’ll be OK if you vote for other people.

Read the posts before voting

We are responsible voters here at yeah write. Read, evaluate, and vote on merit. Even though the grid was unmoderated this week, we’re still writing the yeah write way, and we want the votes to reflect it.

Voting is open until Friday, 6:00 p.m. EDT

• Yeah write and the Inlinkz app allow only one round of votes per IP address. When campaigning for votes for your favorites, please ask outside voters to read this section before voting. It will lessen their confusion and curb their clicking enthusiasm.
• If it’s after 6:00 p.m. EDT [-4 GMT] on Friday when you’re trying to vote, voting is closed. There will be no more voting icons on the thumbnail and voting will not work.
• Once you’ve voted for your four favorite posts, you’re done voting. The voting icons will disappear.
• Voting for your own post should be disabled. If it’s not, please don’t vote for your own post.
• Once you’ve voted for the four best on the grid, you are then free to campaign for votes for your favorite entries.
• If you’d like to see the current vote tallies after you’ve voted, refresh the page.
• If you just cannot resist asking your people to vote for your entry, please let them know they have four votes, and they should vote for yours only if they honestly think it’s one of the best on the grid. Campaigning for your own targeted votes is highly discouraged.
• The vote tallies show only from the same IP address you voted from the first time, so if you leave home and get to the gym and, oops, now can’t see who’s in the lead, please wait until you get back home. Voting again to reveal the new tallies just makes much more work for our editors who, in exasperation, may delete first and ask no questions later. One voting round per IP address, one voting round per person. Thanks.

Winners announced in Sunday’s kickoff post 

Once the voting ends, the challenge grid will sort itself from highest number of votes to the fewest. Ties are broken by number of page views. Until the winners’ post is published, none of the sorting will be official, but you can still get a good idea of where everyone ended up until the votes are validated.
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