“The face in the wall” by devi laskar

What I learned from reading the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate and Columbian author of such perfect books such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera: to leave every last drop of inspiration on the page.

My favorite book by Garcia Marquez is a slim story called “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” which recounts, in journalistic fashion, the story of how a man came to be murdered by two reluctant killers.

1. PLOT and CHARACTER development together make a good story, but PLOT and CHARACTER and IDEA/THEME development make a wonderful story. Try to give life to that idea that first made you want to write the story you’re knee-deep in right now.

2. Bricks can fall on people’s heads but only to COMPLICATE a story, not to RESOLVE it. Put another way, this means you can’t write a story that has problems that you’re not willing to address or even try to work through, but only want to end by saying “and then he died in a plane crash. The end.”

You can have the plane crash, but only if it comes on the first page. We as readers want to know what happens after the character survives the plane crash. In Marquez’s story “Chronicle of Death Foretold” we know in the first moment that the main character is going to die by the end of the story, but we read anyway because as readers, we are dying to know HOW and WHY.

3. CONTENT and LANGUAGE are the two most important aspects of any story. Of the two, CONTENT (another word for this is PLOT) inches out language at the finish line.