NARRATIVE COMPOSITION: the structure of a short story, with a complete worked example.

THE FOUR-MOVEMENT STRUCTURE

1. SITUATION AND CONSTRAINT — who the character is and what holds them back. Establish it fast; do not spend a third of your words on background.
2. THE COMPLICATION — something disturbs the situation.
3. THE TURNING POINT — whatever the question requires must actually happen on the page.
4. THE CHANGE — show how things are different afterwards. A story that stops at the turning point has not finished.

WORKED MODEL (approximately 330 words)

THE GOLDEN NEEDLE

Manohar had inherited three things from his father: a treadle sewing machine, a shop the size of a cupboard, and a sentence. "Your grandfather was a tailor, your father is a tailor, and you will be a tailor." He had heard it at fourteen, when he had asked to be sent to the city to study, and he had never asked again.

So he stitched. School uniforms in June, wedding blouses in November, and in between the endless falling hems of Shivpur. At night, when the shutter was down, he opened the fashion magazines the barber next door passed on to him and copied the drawings onto the backs of old bills. Nobody in Shivpur wanted those clothes. He drew them anyway.

The travelling theatre changed everything, though it did not look like it at the time. Their leading lady took one look at her costume — a shapeless green sack — and refused to go on. Someone remembered the tailor across the road. Manohar was marched in, handed the offending dress, and given forty minutes.

He worked the way he drew: a snip at the shoulder, two tucks at the waist, a slit at the hem. When she came out, the troupe fell silent. The dress had not been repaired. It had been redesigned.

A journalist in the third row photographed the costume and, without asking, entered it for the State Handicraft Award. Manohar learnt he had won from the barber, who had read it in the paper.

The prize was fifteen thousand rupees and a certificate he could not stop touching. But the thing that changed his life came a week later, in an envelope from a design house in Mumbai offering him a place as an apprentice cutter.

He was thirty-one. He took it.

Years afterwards, when people asked about the award, Manohar would say it had not given him his talent — that had always been there, drawn on the backs of old bills. What it had given him was permission to believe the sentence he had grown up with was not a life sentence.

WHY THIS MODEL SCORES

It SHOWS instead of telling. "He copied the drawings onto the backs of old bills" does the work of a paragraph explaining that he was talented and thwarted. The four movements are visible and each has its own paragraph or two. It answers the exact requirement. The question asked for an award that CHANGES his life, so the last third of the story is about the change, not the prize. The ending returns to the opening image (the sentence he inherited) and turns it. A closing that echoes the opening is the cheapest way to sound finished.

TECHNIQUE CHECKLIST FOR ANY STORY consistent PAST tense throughout dialogue used sparingly, punctuated correctly, each speaker on a new line no "and then I woke up and it was all a dream" a title — it costs one line and frames the whole piece