Memories that drive me

I've thought back recently to moments that helped me know where I was going. Times in my life that tell me this is something I want to be. I've several of them, but one of the most driving points in my life came in one of the hardest times of my childhood. 

When I was in seventh grade I was a tiny quiet little thing, with glasses, braces, and a certain social ineptitude. I was the least popular kid in all my classes, and school was a torment. I might have fared better if someone told me what conformity was, or how to do it, but even without my dorky appearance, every time I opened my mouth to use extremely big descriptive words, I set myself apart from the group all over again.

It was halfway through the school year that my English teacher gave us an assignment, a completely open creative writing project. We were told to write a short story, it could be about anything. It was one of the first times that I could remember being given a chance to simply write, without a dozen addendums and rules to take the joy out of it. We were all to write a short story, about anything we wanted, and the stories would be put into a book as a gift for another teacher.

I was excited. I don’t remember the exact reason I chose my topic, but I decided to write a short story about a man eating bear that stalked a man in his cabin, hoping to eat him too. I thought it came out wonderfully, if I had saved a copy I’d love to read it again, I can hardly remember how it came out. But I do remember writing the climax, the man made a break for freedom, cutting through the woods, finally having to run as the bear bore down upon him… And then the bear got shot by the forest ranger, and the man was saved. (I don’t think it occurred to me to have the bear win. I was twelve, and they tend to send notes home about stories involving graphic death.)

I was so proud of that story. The irony of it is I probably would have turned it in, received my marks, and forgotten that story completely if not for what happened next. I turned in my story, and then the next day, during study hour, the teacher called me to her desk.

“I know what you did.” She stated. (This all sounds so cliché, but I swear those were her exact words.) I blinked in confusion. I don’t remember if I said anything or not, but she went on. I’ve forgotten her exact words, but they went something like this.

“I read your story. It’s very good.” There I smiled, she liked my work. “Except that it’s obviously too good. ‘Slavering’? I don’t know where you stole it from but you aren’t fooling me.”

I was completely baffled, stunned really. She told me I’d be receiving a zero for the assignment and had to take home a note. I may have cried, but I don’t remember. Years later, it does strike me as a certain irony that my English teacher was oblivious to the 900 page hardback historical fiction I had propped on my desk during reading hour. Or the fact that I was completely shunned by my peers for using words like ‘slavering’ in a conversation, but it was the fact that she didn’t that let this story stick in my mind.

I brought the note home to my Mother. I do remember her reaction, she looked at the note and looked at me.

“Why does she think you didn’t write it?”

“She said the words were too big for a seventh grader.”

“Has she met you?”

After that was a phone call, maybe even a teacher conference. My Mother was outraged by the accusation. “She’s scored at a 10^th grade reading level!” The teacher was convinced, my paper was accepted, and it all had a happy ending.

Yet through it all, it wasn’t the final result that stuck with me, or even the words that I wrote, it was that singular moment. That instant where I went from being told my words were good, but that I was unworthy of them. That strange moment of disorientation, when my ability was called into question.

I’ve always had a stubborn streak. This whole incident served to prove to me that I had an ability to write, a potential that I shouldn’t squander. The very words, “this is too good to be written by you” only serve as fuel for my goal. I want to write my stories, and tell them well, so that people will find them fantastic. I want to earn my writers spot, because once upon a time, my words were good enough to convince my teacher that they didn’t come from me.

Movies as Homework

While I'm working on my epic science fiction series, I haven't had as much time to read critically as I'd like. I still read for fun, but between chasing my daughter around and keeping up with edits, reading for homework has fallen by the wayside. Then I sprang upon a new idea. Now with each scene I come across where I want a different perspective, or to do more research into strong and similar character building, I look  for movies, often movies I've already seen, that I can watch critically for research.
So far my list includes heavy action and sci-fi titles, but I'd be interested to know if this technique works for anyone else.

List:
Resident Evil (the first one). Goal: Examine Alice's evolution from amnesiac scared girl, to super powered badass. Watch for clues to her changes that lead into later movies.

I Am Legend. Goal: Look at the survival methods chosen to keep living as a lone survivor in a demolished and highly dangerous area. Explore the survivors guilt inherent to the plot.

The Bourne Identity. (Honestly, I haven't read the books and the movie didn't wow me, but it still has seeds of usefulness. Even a BAD movie can help a writers growth by exploring WHY it didn't work.) My Goal: Look at the distress and cognitive dissonance of a man who's lost his complete identity, only to discover he may not LIKE who he used to be. Examine the psychology and potential traumatic fallout of a complete loss of identity, and what(and who) helps us form our choices.

I'm focusing on these movies before I think of a few more. While I have picked two zombie movies, it does seem to me that currently people only allow society to be destroyed by zombies in film. :) Since my novel series relies upon the destruction of mankind, this is important research.

What sort of movies mirror the current work you're writing? Even movies from a different genre can inspire with a single similar character or relationship. If you could pick a movie to learn from, what would it be and why?

The Short Story: How to End It.

Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of short stories. Mostly free, I confess. I’ve been tackling shorts as a way to unwind in between massive editing forays into my own full length novel. Reading while in ‘editing’ mode, has perhaps made me more critical, but I like to think that I understand WHY I don’t like something, not just WHAT I don’t like.

So in a few blog posts hopefully. I’m going to explain some of the pitfalls I see in short stories and some advice on what to do with it.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional editor, I’m a writer. I prefer to read full length novels, but the same rules can apply to writing shorts. Honestly, I think shorts are especially hard to write in a satisfactory way because of the decreased length. As Jim Butcher once said, “It’s like trying to have a knife fight in a phone booth”. You lack room to expand the tale.

But it CAN be done, for example, look a Junior Reader series book. Their larger font usually means their half as long as the page length suggests (compared to adult fiction) yet they find a way to tell a complete story, beginning to end. If you have time, think about picking up a few to look at writing in its simplest form, they’re quick reads, and often fun.

Common crits/bad reviews: “Too Short.”

This phrase can puzzle writers because they’re writing a short, so the length is expected. What the reader in this case usually means is that something about the ending didn’t satisfy. Every story, no matter how short, needs an arc. You have to have a beginning, middle and end. In a short story, it can be too easy to rush to finish, you reach a point then, “andallthisstuffhappenedokayTheEnd.” This isn’t a school essay hastily written the night before. It’s a piece you want people to understand.

To work on endings you need to focus on several key areas:

1.      Did I answer all the questions?

If your story is a serial, SOME floating questions are okay, but you STILL have to get the character to an END, a safe place, a haven, a point to catch your breath. IF you are writing more to it then YES leave a hook, but that cannot be ALL you leave.

Some famous short stories end on a twist, or a sudden question, then that’s it, the author doesn’t write more. I hate that. It’s a cheap trick. Don’t be cheap. If you can’t figure out a good ending without resorting to “and it was all a dream” then your story isn’t done.  (Note: You CAN write dream stories, but you have to leave allusions to the fact that things do not add up. They must be done WELL. All rules can be broken if things are done amazingly well. This is NEVER easy.)

So re-read, if you go on for a paragraph about the glass rose on her desk, and then the rose is NOT important at all, remove it. If you put emphasis on something, make sure it matters, don’t waste the readers time with the extraneous. ANSWER the questions. “Hattie wondered if she’d ever make peace with her mothers passing.” Is this relevant? Does she make peace? Don’t leave the reader wondering.

2. Make your endings satisfy! 

Is your ending: “Hurry! Rush! keep reading! go go! STOP! Where’s the next page? WHAT THE HELL?” Be not the season finale to Game of Thrones on HBO. 

If people are buying a short story, give them resolution. Hooray! Bob survived his death defying injury when he jumped from the flaming helicopter to rescue the baby seal! He lost his limb, but Annie still loves him! People want CLOSURE. If your character is a skeptic, kidnapped by aliens, probed, then dumped in a cornfield, does he drink himself sick and convince himself it was a dream? Or arm himself with tinfoil to PROVE THE TRUTH? 

We want a peek at what will happen, along with what HAS happened. Don’t just say, Bob was a skeptic, then he got taken by aliens, the end. That’s a beginning and a middle, give us an END. Give us a REASON for spending 5 thousand or 20 thousand words with Bob.

3. Is THIS THE END??? Okay, no one wants to hear question marks when they finish a book. They want to know, either a) I’m done with you. or b) Ha, gotcha! There’s a 2^nd half to this coming out later. Decide BEFORE you write/publish/sell what you are going to DO with this story. Many authors who’ve written great novels either get asked, or get motivated, and wind up writing short stories that feature characters from their novels. This is great! It allows people a quick glance at characters that are fully fleshed, have whole histories, and yet come together in a short piece.

Did I say this is great? Let me clarify, this is great when it’s DONE RIGHT. Even some incredible long fiction authors find themselves flailing at a short piece. You have to balance the fact that Thor the Weasel Farmer, has an entire SAGA devoted to his feud with the evil ermine-mongering Pikipsie clan. There’s only so much back story you need, or even WANT to put into a short story. Give readers a taste, a thin veneer, not enough to confuse them, but enough that they can sense the greater depth.

““I knew we’d meet again!” Growled my arch nemesis Ermine Jill.” Just looking at that sentence tells you, they know each other, and if people are curious about their OTHER adventures, you can mention them on the last page in the bio. You don’t need to recap other books.

Okay, what about the new guy. Bob has a great story, Bob is going to tell you his story in five short stories in a series. Okay… Well, here’s my first question, Why did you choose to present a fiction with that much content as a serial short? In some cases, you might do it as a publishing agreement. You get 5 short pieces in a magazine anthology or something. That gives you range to present your work.

But consider the possibility of saying, ‘Gee, I have five 20K word shorts in a series. I could just do some editing, and make it a 100K Novel.’ What you have to determine is if you have individual arcs for each story. Some things just WORK as a Serial. My favorite is Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire. Each chapter has a rise and fall and flows as its own little story playing into a greater whole.

Here’s what you don’t do: DO NOT take a novel that you are finished with /partway finished /uncertain of chop it into pieces, and then sell it as a series of shorts. Unless you are willing to chop, rewrite, and edit the hell out of that work to make sure each arc reads like a short. Do not lie to the reader and market it as a ‘short work’ when really it’s a Part 1 of 4 of your novel. Or god have mercy on that poor unsuspecting reader who pays for part 2, 3, or 4, and winds up stuck in the middle of a confusing half finished story.  You may know it’s the middle piece. You might even put it all over the description. It doesn’t change the fact that it will alienate the reader.

(I am violently opposed to anyone publishing unfinished work. It’s a lazy shortcut. You finish, you edit, you polish, and you do it right, or you stop trying to sell me crappy e-books. That’s all.)

So if you want to write a serial short, because you wrote one, and loved those characters so much you want to give us more, just make sure your endings feel like endings. There may be things we are left to discover, but give us a place where the action slows, the reader breaths, and we get a little closure. “And Thor wept over Pete’s tiny weasel grave, knowing even as he laid his tiny buddy to rest, he would surely seek vengeance on that conniving Ermine Jill.”

There is an end, and a hint of foreshadowing. They do it all the time in comics. (Not to be confused with TV Cartoons made from comics where they do ‘to be continued’ all the damn time!) Uncertain how to imply continuation while giving an ending? Read a comic. Look at how even as Eric Banner is always trying to avoid conflict, you just KNOW conflict will find him for another issue. Look for allusions to the future, and hints of continuation in the theme.

If you ARE writing a serial? It helps to imply it in the title, “Ambers Honey Pot Adventures: The Tale of the Pygmy King” She has more than one adventure, and the colon implies that the title may be on more than one piece.

So that’s my advice on endings. Answer the lingering questions, Make sure your story arc includes an ending, and do not neglect the arc for a series. If short goes right into another short with no pause, no stopping for breath, no end in sight, then you’re writing a novel, (or novella) not a short.

Tune in next time when I rant about other short story thrills and woes. From plotting to speed, I hope to keep your shorts trim, fitted, and roomy enough to breathe.

This Was When I Quit: My Journey as a Writer

It's strange, on this crazy writing journey of mine. Sometimes I tell people I've been writing forever, sometimes I say I've just started, and honestly, it's both. It's all these contradictions, fact and and a contradicting fact that is also true, with clarification.

I have wanted to be a writer, a storyteller, a person who writes books, since I was about 6 or 7. I don't remember if there was a specific book that inspired me, I just knew I loved reading, and I loved words. In third grade my teacher first brought out the 'half pages'. The bottom half was lined, the top half was blank, so we wrote stories on the lines, and illustrated them in the top. I wrote stories about a lovable dog that got into trouble. (I don't think they made any sense. I was seven. I would have to edit them prior to publication.)
By the time I was ten I was dreaming up Star Trek NG fanfiction. I don't think I ever got it written down, but I'd act it out, inserting my original character into the Starship Enterprise D and rewriting my favorite episodes.
(It was at 12 that I was bullied relentlessly. I developed an ulcer, and had to leave school. 90% of this abuse centered around the fact that I used 'big words', and read 'big books'. I didn't know how to fit in.)

When I was fourteen, I got my first rejection letter. I had written a full fan fiction manuscript for the Animorphs Series, and sent a letter to K.A. Applegate offering her my concept. It was a very sweetly worded rejection, and it looked handwritten. Sadly I lost it, and to this day I wish I had it, to start my rejection pile off on a high note.
But see... Here's the important part.
That was when I Quit.

I quit writing fan fiction. Oh, I found other outlets and still wrote fan fiction every so often, but I never saw it through. I never forced myself to push through the hard parts, or to find a better way, I would just lose interest, walk away, and abandon those files. I still have them (On a FLOPPY DISK PEOPLE. Oh, how this dates me.) I wrote Harry Potter Fanfiction (along with half the world!) I wrote Fanfiction for the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters (knowing my name. I confess I was saddened to learn that was only her pen name), I wrote fan fiction for Anne Rice's Vampires. BUT I never finished, because I quit. I saw I would never BE PUBLISHED, if I wrote myself into someone ELSE'S world.

So I started writing original fiction. I'd get an idea, write half of it down, find myself flailing somewhere, and give up. I kept them, but never finished. A lot of it was vampires. I loved vampires and did a huge amount of creative writing through a chatroom, (A pure text HTML coded RPG. Actual WRITING with no animation, dice, or DM. For those who speak geek.) I had wild vampire adventures with seductions and intrigue and betrayal through my screen name. Surprisingly this really did improve my writing. There was an elite club of characters, they all had these amazingly well written posts, and I wanted to be like that. I whipped out my college vocabulary, I practiced making my words flow, while describing my actions. It was still, in terms of fiction, horribly done. I'd use the same word 50 times in a night, but it forced me to write the words.

Then years passed. Life happened. Instead of going on to go to school to be a writer, I discovered no one thought it was practical. I'd starve, they said, so I did a few years of college, life happened again. Relationships, jobs, many, many failures, and finally good stuff. Marriage, baby, and a nice place to live. In 2007 my friend approached me with this great idea... It'd be a graphic novel, no, a tarot deck, no and actual novel! And a movie! Each time we talked about it, the ideas got bigger, longer, more elaborate. We talked for hours about this amazing world we were going to have. I made a character that was my favorite, he made one that was his, then we fought over the timeline to make each have their shining moments. We took AMAZING photographs themed toward the WIP.
It was going to be a series. It was going to be epic. Someday we would be millionaires!
I finished one draft of one novel, he wrote his draft, but putting them together... didn't work. We fell into the pit of despair filled with wrath and hate and daggers (I mean that literally, we both own a shit-ton of knives, we just don't use them on PEOPLE duh.) It wasn't going to work. He said he was done.

I tried to keep going, then I faced the mountain, the mountain every writer must face. You reach a point where the glamorous money and fame and riches prove to be a mirage... Then you see what actually lies beyond the alluring deception. You see edits. Corrections. Rewrites. You see plot holes and misused metaphor, tropes and excess description. You see your first draft for what it is... crap on a page. Words... that only in the crudest form... reflect the story your trying to tell.

That was when I quit.
Oh, I could make excuses. That I was a new Mom, that I had a baby to raise, or that my depression was acting up, or that I was more concerned with buying a new house.(these are legitimate reasons, but they were not MY reason.)  

The truth is, I just wasn't ready.

I looked at all the other writers and I thought, I'll NEVER be that good. I thought about the work, and how trying to get published takes HOURS upon hours of blood sweat and toil. Then you have Agents, agents and editors that are so overrun with queries that no matter HOW brilliant you are it will never actually grace their fingers.

And guess what, if they sign you for a multiple book deal, you have to make MULTIPLE BOOKS! On a deadline! Without them sucking! Or you'll FAIL and it will be such an EPIC FAIL that the entire INDUSTRY will pause and laugh at you as you fall.
I wasn't afraid of failing. I was afraid of not failing quietly. I was afraid that yes, my work would finally pay off with a beautiful heartfelt AMAZING book I'd spend years crafting. It would do AMAZINGLY well! People would FLOCK to buy it. And then my second book would go HORRIBLY WRONG. It wouldn't get finished... ever... It would get written, but so badly that all my fans would set fire to it. I would be kicked out of the Authors club and told to NEVER darken their doors AGAIN.
That was my fear. And even as cartoonish and laughable as it sounds... It shut me down. It made me quit.
I quit, and I told myself. "I can still write, I just won't go through the pressure of getting published."

That was five years ago. Then in late February or early March of 2012. I realized something. My life, was not gong how I pictured it. A lot of things were there, but like many people, at some point I looked around and all I could see were the things I gave up. I kept getting bad news about family, bad news about my health, and I finally just said to hell with all of it. I was going to sit down, and write my novel til it was done. Then when it was done, I was going to make it better. Then when it was amazing, I'd sell it. Sink or swim, if all I managed to do in life was get my NAME on the cover of a book I wrote, then that was going to be my goal.
Profits? Eh, if I fail, I fail. If I make money... That'd be cool.
Fame? If I get INVITED to a Con because someone WANTS me there as an AUTHOR, that's fame enough for me. That's the dream. (I have a much more specific dream of walking up to Jim Butcher with my novel in hand, slapping it down and saying, "I BEAT the BEAR!" Go read Jim Butcher's bio at jim-butcher.com. I'll wait.)
I have nice, small, achievable expectations. I'm going to keep doing this. I’m not doing this for me. Not really. It's for the story that sits in my head. It's for the characters that live and fight and weep because of the life they live on the pages. It's for the world I created, because I love it.
If I abandon my story now... A whole fictional world dies. (Remember Alderaan.) That's a tragedy I won't be responsible for.
I sat down in March, seized by a fevered madness to WRITE my STORY. I got the first draft out in a month. It's actually turned into two books. It's... kind of a beast. BUT the words are there, the potential is ALL THERE.
 This is the FIRST time I've decided to try for publication. This is the first time I've committed to going the distance. I've been writing forever, yet all of this is new.

Since April I've been working on edits and rewrites. It's the second time I've written this story, and it's already at LEAST 80% better. I've set my BETA Piranha fish to chomp-chomp-chomp on my story and spit out the nasty bits.
I am on my way.
And sometimes I still look at the mountain I still have to climb. I look at the deadly ledges labeled 'query' and 'publisher' and 'self pub' I look at the frightening crevasses labeled 'self-doubt' and 'failure'.
But this time I'm ready. I have made friends who share the journey, I have worked hard to research the science, the truth behind the fiction, and I keep honing my craft more and more each day. I've received encouraging words personally from REAL AUTHORS (I say with hushed awe), who tell me not to quit, to keep going and find my way.

Most of all, I know I'm ready because I've figure out who I am. I am a writer. I am the pen that springs forth worlds of my imagining. I am a mad genius of sadism to characters and masochism to edits. I am crazy, but I am sound. I like who I am.

And This, is where I harden my resolve, look at the mountain, and I WILL NOT quit.