Tag: fiction writing

Flash Fiction: Time Crunch

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Meant to post this last night. Whoops.

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I realized I haven’t posted any of my real work in a long time, so I thought I’d try out one of my own prompts. Glad to know what you think.

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Time Crunch

It stood in the center of the garage. A puzzle of greenish copper gears and cranks with worn leather handles. A metal mess the size of a Volkswagen Microbus. And, from somewhere inside it, a faint ticking.

            “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

            “Stole it.”

            “How’d you move it?”

            He took a long drag on his Kool. He wasn’t going to answer.

            I stuck my hands in my armpits. My fingers were itching to pump some levers and tickle some toggle switches, but this was no time to play around. Both our futures—or rather, our pasts—were at stake. Imagined scenes sped through my head, a thousand should-have-beens. He’d have finished school, graduated with honors, gone on to college. Met some girl and married her. Maybe I’d even be an uncle by now. It was funny; most of the ideas I had about how much better our lives would be were about him, not me.

            “So how does it work?”

            He shrugged.

            “You couldn’t steal a manual, too?”

            “We’re not gonna use it.”

            I almost hurt my neck, I turned my head to look at him so fast. I knew he didn’t steal it for me. He stole it so he could get back six years of working at the plant to keep me alive and in school. So with so much on the line for him, and with the job half done, why was he backing out now? He had the hard look in his eyes that always scared me, but I was too mad to keep my mouth shut.

“Then what the heck are you gonna do with it?

            He threw his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and mutilated it with the toe of his boot.

            “No,” I shook my head when I realized what that meant. “We finally have the chance to bring them back. You can’t just—”

            “They were my parents, too.”

            “So why can’t we try? Look, you probably just pull that—”

            He smacked my arm back and I yelled so loud we could hear it shake the garage door.

            “I already stopped it,” he told me. “I already went back. I already saved them.” Something weird and distant in his voice made my gut turn.

            “So they should be here with us right now, right?”

            “You were riding your bike that day. Just up the street.”

            “So why aren’t they here with us right now?”

            “I changed it back.”

            “You what?”

            He closed his eyes. “I tried it a million different ways, and it always happens the same. Either the truck hits them,”

He paused, because his voice cracked on the word hits. The knot in my gut spread to my chest as he swallowed before finishing the sentence.

“Or it hits you.”

            All of a sudden my legs were like paper, crumpling under me until my butt hit the concrete floor. He turned around and started searching Dad’s old workbench. I felt sick when he hoisted the sledgehammer.

            “Why’d you pick me?”

            He stopped and looked at me. “The same reason I never let them ship you off to foster care. What, are you stupid?”

            He turned around again, raising the hammer over his shoulder like a baseball bat. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled through the door into the house. Before I’d even closed it behind me I heard the clanging crunch of the metal as the machine caved under the love of my brother.

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5 query-writing tips you can learn from my horrible experience

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Facepalm! [img by striatic]

Years ago, naively believing my novel was finished, I submitted a draft of a query letter to an online community called Writers Net for feedback. The query was horrible, and several people offered advice.

I wrote draft after draft based on a myriad of tips, but never seemed to make any progress. We all got frustrated, zingers were exchanged, more patient folk tried to explain again and again, and eventually I stupidly decided to go with an excerpt of the book, and left the forum. To my chagrin, you can still find the entire conversation when you Google my name.

But now that I have a successful query letter (if not a finished novel), I stopped to wonder what went wrong on that forum. To find out, I trekked back to the scene of the crime and reread 4+ pages of facepalm moments and harsh reminders of the gross literary inadequacies of my youth (which wasn’t even that long ago).

Here, I pinpoint where things went wrong—and explain how you can avoid the same mistakes.

 

1. We didn’t understand one another

We were all writing English, but I didn’t really understand what they were telling me and they didn’t understand why. I should have realized this when, after several drafts, I wasn’t getting any closer.

Lesson learned: If you need feedback, don’t post your work on a public forum (or blog) run by strangers. Get to know the people first. Read their other posts. Make sure you understand their semantics and respect their opinions before you ask them for advice.

 

2. Conflicting advice

Some said to focus on the protagonist, forget the alternate story; others said to focus on the way the two stories fit together. Some said to simply state the connection between the two; others said that was boring. Some even posted examples of successful queries that broke major rules. And since I didn’t know these people, I didn’t know whose opinion to choose.

Lesson learned: If getting advice from a group, don’t try to please all of them. See if you can identify and solve one general problem they all agree you have. (I had two: the hook was confusing and boring.)

3. I didn’t know what “show, don’t tell” meant for a query letter

I asked how “just tell us what it’s about” fit in with “show, don’t tell,” but they didn’t understand the conflict. I’ve since learned: Telling in a query letter refers to fluff language like “gripping,” “page-turner,” “heartwarming,” or anything that tells the agent how the book is going to make them feel.

Lesson learned: Don’t tell the agent how to feel – tell them the parts of the story that will make them feel that way. (Read more about showing vs. telling here.)

4. They kept telling me what was missing, but not what was needed

Chop a book down to two paragraphs and of course things will be missing. Anyone can point out what isn’t there, from the villain’s motive to what makes the protagonist relatable. But that doesn’t mean these things belong in the query. I kept cramming facts in, but the real problem wasn’t that it lacked information: it was just boring.

Lesson learned: Write down the most interesting (yet plot-relevant) facts about your characters, world, and story. Try building your hook around those things.

5. I attempted to tell what the story was really about

This is what everyone tells you to do, and what they told me to do. But it’s wrong.

Lesson learned: If your plot is complex, you cannot tell what it is “really” about. You don’t have the space. Instead, tell what the story seems to be about, in the first fifty pages of the book. (More on that in this post about hook-writing.)

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Have you ever had a bad experience with an online writing community? What did you learn from it?

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Drunk with Dandelion Wine and in Charge of a Bicycle: a Tribute to Ray Bradbury

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photo by Sam Howzit

 He arrived with a seedy two-bit carnival, The Dill Brothers Combined Shows, during Labor Day weekend of 1932, when I was twelve. Every night for three nights, Mr. Electrico sat in his electric chair, being fired with ten billion volts of pure sizzling power. Reaching out into the audience, his eyes flaming, his white hair standing on end, sparks leaping between his smiling teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire. When he came to me, he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose. The lightning jumped into me. Mr. Electrico cried: “Live forever!”

I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard.*

Tuesday of last week, Mr. Bradbury died.

I sat thinking for awhile about what I would say about him. What was special about his work? Certainly, he had a dark and fantastic imagination. He had an amazing sense of place and a unique way with words. He’s one of the few writers I would read for his voice alone, story aside.

But none of these things do him justice. They are all symptoms of a deeper thing that I feel strongly but that I’m not sure I can put into words.

Remember how everything felt when you were a kid? How much more terrifying and wonderful everything was? Before you got so busy. And jaded. Before you let yourself become ashamed of loving comic books and Saturday morning cartoons and Nancy Drew. Remember how palpably exciting it was to merely pretend to be the captain of a ship? The magic of anticipating Christmas morning that was not only because of the presents? The hot, perfect freedom of summer, and how eternal those three months felt?

We felt things then we can’t seem to feel anymore. We get inklings occasionally, like catching the faintest whiff of a familiar scent, but it seems we’ve forgotten how to really feel them.

Bradbury brings it all back.

 He writes in the passion of feeling we had when we were children. I don’t mean “passion” and “feeling” like drama. I mean magic. Wonder. His words are dripping with it. We drink them and become intoxicated with it.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.***

Ray Bradbury never forgot the boy in him. When he wrote, he didn’t have to twist his brain around to squeeze out words like so many of us do. He opened a fire hydrant of his own childhood wonder, and magic came gushing out.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.**

Bradbury’s stories are time machines. Except they don’t take us back to a particular place or era. They take us back to ourselves.

When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares. I’m not sure where he leaves off and I start.*

The boy mentioned at the top of this post was Ray Bradbury 80 years ago.

And it will be Ray Bradbury forever.

“Now it’s your turn,” he prods us toward our own landmines:

“Jump!”**

 

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* Zen in the Art of Writing: Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle

** Zen in the Art of Writing: How to Climb the Tree of Life, Throw Rocks at Yourself, and Get Down Again Without Breaking Your Bones or Your Spirit, A Preface with a Title Not Much Longer than the Book

*** Dandelion Wine

AIDA aftermath: 4 ways the last few blog posts have changed my novel

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bang head against wall

photo by Eamon Curry

In case any of you are agonizing over changes you have to make to your work in progress due to something you learned in the AIDA blog series, rest assured: I am drinking bucketfuls of my own medicine.

Title

I’ve been holding onto the same vague title for years. It sort of means something if you’ve read the book. Sort of. By itself it is unremarkable. I know I can do better.

First Chapter

  • Trimmed some fat from my opening scene – including most of my main character’s physical description – to make room for actual character development, punchier dialogue, and an extra layer of depth that makes the perfect precursor to the rest of the book.
  • Cut a net total of 1,304 words from that chapter.

Second Chapter

My second chapter is actually the beginning of the alternate story – one that connects to the main story but not perceptibly until much later. I offer no explanation at this point. We are simply following one character and one story in the first chapter, and an entirely different character in a different setting in the second. Mere days after realizing this egregious error, I heard one of my beta readers found it disorienting.

Why is it beta readers never seem to tell you what’s wrong with your work until after you’ve figured it out yourself?

Anyway, I added some explanatory narrative at the beginning to introduce the new story and hint at the connections without giving anything away. I also cut a few hundred words.

The Entire Middle of the Whole Bloody Book

In the midst of my quest for tips on writing a page-turner, I realized something life-changing and consequently left this sentence in my Evernote app:

ONE AT A TIME, DUH!

Translation: the order in which I introduced the five characters in the main story was all wrong. I’d made my main character the last to join the group, which meant she met all four others within paragraphs of one another, and I had to pour out oodles of backstory about who each one was and how they got there and where “there” was and what they all thought of each other and how they reacted to meeting her.

I was shooting myself in the foot with a bazooka.

So I’m both changing the order and spreading things out. She’ll spend a few days with the first person she meets, actually experiencing a couple of things I only summarized in previous drafts, and meet additional characters over the next few chapters – instead of over the next few sentences.

In short, I’ll be permanently cutting several scenes I’ve rewritten dozens of times, and adding other scenes I have never written before. I’m angry, excited, exhausted, and relieved all at the same time.

 

In case you missed it here’s a rundown of the whole series:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

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Has the AIDA blog series led you to make any painful changes to your WIP? Rant in the comments!

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20 tips for creating relatable – and lovable – protagonists

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Photo by Alex Brown

Photo by Alex Brown

Keep them reading. That’s our mission, right? And there’s nothing that can hook any reader faster and stronger than a protagonist they can relate to, like, and therefore care about. This is one half of the D in AIDA:

The D in AIDA

So what makes a character likeable?

I took inventory of the most likeable attributes of some of my favorite characters. I also borrowed some of the best advice from the Internet, and compiled it all here for your reading pleasure! Not all of this will apply to every character, but pick the right handful of traits for your hero, work two or three of them into your first page, and you’ll be well ahead of the average aspiring novelist.

Stuff that makes us connect with them

  • They enjoy things – especially the simple things. People who don’t enjoy anything are whiny. People who like things are fun to be around, both in real life and in books
  • They have flaws, but not unforgivable ones – flaws they must realize and overcome (Donald Maass writes about flaws and strengths here)
  • When they make bad choices, there are consequences – otherwise it’s a Mary Sue
  • They express universal truths – this doesn’t have to be deeply philosophical, just a little detail that everyone notices but nobody has put into words yet. Like how hard is it to drive in high heels (okay, maybe that one’s semiversal).
  • They want something deeply for personal reasons – this is the most important trait. They are in love. They are slaves. They’ve never met their real father. Etc. Even if your protagonist is a villain trying to take over the universe, he should have a personal reason for doing it (e.g., so that no one can ever hurt him again). We should feel this on the first page.

Stuff that’s just plain likeable

  • They have pets – especially if the pet is stupid, ugly, or smelly
  • They have the chance to be mean but aren’t – even characters who are jerks most of the time, but nice to one person (who must be weak or an underdog), or are nice when it matters most, are lovable (Blake Snyder calls this “saving the cat“)
  • They don’t realize how awesome they are – other characters like them better than they like themselves (this doesn’t mean they need to be totally insecure – just a little)

 

Stuff that makes us root for them

  • They are unlucky – Stanley Yelnats from Holes is unlucky but perpetually hopeful anyway, and it makes us love him
  • They defend the innocent – and/or stand up for the underdogs
  • They want to run away from danger, but don’t – the definition of courage
  • They are loyal – even a character who lies, cheats, and steals, but still sticks up for his friends, is likable

Book Country advises:

  • We don’t have to like what they do: we have to understand why they do it
  • Never let coincidence help a good character

Elise Broach adds:

  • They should be in love or in trouble (or both) on the first page
  • Avoid whiny, passive or cruel
  • Shoot for: spunk, persistence, courage, kindness, ingenuity, loyalty, humour
  • But be careful with spunk/sass – now getting overused
Neil Landau and Matt Frederick suggest these devices for getting to know your character:
  • Create memorable entrances – what would you notice about them meeting them the first time? Their charm, or clumsiness? Their laugh, or their uneasy silence?
  • Use props – what your character carries with him everywhere, or keeps in an honored place in his bedroom, can tell you a lot about him

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QUESTION FOR THE COMMENTS: What protagonists do you connect with most? What makes you like them?

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Stay tuned: next week, we’ll talk about more stuff you need to include in the first pages.

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puppy dog

Ways to make your readers love your main character.