Posts Tagged ‘story’

Having Something to Say

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m hav­ing a lot of luck writ­ing words lately.  There’s just one prob­lem;  they’re not meet­ing my rig­or­ous qual­ity stan­dards out the gate.

I’m torn between want­ing to be a good writer and a paid one.  Is there a dif­fer­ence?  Can you live on $10,000 every 5 years?  Quality takes time, and time is money.  The two are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily go hand-​​in-​​hand.  If I am forced to choose my cri­te­ria for suc­cess, it would be a large fan­base and prof­itable projects  enough to keep me in the lifestyle I have come to expect. You know, vis­it­ing the den­tist once every ten years and trav­el­ing to con­ven­tions every five.

Like most every other aspir­ing writer you know, I wouldn’t mind mak­ing a liv­ing from my efforts.  Actually, when busi­ness is good on the free­lance web front, I’m not that con­cerned about it.  When busi­ness is weak like it has been lately, I’m all “OMG, gotta write six short sto­ries and try to sell them all.”  Because short fic­tion is so profitable.

No, I know, short fic­tion isn’t going to pay the bills.  And that would be why I wrote a deeply flawed novel this month!

I’m con­flicted a lot about what I’m turn­ing out because I’m not sure that what I have to say mat­ters.  I don’t always even know what I want to say.  Since col­lege, I have this deep sense that I live too much on sur­face thoughts.  Critical think­ing and form­ing of deeply held opin­ions isn’t some­thing I get up to as much as I did when I was younger.    My thoughts rarely go beyond “how can I pay the rent next month with­out dip­ping into sav­ings?”  I don’t spend a lot of time pon­der­ing free­dom vs. secu­rity or what it means to be grow­ing older in a soci­ety that increas­ingly val­ues youth above all other per­sonal traits. (Freedom prob­a­bly, and “it sucks”.  Now where’s my Nobel?)

You have to do some deep think­ing in order to form the opin­ions that are the core of “hav­ing some­thing to say.”  Especially if you plan on offer­ing any kind of unique insight.  For instance, “mur­der is bad” is a lit­tle played out.  However, “mur­der is okay when it’s a clown” is, ignor­ing the moral impli­ca­tions of such a mes­sage, at least some­what original.

So I’m work­ing on that.  I’m also back to think­ing a lot about sto­rycraft.  Because I don’t always know what to do next when I write a story. I don’t know implic­itly what makes a suc­cess­ful story, at its core.

What I’d like to do in the next year is learn story.  Learn my craft, so that I can focus less on “how do I end this story so it feels sat­is­fy­ing?” and more on hav­ing some­thing more to say.   I keep com­ing back to this issue of sto­rycraft.   I know I can do it by acci­dent. I would just like to be able to do it consistently.

I want to be the depend­able writer edi­tors can count on in a pinch.   I want to be the guy you go to for an odd anthol­ogy theme, know­ing that you’re going to get some­thing fresh and enter­tain­ing.  I  don’t want to be boxed into a par­tic­u­lar sub­genre (epic fan­tasy, hard SF, etc).  Like I am in a more broad sense, I want to be a gen­er­al­ist when it comes to the things I write about.

I actu­ally really want to write on-​​spec nov­els.  I want to play in other uni­verses not my own.   I want to write for video games. I want to write comics.  Screenplays. I even want to write more nonfiction.

Do you have tips for mas­ter­ing story?  How to make those choices in the course of a story to make it have that “oomph” in the end that makes a reader value the time they spent inside your head?  Share them in the comments.

Ten years into my writ­ing and I still feel like a jour­ney­man at best.   The most impor­tant trait of being a writer some­times feels like stubbornness.

Ideas are Skeletons

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It occurred to me this morn­ing that ideas are skele­tons upon which I hang the rest of my sto­ries, like so much meat and gris­tle.  Before I can write one word, I need a cen­tral struc­tural frame­work of the idea.

I am the pale­on­tol­o­gist of my sub­con­scious.   I dig and poke in so much muck of the mind, but some­times I strike upon the out­lines of some­thing unusual, some­thing I’ve never seen before.  You see, I am not inter­ested in recon­struct­ing ideas of the same species as another I have already done, so each is exam­ined, iden­ti­fied, and if a known quan­tity, left for some­one else to excavate. 

It’s only once I have that skele­tal idea with its odd pro­tu­ber­ances, fan­ci­ful fins, and strik­ing spurs that I can begin the process of recon­struct­ing the whole of the beast, lay­er­ing on the mus­cle of plot, the skin, scales, or fur of descrip­tion, the ner­vous sys­tem of characterization.

That’s not to say that the crea­ture lives when I’m done.  More often than not, it col­lapses under its own weight, wheezes once or twice, and expires.  But we try, as they say.

So how about you?

Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The struc­ture and nature of short sto­ries haven’t really changed in the dig­i­tal age, as far as I can tell.  They’re still told the same way mostly, same per­spec­tives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3–7000 words).  E-​​zines are for the most part  straight for­ward adap­ta­tions of the print mag­a­zine for­mat, to vary­ing degrees.  PDF mag­a­zines are iden­ti­cal to print mag­a­zines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-​​zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hyper­text fea­tures, but the sto­ries them­selves do not take advan­tage of of any of those fea­tures except in rare occasions.

Flash fic­tion, or sto­ries under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with elec­tronic mag­a­zines such as Brain Harvest spe­cial­iz­ing in them exclu­sively.   Personally, I don’t find such short sto­ries very sat­is­fy­ing very often, despite my involve­ment with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fic­tion).  I don’t think I’ve ever writ­ten a really suc­cess­ful flash fic­tion story.   I would argue that flash fic­tion is even less pop­u­lar than reg­u­lar short fic­tion, which is pretty unpop­u­lar in the first place.

Continue read­ing ›