So You Don't Have Time...
Writing Short Stories
Byron Gordon
Copyright © 2011 Byron Gordon
All Rights Reserved
Cover Art by Joseph Wheatley
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Foreword
First off, thank you for taking the time to look at this. I hope that it proves some use to you. Essentially, this e-pamphlet (or chapbook, or handout, or whatever you'd like to call it) is a compilation of a month long blog series I did on writing a short story in a month, ten minutes at a time. As the author, I recommend reading the whole piece through BEFORE you start writing, because at the end I discuss how the whole exercise panned out and I think that is important to know BEFORE you jump in right away. That being said, this booklet differs from the blog series in it's length. I worked very hard to keep the blog posts to 500 words so that they would read faster. Trying to achieve that greatly restricted my room to elaborate on things and might have left some confused, so here I elaborated to my hearts content. Enjoy.
Introduction
So, you want to write but don't have enough time to really get going?
That's how it goes for a lot of us that aren't professional writers
(though we may yet dream). We have full time jobs, families, some of
us even have friends! And all the time in between is taken up by
fetching groceries, washing cars, cleaning house, cooking dinner,
mowing grass... The list seems endless, and writing tends to get
pushed to the bottom and neglected.
Some are currently nodding
yes, others are leaving in disgust, and some are regarding me as a
particularly curious specimen of auctor vir. Either way, with
this series I'm going to finish a short story in one month by trying
to write ten minutes a day. The weekly posts will take a "how-to"
approach and are divided into chapters. First, I need to offer up two
disclaimers.
DISCLAIMER 1: If you are trying to write the next Sound and the Fury, this series probably won't help you out much. This series IS intended to help other people find time to ACTUALLY write stories. This IS NOT intended to teach people HOW to write.
DISCLAIMER 2: My recommendations are what works for me. They may not work as well for you or appeal to you at all. After all, everyone is different. This series is about helping people write, not establishing the best or only way to do so.
Chapter One
Week 1 - The Beginning
(First 700 words / 7 days)
We start off with some hard truths.
Hard Truth # 1: You have to write to be a writer.
You have to write. Pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. Whatever your preferred technique is for getting the words down, you have to do it. You don't have to spend a long time doing it. You don't have to have perfect sentences, grammar, structure, or anything. You just have to put words on the page. Lets say you can spare ten minutes a day to write. Just ten minutes. You pull out your notepad, you whip out your pencil and you write “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! Because there is a bloody tiger chasing you!”
If that is all you get in ten minutes, that's fine. Give yourself a cookie. You just became a writer. *queue awesome mysterious music*
Hard Truth # 2: You must continue writing, good or bad prose, to remain a writer.
"See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! See the bloody tiger chasing Spot!" It's not going to change the face of human society. Perhaps it's just not the topnotch writing you want to compose. That's ok. Your efforts efforts are not always going to come out like Steven King wrote them. Or Tolkien, or Asimov, or Clancy, or any other best selling writer. Don't worry about it. The key to improvement is writing. Your prose will improve with practice. Trust me. I found a novel I started in highschool and I assure you, do not despair, improvement comes to those who practice. Keep telling the stories.
Now we can start on what this series is really about. Finding time in your hectic schedule to write the stories that you've been dying to tell. Follow this series; complete the accompanying exercises, and you will have a finished story of 2000 - 3000 words (approx. 4 - 6 pages) in a month.
We have to write 100 words a day for a month. Some days this is easy, others it may seem hard. Don't worry to much about falling short or long, it will balance out in the end. I'll be doing this along with my posts using Spot and the tiger.
Seem too hard? The explanation of Hard Truth # 1 took 5 minutes to write and its 117 words exactly. Go ahead, count them. A paragraph a day is all we need.
Drop right into the action. There is a tiger chasing Spot. Two immediate questions arise. Why is the tiger chasing Spot and what is Spot going to do about it? This works beyond the confines of this example. Present what is happening; your story lies in the answers to why it is happening and what the characters do about it. You can run with the action until the end and then answer the why. Or you can focus on the why and then show the what. The first method will set you up for a rip-roaring adventure style story, the second is more aligned towards a contemplative tone. Which one you choose is a matter of taste.
The most important thing is that in the beginning you get the reader asking why and what. Once these questions are answered your story is over.
This week, give us some action and start telling us either the why its happening or what the characters are doing about it. You can drop hints on either question as you like, but try to keep your focus on one or the other. The one you don't focus on is going to come back later as the climax of the story.
Chapter Two
Week 2 - The Middle
(700 more words / 7 more days)
Hanging in there? Hopefully everyone is doing well. 10 minutes isn't much time to get the brain to shift gears to the creative aspect of writing even vaguely original fiction but it can be done. Pretend you're telling your boss why you were late for work this morning!
Some more hard truths to think about.
Hard Truth # 3: Resist the urge to rewrite at this point. There are different philosophies on re-writing, whether it is worthwhile or not. You can make up your own mind. All I'll say is, we are in the thick of battle right now, don't use your time re-writing right now. Wait till the story is done and the battle is won and then, if you think you should, go ahead and re-write.
Hard Truth # 4: Ad-libbing is OK. Have fun. Who cares if it's a little different. That's called flavor. One of the beautiful aspects of short stories is that a lot can happen off stage. I had two characters burgle a business off stage earlier. I started to write the burglary scene, realized I was copying Donald Westlake, tried to write it more originally, then realized the burglary, while the biggest action scene in the story, isn't really important to the story overall. So I skipped the whole scene. Doesn't mean that's the BEST way to do it, but it is a WAY to do it. I read a short story by Patricia Briggs the other day where she skipped an entire fight scene. The narrator briefly alludes to it as an afterthought almost. It was really quite brilliant.
We should have about 700 words of our stories written. For those of you who don't think you're quite ready to start the middle, that's fine, keep working on the beginning for another 2-3 days. But no more than 3 more days / 300 words! This is a short story, remember. Novelists will run out of time here.
How do you know if you're at the middle? At this point in the story we should have an idea of who the central characters are and which one/ones we are rooting for. We should also know (or think we know, if you feel like being clever) what problem has arisen from the initial action and now needs to be resolved. If you don't think you've quite established that, it's ok. You've got 300 more words to play with AND the lines between the beginning and the middle are not especially distinct. There's no Spanish Inquisition waiting to swoop down on you if you start your middle at 1028 words. Or 500 words, for that matter. Don't let word counts become to dictating. To quote a certain pirate, “Their more like guidelines than actual rules.”
The central focus of the middle is the problem confronting the charaters. In the next 700 - 1000 words our protagonists need to formulate a solution to the problem and storm the castle. Optimally this action will end in dismal failure (shhh - they don't know that). How dismal is dependent on personal taste/genre. I don't recommend death, as that is pretty hard to recover from. I would say near to impossible to do effectively in a 3000 word short story. (Though if you want to prove me wrong, go for it and send me the manuscript. I'd love to see it pulled off.) Please note that if their solution is successful, well, you have just finished the story.
Chapter Three
Week 3 - The Climax
(700 more words / 7 more days)
Here we are with the third chapter and today we'll be discussing everyone's favorite part (key drumroll) The Climax! Stay tuned, we'll be right back after these Hard Truths from our sponsors.
Hard Truth # 5: Presentation is key. You don't have to show everything, tell everything, or explain everything. Think of it like being a defense lawyer (ducking the rotten fruit for comparing writers to lawyers). As long as you don't find yourself outright lying to your audience, you can twist and spin things as much as you want to achieve the perspective that your story needs. Which brings us to the next Hard Truth.
Hard Truth # 6: You are the narrator. You are not your characters. Remember, the rules are different for narrators than for characters. Characters are allowed to lie, cheat, steal, murder, do all of this with bad grammar, and then save the world and they will be dubbed heroes. As a narrator you do any of that and then they throw you in jail. This line becomes somewhat blurred (essentially it disappears) in first person narrative as then the narrator IS a character, but for the purposes of third person it is a good rule of thumb. An example from my writing is that my characters swear. I do not. The narrator has a purpose, a job, the narrator is a professional on a stage and swearing in public is unnecessary at best and unprofessional at worst. It undermines the narrator's credibility because swearing is a shortcut. If the word is that desperately needed, it should be coming out of a characters mouth not the narrators. Again, this applies to third person narratives.
In the past week our protagonist developed a solution that failed, hopefully to various spectacular degrees, and is now dealing with an even bigger problem than before. Now they have to come up with a new (improved) solution that will restore balance and order to their world. We are still dealing with the same concepts as last week, a problem and a solution. This time the solution works.
Remember, solutions depend on the setting of your story, but they don't require the protagonist to survive. While the protagonist MUST survive the failure (otherwise they can't try again) it's ok if they don't survive their success. They succeeded. But it depends on what you're going for and what story you are telling.
The three really important things to focus on:
1) Tie up all the loose ends. Before your climax. Loose ends are clutter and you want no distractions from your ending.
2) Present the solution in a surprising, but believable way. Hard Truth # 5 really comes into play here. Most anything can be believable if it is presented properly. I mean, this dude in a castle drinks blood, turns into a bat, and can control people telepathically. Riiight. And you have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, don't you? Another technique is if characters notice things earlier but don't mention them until they come into play later in the story. Timothy Zahn does this very well.
3) Only leave the reader the questions you want to leave them with. I have a story that is hinged on NOT answering the primary question. The whole point of the story is to get the reader saying “Is this true? Maybe?” and get that chill up their back. It's a little creepy to me, other people have told me it's really creepy. Either way, it is a ghost story and leaving that question open ended creates a creepy atmosphere.
Chapter Four
Week 4 - The End
This is the last part of the “So You Don't Have Time...” series. We should be ending today's 10 minutes of writing with the words “The End” at, well, the end of a 2700 – 3000 word short story. If you're clocking in a little less or a little more verbal mileage, that's ok. There is really only one thing that is important that we should focus on. What was the question/problem posed at the beginning? Was it answered/solved? If we can say, “Yes, it was.” then the story is over, if not, there is still more story to tell. However, there is something I want to emphasis (and will probably get eviscerated for shortly). Do not angst about your use of adverbs, or whether your descriptions “breathe”, or even whether your characters are dynamic. All of these 'quality of writing' issues will fall into place and become resolved as you write more. Be aware of them, but don't angst about them, because they are all secondary to the actual story itself. Ensure that you have told the story out to its end. That was the point of this whole exercise. It doesn't matter how good a writer you are if you don't write! Go back to Hard Truth # 1. You have to write. Everything else is secondary and will fall into place IF you continue writing. It's not just me saying this, I'm practically stealing it from Heinlien.
Lastly, I'd like to tell you what I have learned throughout this series. It takes me about 50 – 75 words to warm up and return to the story and really “get into it”. So writing in 10 minute / 100 word spurts doesn't work very well for me. I wind up having to stop writing right about the time it's starting to flow and really get good and that is terribly frustrating for me. The other aspect was that I'm not so terribly busy that I HAVE to write in 10 minute sittings. I can dig up an hour or two, most days, to set aside for writing. I have the spare time and my fiancee is awfully understanding. I am very fortunate in that aspect of my life.
That being said, I encourage everyone who wants to write to try and find time to do so, whether it is 10 minutes or 20 minutes, or however it works out. I sincerely hope that some, if not all, of the information I posted was of use in your pursuit of writing short stories. Please feel free to post on my website or email comments or questions whenever you have them. I can't promise instant responses but I'm usually good about responding within a few days. Take care y'all and thanks for reading.
Author Biography
Byron Gordon lives in search of endless adventure on land and sea. An avid motorsports enthusiast, Mr. Gordon enjoys tinkering with motorcycles in his free time. He is well traveled throughout the coasts of the United States, as well as the Caribbean. In addition to ambitiously pursuing his writing career, Mr. Gordon currently serves in the United States Coast Guard.
If you enjoyed this story, please visit his website at http://marieabmare.wordpress.com/.