Category: writing

I’m writing a short story set in a world I’ve played with for years. It seemed a good story with relatable characters. I started. Part of it made sense to me; I know the back story. The average reader wouldn’t know that, so it needed detail. Now there’s this other thing, and another thing, and so on. The short story is no longer short.

This happens often. It is difficult for me to crank out a short story, despite my inherent laziness. Instead, my brain builds elaborate histories for everything. I see economic systems, language shifts, religious development. Even the tiniest vignette has an encyclopedia of facts around it.

One option: simply make notes elsewhere and leave them out of the story. In some cases, that works. My brain doesn’t like it. There will be some detail from the story world that makes the story just that much better, and the rest of the world comes with it. Sure, oatmeal is good, but how about with cinnamon? How about with cinnamon and honey and blueberries and cream and…

Occasionally, the needed pieces are just things not originally conceived. If the main character does this action, will there be a reaction? Consider a kid who not only stands up to the bully, but hurts the bully in the process. Is that the end of the story? Are there witnesses or authority figures? Does the bully have friends? Despite what some parents tell their kids, many bullies won’t stop because you stood up to them, and if you hurt that bully, you better have crippled them or they are coming after you. So a short story about a kid standing up to a bully is likely to grow into a longer story about that kid running from the butt-kicking of a lifetime.

In the short story I was working on, there was a similar scenario where the weaker party was trying to escape from a stronger group. Without giving away too much, the stronger group is sent packing with the message that they better not come back. That seems straightforward.

The problem is, there was already a context for the stronger group. They were a tiny arm of a much larger group. The much larger group would be unlikely to accept the threat, choosing instead to retaliate.

This apparent antagonist was not intended to be the primary antagonist of the story. They were supposed to be a passing part of the set up and then fade away. This was one of those situations where the character tells you what they are going to do despite the prepared plot. The temporary bad guy went home and got buddies, making the story longer and more complex in the doing.

This won’t be bad for the tale. The planned antagonist will now have some competition, and this only aids the protagonist. Before this, I wasn’t entirely sure how my protagonist was going to pull off the miracle of getting away from the planned bad guy, but now the villain has something more hostile to deal with.

When I get around to retirement, I will have to get all of the stories for this fictional world out of my head. In some cases, it will just be a matter of finishing off the started-not-finished pieces from the past decades. In others, I may do a paper on the economic systems of this world and their effect on the interactions between the various peoples and their prejudices. For now, I will still try to write things as small as I possibly can. Maybe I can keep each short story to just a couple of volumes.

I have a story from the same world as the last two that started with Cordell’s Rebellion. The main character was a side character in Hour of Consequence. The story arc is complete. Unfortunately, there is no character arc. Oops!

What do I mean by this? In most interesting stories, the main character has an emotional connection to the activity and there should be some change in that character as a result. We map the change from the starting state all the way through to the end state. Right now, my character is simply an artifact passed around by other forces in the story. That’s not good.

Why can’t I see the character arc or his internal actions? I don’t know his motivations or his life experiences well. I’ve not spent enough time with people like him to have an understanding of their world view. In the previous story, he was mysterious to good effect, but that won’t work for a lead character.

I could try to find people with similar life situations and find out more about them. That wouldn’t be creepy at all. I could do some research and read quite a bit, but that’s not quite the same; it would feel like a copy of a copy.

Another option would be to change the character into something so unique that no one could compare him to anyone else. He would also be unrelatable. It would destroy everything he was in the previous novel

It may work to tell the story from the point of view of a different character. This would still leave my hero flat with no emotional connection. What’s more, I think it would be disrespectful to the character and to the real-life humans who are similar to him. This just isn’t a good option.

For now, I think I will set this story aside and work on something else. The tale has a lot of potential, but only if it can be done honestly. At the moment, the honesty does not manifest.

The blank canvas
The empty notebook
The unshaped clay
In plaintive voices

They call
Soon, I may have time
Soon, duties will diminish
Soon…
Soon, I can turn to my passions
Hours spent with brush or pen
The clay knife, sculpting, shaping
Breathing life into the creations that for now
Wait
Weep
And call for release from their emptiness

I’ve whined about the difficulty of writing around my day job. All the class prep, grading, and keeping up with ever changing technology has devoured my spare time. Now, the inconvenience of the world’s population getting sick and dying has pushed that a little further.

Honestly, I’ve got it good. Already a hermit by nature, social distancing has not been difficult. The college where I teach announced the switch to online course delivery as we entered spring break. That meant I had time to prepare. It’s a good thing too; I needed it.

I now handle my courses through video lectures and labs. The students submit their work through our Learning Management System. As long as I stay ahead of the lectures and grading, I will do well.

It took a couple of weeks to develop a system. A full day’s work creates the lectures and labs for one class. The grading still takes forever, but at least I can plan for the lectures themselves. Fortunately, I had been reading about screenplays and movie making, so I started from a position of knowledge, sort of.

All the class activities still take place on the computer, so it is hard for me to sit and write at the keyboard. Once my day work is done, often well into the evening, I just can’t sit in front of a screen to type.

Lo, there is light at the end of the tunnel. We have about a month left of this semester. I will finally be free. My days will be my own to waste as I will. But will I waste them or will I use them to build new things? To express myself? To vomit out all my creativity onto the waiting world? Yea, I’ll probably waste a bit of it, especially that first week or two.

In the meantime, this is one of those historical events people will look back upon for centuries or even millenia. This is time to record one’s experiences, thoughts, emotions, all for the benefit of those yet to come. Like I always tell my students: if everything goes right you don’t get a story out of it.

With my overwhelming work schedule this semester, creative things have been finding alternate routes out of my head. I’m sure this is a sanity-saving safety device built into my brain’s biology. One of the mechanisms is the spontaneous composition of poems just as I’m preparing for bed.

I enjoy writing poetry. The mixture of rhythms, images, and word play in a compact form is fascinating. During more restful periods, I like to pick random words and try to build a poem around them. With a rough poem in hand, I start the linguistic lapidary needed to find the best facets and features, making it shine with, what I hope, is brilliance.

With the end of a long day, and the prospect of another tomorrow, the poetry builds up pressure in the mantle of my mind. From time to time, it finds some cravase, and forces its way to the surface. Grabbing the notebook beside my bed, I scribble the words as they erupt and guide them to safety. If I don’t, there will be no sleep that night.

The pressure safely relieved, rest comes, such as it is. It is a reminder of what lurks beneath. It also makes me wonder what would happen if these smaller releases failed. What is a poetry eruption?