Posts Tagged Fiction

I’ve been busy lately, working on a new story that, as stories sometimes do, came to me almost fully formed in a nightmare.  The writing is going extremely well, and the characters are talking to me.  It’s going to be a short story, probably coming out at somewhere around 12-15,000 words when complete.  I thought I’d give a bit of a preview:

Keane sat up with a grunt, rubbing at his back where the ridge in the hard fiberglass bench always pressed into it. Around him, others were also sitting up in the dim light, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes in response to the polite “Ding!” coming over the loudspeaker.

“Another day, another dollar,” the woman on the green bench said, standing and walking to the back of the car. She didn’t even bother holding on anymore. No one did. They’d all gotten accustomed to the swaying of the train. Sometimes Keane wondered if he’d be able to walk on flat land again, if he ever got a chance.

Keane leaned back and sipped carefully from his water bottle. It had his name on it, in black sharpie marker on white masking tape. He took two small sips, barely enough to wet his mouth, then closed it tightly again, tucking it into his backpack and standing up, throwing the pack over one shoulder and grunting a hello to the man on the orange bench ahead of his. He was looking out the window at the station they were passing through.

Keane didn’t look out anymore. He didn’t want to see the shambling passengers waiting for the train that would never stop. Instead he walked back, to the last car on the train, trying to ignore the stench that made his eyes water, grateful that it wasn’t his turn to clean. Someone had left a small cosmetics mirror over the bucket, not that it did any good to care about your appearance here, where they’d not seen enough water to wash with in over a year. Keane had a full beard now, black and rough, and his face in the broken mirror looked foreign to him. He shook off and tucked in, then reached up to snatch the mirror down.

Subway trains weren’t meant to have bathrooms. But they weren’t meant to be lived in either.

Keane walked then to the front of the train, carefully closing and locking each door for each car as he walked through, frowning when he found one barely fastened. If the train was compromised, they needed to know that the other cars would be safe. He added the door problem to his mental checklist and kept going, nodding or grunting hellos to those he passed along the way. Eventually he made it to the driver’s compartment and inserted his key into the deadbolt, thumbing it open.

Once upon a time, terrorist threats had ensured that the driver’s compartments on each end were the most secure areas of the train, that no one could get in without a key, that the window was bulletproof and the door unbreakable. Keane barely remembered that time, anymore, when brown-skinned, turban-wearing terrorists were the thing they were told to be most afraid of. He remembered shooting some of them, in the desert, but it seemed so far away now.

He leaned against the open doorway, staring out at the barely lit tunnel stretching away before the train. Lynn (Tan Bench, 3rd Sleep Shift) sat in the driver’s seat, looking just as dreadful as he did, her once-blonde hair matted and tangled and a good inch-and-half of brown roots coming out at the skull. Keane supposed she might have once been pretty. Now, she was just Lynn.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

Keane shrugged. “Well as could be expected.”

This had been their standard greeting for the past nine months. They switched places, Keane handing over the key to the door. He would be locked in for his shift. Standard procedure.

“Anything on the radio?” Keane asked.

“Just repeats,” Lynn said. This, too, had become standard in the last two months, when the occasional bulletins from what remained of the government finally ceased to come.

“Got two of them last night, just standing there in front of the train,” she said with a grin.  “Trisected.”

Keane grinned and sat back in the seat, his arms behind his head. “They’ll have trouble getting up from that.”

© 2011 Jennifer L. Davis, All Rights Reserved.

When I have an idea that I love wholeheartedly, and I first start applying words to the blank page, they come easily.  It’s almost a euphoric period of nonstop keyboard-clicking where I can average over 1000 words in an uninterrupted hour of work, where the characters cooperate, the path for the plot and any subplot threads are as clear as the markings on an interstate highway.

This is the honeymoon. Everything is perfect and new, the weather is balmy and tropical, the sex is great . . .

Then reality comes crashing in like a hurricane, obliterating the pavement and any road signs, getting your characters stuck in cement-like mud where they don’t do anything but get angry at you for letting them get into this state . . . the excitement of the new story disappears.

Sometimes it’s gone for good. This is generally a pretty good indication that your wonderful idea wasn’t so wonderful to begin with, especially if the honeymoon period breaks fairly early in the story.

But one of the first things I had to learn when I turned seriously toward writing as a career, and something that was learned only after finding myself sitting on a massive pile of uncompleted manuscripts, is that you can’t let go so easily. You can’t give up on a story just because the honeymoon is over.

First, you have to learn to distinguish between ideas that were weak to begin with and the ones that deserve to have you pick them up again.  Generally, for me, this is a distinction between reading over what I’ve written after a few days break and my inner critic exclaiming either:  “Oh gods, this is awful, I’ll never be a real writer” or  “Oh, I wrote that! I’m awesome! I’m gonna be a gazillionaire!”

Sometimes finding the excitement again can be as easy as scouring Google’s image search database to create a collage of images representing characters or settings.  (“Oooh, yeah, Phoebe would totally rock that outfit.” or “Oh, these woods are just how I imagined the forest behind Sam’s house!”)  Collages and artwork are, for me, the marital aides of fiction writing. But making the story feel sexy and exciting again doesn’t always work.

Sometimes it takes more effort. Sometimes you have to sit down and read and reread what you’ve written to find that magic highway of rainbows and glitter for your characters to travel. Sometimes you have to dig the holes and replant the signs, and sometimes you get those signs put back upside down.  Start writing again, and you’ll get there eventually.

Sometimes, in the worst cases,  I have to scrap everything but the initial idea and start over again.

But if the idea is strong enough, the excitement will return.

So what are your favorite ways of finding the excitement for your story again after the honeymoon period is over?

Image by madamepsychosis via Flickr

I don’t talk about my works-in-progress.  I try to avoid mentioning my ideas to people, except vaguely and in passing, and then only if they ask.  Those that know me best have learned not to ask.

Why? I am not a superstitious sort of person. I do not think that I will jinx my project by talking about it. But over the years I have learned that talking out a project, discussing it and my characters with other people before and during the initial pre-write, or even telling anyone what I’m writing about seems to act like a needle to a balloon.

My enthusiasm for the project pops and vanishes into thin air.

After watching dozens of potential stories die a withering death in this manner, I eventually stopped telling people what I’m writing, beyond the vaguest of genre references. I keep it to myself. I keep the characters carefully locked away in my mind, and ensure that they know that the only way they’re getting out is to perform – to give me their story to tell.  Only when the story is complete can they be free to go and dance about in someone else’s head.

Keeping the story to myself means that I discover it as I am writing, rather than telling it to someone else and then never sitting down to actually write it down.  It is fresh to me, when I sit down at my computer and start typing. It is new and exciting.

Keeping the story to myself ensures that I don’t get bored with it before it is written. And this is key, because my excitement about what’s going on in the story infects the story itself, and I want my readers to share in that excitement. Writing a story I am bored with will only ever result in a boring story.

So I keep it secret. I keep it safe.

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Sometimes even when you think your latest story is going magnificently, it doesn’t turn out to be nearly as magnificent when you go back and read over what you’ve written.

Little things, most of the time. Big things sometimes. Like how I somehow managed to completely forget plot in the middle of my new story “The Boy Ran” and somehow wrote several nearly identical chapters that could be summarized by “We woke up, we walked, we went to sleep.”

I finished the story up toward the end of last week, ending up at somewhere around 42,000 words. I usually try to put a few weeks between finishing up a story and going back to read over it again, so that it’s new and fresh to me when I start the initial proofreading process.  However, this time I tried a new writing method where I didn’t go back and read over anything at all the whole time I was writing. I’d been having a lot of little projects that I’d started and never finished – generally because I start second-guessing myself about halfway through.

So, I refused to go back and re-read while the story was in progress. I would get it finished first.  And I did. If nothing else, this method has worked to ensure that my doubts didn’t get in the way of my writing.  However, it also means that this first draft is a lot less polished than I’m used to dealing with when I go through my first proofread.

For one thing, there’s those repetitive chapters, which have now been cut out almost entirely, except for a few gems of paragraphs and dialogue that I condensed down a great deal.  I just cut almost 20,000 words out of my story at one go.

So yeah, that novel? It won’t be a novel by the time I’m done with it, I don’t think. Going back over my plot and organization, I realize that this is a story that is probably best told in a short form anyway.  It’s a departure from my usual writing, particularly considering the age of the protagonist and the prospective audience.  It’s also set in a world that is extremely close to home, dealing with some extremely difficult subjects.

I know that it’s possibly one of the most honest and difficult stories I’ve ever written. Perhaps, like dark chocolate, it is a story best enjoyed in small amounts. The words are getting in the way right now.  I’m hoping that by the time I’m done with editing (and sending it out to my betas for their critiques) that will no longer be the case.

I think I got too caught up on hitting that big word-goal and lost the focus of my story in the process.  Sometimes a story doesn’t need to have a lot of words to make a point.

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(Spoiler-free Review!)

Start out by imagining Elizabeth Bennett. Add a hefty amount of steampunk, a few vampires and werewolves, and a good dose of wonderful sounding food and tongue-in-cheek humor. You might come up with something somewhat like Soulless, by Gail Carriger.

I would’ve known nothing at all about this unassuming little book if not for word of mouth, but it was a wonderful discovery. In the current literary world where vampire stories are a dime a dozen, and the majority of them rather decidedly bad, I found myself having to put aside a certain amount of suspicion of any book involving the supernatural.  Once assured that none of the vampires in the book sparkle (with, perhaps, the exception of Lord Akeldama, and that only with sequins) I decided to give it a chance.

I’m glad I did. This book was one of the most fun reads I’ve had in quite a while, largely due to the humor of the novel.  It has no problems poking fun at the tropes of the genres it straddles, while at the same time presenting them in new and rather refreshing ways.  Alexia Tarabotti is a heroine Jane Austen would be proud of:  an unconventional and independent woman in a society where free-thinking women were rarely welcomed. Like Eliza Bennett, she looks upon the women of her own family with amused annoyance as they natter on about fashion and society gossip.  Her male counterpart is a good bit more Heathcliff than Darcy, but a fitting match for her wits and someone who can appreciate a woman who can think for herself.

I couldn’t help laughing out loud at places, but don’t think that this book is all about the giggles.  At its heart are characters you can’t help but fall a bit in love with, a tightly written mystery story that never did lay all its cards on the table until the end, and a romance that is anything but Victorian.

If you like a little steampunk Victoriana and can enjoy a good supernatural story, be sure to pick this book up.

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