Tag Archives: short story

What Lies Beneath

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I always love reading authors introductions to short stories and sometimes find the inspiration for writing the tale more interesting than the story itself. And just so we’re clear, I don’t mean the opening line and/or paragraph of the story. I’m talking about the preface, and a well-written introduction in the right hands is like the director’s commentary or behind-the-scenes footage or Easter eggs on your favorite DVD.

The odd thing about me is I can’t actually write an introduction to my own work until after I’ve completed the story, which I guess makes it more of a postmortem than an actual preface. I think the primary reason is if I write the introduction first it feels like I’m writing the story twice, instead of offering a quick glimpse at the man behind the curtain.

On more than one occasion, I had no idea what served as the impetus for the story I’d just written. Not immediately anyway. It usually comes to me later, sometimes days or weeks, when I’d wake with the story and characters stuck in my head, unraveling plot and dialogue in my mind until I uncovered the parallels to some half-forgotten event.

They’re like finding buried treasure, aren’t they? Those memories stored in neurons on seldom traveled synaptic pathways. Which made me think about a new project. Normally I don’t write drama pieces, I tend to gravitate towards speculative and science fiction, religious fantasy and horror, but I think I’d like to write a collected book filled with nothing but prefaces. Inspirations for stories without including the stories themselves.

I haven’t quite worked all the bugs out of the idea yet and I’m not sure how marketable it would be, but some projects we write for ourselves and not the quick buck, don’t we?

— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

URSULA K. LE GUIN on an Artist’s Passion

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Ursula K Le Guin
The choice to train to be an artist of any kind is a risky one. Art’s a vocation, and often pays little for years and years — or never. Kids who want to be dancers, musicians, painters, writers, need more than dreams. They need a serious commitment to learning how to do what they want to do, and working at it through failure and discouragement. Dreams are lovely, but passion is what an artist needs — a passion for the work. That’s all that can carry you through the hard times. So I guess my advice to the young writer is a warning, and a wish: You’ve chosen a really, really hard job that probably won’t pay you beans — so get yourself some kind of salable skill to live on! And may you find the reward of your work in the work itself. May it bring you joy.

Ray Bradbury on Being a Sublime Fool

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To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Anton Chekov Addresses Adjectives

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Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. It is comprehensible when I write: “The man sat on the grass,” because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: “The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.” The brain can’t grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

George Orwell’s Scrupulous Writer Questions

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George Orwell

According to George Orwell, a scrupulous writer, in every sentence they write, will ask themselves these questions:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
  5. Could I put it more shortly?
  6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

What lasts in the reader’s mind…

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“What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.”

― Isaac Asimov

The 10 Rules of Writing Elmore Leonard Lives By

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From 1953 to present, Elmore Leonard, the king of gritty realism and strong dialogue, has written 49 novels, 9 screenplays, and more than a few short stories, so it’s fair to say the man knows a thing or two about writing. So, even if you aren’t a fan of his work, it couldn’t hurt to take a couple of tips from a man who’s been there, written that:

  1. Never open a book with the weather.
  2. Avoid prologues.
  3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
  4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
  5. Keep your exclamation points under control!
  6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
  7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
  8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
  9. Same for places and things.
  10. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

Almost makes writing a novel sound easy, doesn’t it? Truth is, it’s only as hard as you allow it to be.

Sally forth and be writeful.

How to Write a Great Story – 8 Tips From Kurt Vonnegut

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  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing

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  1. Write
  2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
  3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
  4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
  5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
  6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
  7. Laugh at your own jokes.
  8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.