“Each man makes his own shipwreck.”
>> Lucan
Unbelief: My First Short Story is Out
Achievement Unlocked! First publication.
I released my first short story, Unbelief, here on my website. Edit October 13, 2017: And now on medium.com. It’s about a girl who learns she can unbelieve things from existence. But what should she choose to get rid of?
Not a giant leap for mankind, but the first time I’ve officially put a story out for public consumption.
If you enjoyed, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Cheers.
Write Like a Pirate
Once you start seriously developing your writing as a craft, you realize you need more expert feedback than your mother can give. So you set your course and sail into the waters of critique. No matey, this is not a mythical land. But any critique group is populated by writers with deadly weaponry. Your well-intentioned critiquers will bear down on you, cannons blazing with a heavy shot of RULES!
As they blast their way through the hull of your manuscript, you might wonder where you went wrong. What dangerous waters have you sailed into? How can a good pirate like yourself save your manu-ship from total annihilation?
First, let me assure you that your first draft sucks. Everyone’s does.
Second, let me reassure you that it can be saved. And your creative side can be saved, too. How?
4 Steps to Dynamic Characters
I’m in the process of creating characters for the sequel to my first novel and I realized:
I don’t want to do what I did last time.
It was exciting, interesting, crazy, and took way too much time.
Like many people, I had a concept and a main character for my first book, and the excitement of writing and discovering her world made it fresh and fun. But now I know better. Writing, especially when you are actually trying to write well, is hard. I want to craft stories that are interesting, that resonate with readers, and that do my characters and ideas justice. Those are tall orders.
So what I did last time—let my characters grow organically and then edit like a maniac until my eyes bled—won’t work again. Not without me becoming alcoholic at any rate.
I need a process.
Where’s Your Flux Capacitor?
I guess the first question is really this: What is the Flux Capacitor?
Easy:
…it’s what makes time travel possible.
And that’s all you need to know.
What a great bit of storytelling! The entire Back to the Future franchise rests on the ability of Marty McFly and Doc Brown to travel through time in their suped-up DeLorean. But do we really need to know how time travel works? Nope. We just need to know that it does.
Therefore the Flux Capacitor makes time travel possible and it also makes the story possible. All without being explained in the slightest.
So the real question of this post is: What makes a story possible? What is it that a plot relies on to make all the action which follows it make sense? If you are writing a story, do you know what is special about your story which allows it to happen?
Buffy and the Disappearing Vampire
I’m a Buffy girl from way back.
The movie was the spark, but the show was the bomb! The seven-year series was creative, entertaining, enlightening, and sometimes controversial (perhaps one day I’ll post on the Willow-becomes-a-lesbian saga). Some of the storylines were not as strong as others, but there was always a compelling reason to watch the show.
One of the things Joss Whedon did brilliantly was to create the ‘disappearing vampire.’ When Buffy staked it through the heart – or managed some other fantastic kill shot – poof! Dust in the wind.
From a storytelling standpoint, this worked well because: