I am at the tail end of a One Story course on self-editing your short stories.  I’ve taken the material presented and some items from the discussion threads and turned them into a kind of checklist of things to look for when editing your fictional works.

You can find the like to a PDF of the current checklist on the “Write Minded” page where it says “Self-editing Checklist”.  It will likely get updated, so if you find it useful, you might want to check back now and then for a revised edition!

Yesterday I finished taking an online course through the fine people at One Story.  The course was presented by Assistant Editor Ann Napolitano and covered a “new way of looking at plot.”  The approach focuses on first determining what characters in the story are “missing” from their lives, and then proceeds to follow them through their search until they find what they are looking for.  It wraps up by teasing out what disappointments remain after their search is over.

The course was very good, and well worth the modest $60 fee.  During the discussion exchanges with other classmates, I learned about Pixar’s 22 rules for story telling, which I had not heard of before.  That led me to articles on the “Story Spine.”  Combining the Lost and Found approach with the Story Spine shed all new light on the novel I am currently working on, helping to isolate the most important characteristics of the story from the secondary, supporting ones.

Over all, a very good experience that added useful tools to my writer’s toolbox.  I’ll be adding them to the “Write Minded” section of my site as well as posting more specific to my use of them in future posts.

A two-sentence story:

The clockwork beast lay before me, thanks to the advisements of one Mr. Carroll, burbling fluids from the hissing gash I cut through its infernal iron boiler. This Jabberwock would wreak no more havoc, but how many more were even now whiffling through the mysterious, flaming, eye-shaped portal in Tulgey Wood, and I in possession of the only Vorpal sword in existence?

A two-sentence story inspired by the joy of seeing the sun after > 3 weeks of continually overcast skies:

The rain stopped and Rebekkah saw the sun for the first time since her wedding night. She heaved herself out of the earth and shambled off between the headstones to find a stream in which to wash the dirt from her ears and nose.

I won something!  In a drawing held by the inimitable Jeanette Andromeda over at HorrorMade, I won a choice of prizes, the most valuable and desirable of which, if you ask me, was a custom art piece by Jeanette herself.  I asked her to please draw Uncle Cato, a character from my novel-in-progress, The Last Tanuki, and sent her the passage where he shows up in the story and is described.  Of course it is awesome!  Here’s the passage along with Jeanette’s watercolor painting of her visualization of Cato (click it for a larger version):

Aria intentionally passed through a couple of sparsely populated spaces on her way back to her apartment to be certain she wasn’t being followed and arrived at her building without incident. She turned her key smoothly in the lock on her apartment door, pushed it open to slip inside, and then froze in her tracks on the threshold. Lying on her bed, propped up on one elbow, an ill-kempt tanuki in his 40’s looked at her over the newspaper she had left there and which he had been mindlessly perusing.

“Hello, Aria,” he said in a warm, nasally whine. Aria felt a shiver. For several long moments she could not find her voice, but just stood there, poised on the threshold between the danger within and the danger without, unsure if she should go forward or go back, and unsure which direction was which. The grimy tanuki in her bed waited patiently, a faint smile lighting his muzzle as the flickering candle light glistened in his splotchy, oily, black and brown pelt.

Uncle Cato

“Uncle Cato,” Aria finally managed in a thick voice. “What are you doing here?”

Cato eased his hind paws off the bed and sat up. “Well, now, is that anyway to greet your old uncle?” he asked lightly and smiled broadly. “No hug at least?” One of his upper cuspids was missing along with a couple of incisors. The rest of his teeth looked as if they wanted to leave his mouth as well. In fact, the whole of his body gave the appearance of trying to fly apart and escape him, but was held tenuously together against its better judgment by the will of his equally disheveled mind. Tufts of fur stuck out here and there, larger than the rest, all of it pricked and matted by a greasy film that coated every visible part of him in a slimy sheen that reflected the lamp and window light dully. A chip in his right ear made it look ragged, and his dull, black eyes tried to reflect the light in the room but failed, adopting instead a matte finish like scarred stone. He stood and pointed at the gently flickering candle flame with a splintered claw.

 “Quite a luxury, that,” he smiled. “You must be doing well for yourself.” He looked at her, still smiling. Aria didn’t move.

“It was a gift,” she said flatly, and then added, “You still haven’t told me why you are here or how you got in.”

He took a step closer, the same smile still entrenched on his muzzle as if his lips operated independently of his head and only knew one expression. It was a disturbing smile, not quite sincere, and not entirely natural, as though he were unsure of how to smile and was at just that moment trying to recall what to have his face do to make one.

He approached to within a couple of feet of her. His yellow and brown teeth stuck out at odd angles from under his absurd grinning. Aria felt her right hind paw stepping back into the hall and willed it to stop. Cato cocked his head slightly, his grin following, closed the distance to her, and reached up and around her with his dirty paws to take her into his embrace. Aria went numb as his arms wrapped around her and her snout was pressed into his filthy body. His fur smelled of rancid oils and fetid meat and whiskey, blood and death, and smoke. She gasped and yanked away, back across the threshold, retreating and pulling the door, but Cato deftly thrust up a paw and stopped the door dead in its motion and with the other caught her shoulder.

“Oh, no you don’t!” The creepy grin never left his face. “Not yet. Not if you want to live.” At that moment Aria was not certain she did, but the alligorian and the mephilian were still freshly lurking in her memory, and so she stopped, but did not return into the apartment.

“What do you want!” she demanded.

Jeanette is a talented artist in many forms and media, and I highly recommend visiting her in all of her online presences:

• http://horrormade.com
• https://instagram.com/jeanette_art
• https://www.facebook.com/HorrorMade

Here is my first attempt at writing a story in two sentences:

I walk, for now undetected, with a mimic of their emotionless countenance set like chiseled flint on my face while the terror in my heart races  beneath the drab, gray, requisite coveralls.  The cold, unforgiving sidewalk provides the solution: fill the empty cavities with concrete, leaving only the minor inconvenience of alone performing all those lobotomies.

I’ve was recently reading Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, and he has a nice outline of The Hero’s Journey, or Mythic Structure in a Three Act format, which I paraphrase here:

1. Act I
   1. Introduction to hero and his world
   2. Disturbance that interrupts the hero’s routine and/or a “call to adventure”
   3. The hero may (typically) ignore the disturbance/call
   4. The hero is coerced/enters into conflict with the dark forces [1st Doorway]
2. Act II
   1. A mentor may appear to instruct/guide the hero
   2. Encounters with the dark forces/a lot of muddling about/develop readers rapport/sympathy
   3. Hero must confront a weakness or fear or other ultimate low dark moment within himself that he must overcome.
   4. A talisman, usually with supernatural power or significance, aids hero in battle
   5. Final setup for the climactic conflict [2nd Doorway]
3. Act III
   1. The climactic, final battle is fought in a total knockout, usually in defeat of the dark forces
   2. The hero returns to the mundane in his own usual world

So I was poking around on the FA Forums to kill a few minutes, and I ran across this 3-month-old thread about how much description in writing, which caught my attention because I’d been thinking about it lately.  I thought this post by Ursa Maximus was really well put:

I think above all else, an author should stick to what they’re best at. Writing engaging visual description is probably one of the harder literary skills, so for most authors, less is more. But if you stubbornly want to get deep into it, there are definitely not just two types. There aren’t even just two ends to the spectrum of visual description.

None: The wolf stood in front of an office building.
The office building is not described, only named in a sentence about something else. It could look like anything. Who cares. This is not a choice to scoff at. It’s the easiest way to not screw up!

Vague: The office building was grand and imposing.
The office building has just an adjective or two flavoring it. Three artists would produce three very different pictures but maybe this is all the reader needs to know. The words do double duty, offering both visual and emotional content, while the text stays light and easy to read.

Factual: The office building was three stories tall, the façade mostly glass, situated in the center of a large parking lot.
Though far from complete as a description, everyone is imagining pretty much the same thing. Sterile though, no emotional content. If this goes on for paragraphs or if you do it too often, readers are gonna die of boredom.

Evocative: The office building looked cheap, like the kind of place you’d see on the news after a storm had torn off its roof.
No visual description is given but you can practically smell this place, with its damp air and moldy drywall. Hear the buzz of fluorescent lights. How clearly your vision comes through is a function of your skill as an author and the life experiences of your readers. So this type of description can easily miss the mark.

Metaphorical: The massive office building opened its mouth, consuming a stream of suited businessmen.
Who cares what this place looks like, it’s eating people to survive, man. Abolish the wage system. Prepare for readers to roll their eyes if you ham it up too badly.

Vivid: The office building stood, majestic, inconceivably tall, its upper floors cloaked in resplendent, gossamer clouds.
You can do great things by piling a bunch of multisyllabic words on top of one another until you evoke exactly want you want, both visually and emotionally. But again, you’re going to lose readers who just plain don’t know the words you’re using or, even worse, maybe you don’t know the words you’re using as well as you should.

I guess I shoot for a mixture of whatever seems right at the time, then edit aggressively until every single word is working in service of the story.

This page documents some things I found while reading other peoples’ works that I think stood out as lessons in greatness or lessons in mistakes.  I only cite authors if I quote them verbatim and if it’s not so bad it might embarrass them :-O

Errors of Their Ways

• I read a short story in the first person where the narrator used phrases and words that the ordinary guy off the street would not.  There was no indication of the narrator’s profession,  and nothing to indicate it had to do with word smithing, so the effect was to make the character himself unbelievable as a real person.  Thus his interactions with others became purely academic.

Great Ways

Shining Quotes

Sometimes it is helpful to see how your character would handle being in different situations to get a better idea of who he/she is.  Here are a few samples:

• Set your character up on a blind date
  How does he/she react to the idea?  What does he/she do to prepare?  What happens on the date? Afterward?
• Have your character deal with engine failure in a remote area
  Could be on an undeveloped section of interstate, or secluded rural road, or an uninhabited moon around some distant planet in another solar system.  Could be his/her horse dies in a desert.  How does he/she react?  What does he/she do to get “back on the road”

I’d like more ideas for scenarios I can put here.  Comment or email me (graowf@wolf.ishly.me) your candidates for inclusion.