I’ve been working this past few months on short fiction. You wouldn’t think this would be such a hard thing to do, given my rate of production in the last ten years (almost fifteen novels, scores of book reviews, a few assorted nonfiction pieces, and all the blog entries, both here and on Dangerous Intersection), but short fiction is peculiar. Hell, anything is peculiar. If you’re used to writing one form, switching to another can be very difficult. There are some writers, I know (and some I know) who have no trouble moving between forms, but for whatever reason I do.
I feel as though some time in the last several years I’ve forgotten how to write a short story.
So after completing my last novel (the murder mystery) I opted to go back to short fiction. I finished The Drowned Doll in late March. Here it is nigh unto to the end of July and finally I’m doing short stories.
Last month I finished a story for Lee Martindale for an anthology she’s editing, got it in the mail, and she took it. Amazing what a sale will do for your spirits. This past week I finished the rough draft of a novelette and this morning I have begun another new story.
These last two are interesting in that I have no idea where they came from. Writers get asked with such numbing regularity “Where do you get your ideas?” that it seems to me occasionally I should print up small cards with the various answers to hand out. There is only one true answer—I have no idea!
Once in a while I can trace the germ of a story back to a couple of sources—an overheard comment, an article, something on television or the radio—and in the case of anthologies, it’s a bit simpler. The anthology is about X, ergo the story will be about X. The unique feature will be the way it’s about X, and that’s the whole point. The real guts of a story is in the execution, the approach, the viewpoint. Ideas are easy—so easy we often don’t even know we’ve had them until we start writing the story.
What you do with your ideas is where the action is, and that’s where the work comes in. That’s why when someone approaches us and says “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a novel. I’ll tell you what it is, you write it, we’ll make a fortune” we usually laugh. Thanks. Got plenty of ideas, friend. What is required is lots and lots of hard work! You do half the sweating, you get half the money.
Case in point is the story I just finished and the one I just started. In both instances, all I had was a title. The title of the completed one was a phrase I jotted down at the Dante reading group we attend. It just sounded cool. So a couple weeks ago, I sat my butt in my chair, opened a new file, typed in the header, and put the title up.
And stared at it.
About an hour of that and I came up with a first sentence. That sentence had the seed of the rest of the tale. I just started writing. With a few pages I had the basic concept fleshed out. I laughed, too, because I still have no idea where this idea came from.
Now, it’s a first draft and I already know it won’t survive the rewrite. But I needed to get this stuff down and out of the way before I could get to the meaty stuff.
So while Donna goes over it with her vicious red pen, I decided to write another new one.
Again, I opened a file, put all the top matter in, and typed a title: Decadence. (I know where that came from, there’s a copy of Jacques Barzun’s Dawn To Decadence right in front of me.) Okay, catchy title. Now what? There’s a lot to say about that subject, a lot has been said. I want to write a science fiction story below that title.
Stare at the screen.
Hell with it, walk the dog. We did almost two miles this morning.
And I sat down and wrote the first sentence:Â Lew heard them talking.
I know what the story will be now. I just have to build it. (No, I won’t tell you what it is, you’ll just have to wait.) But I couldn’t tell you where it came from. There are galaxies of loose-floating factoids in my brain and when I require them to they collide, join, recombine, coalesce. Sounds mysterious and miraculous, doesn’t it? Again, though, it’s sweat. I work hard to gather all those bits so that when I do need to come up with a story there are plenty of them available to at least start.
If I finish this one, I’ll start to feel a bit better about my program to recover my short story skills. It’s always a work in progress, a construction project.
So, on now to the task.