They’re up!

Creative People Doing Creative Things: A Murder Mystery, by Gracie Fletcher

Look It Up, by Shea Joy

The Bizarre and Untimely Death of Margaret Spoon, by Elwood Gray

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

I am very pleased to post this guest essay by the indubitable Jeffrey Osier-Mixon, author of the award-winning short story, How To Roll a Perfect Cigarette:

There is an old saying that writers cringe when you ask them where they get ideas for stories. This hasn’t been my experience with writers in general, nor is it with me.

In fact, as fiction writers know, it doesn’t matter whether a story is true or not, or even whether it makes logical sense. We recognize good stories because of our humanity, not because of our training, skill, or talent. I think most people come up with ideas for stories all the time — as jokes or real-life stories to tell to friends, as interesting diversions, as instruction, as a reflection of one’s internal life. Storytelling is a part of every human culture. Narrative seems to be ubiquitously human.

The hard part is finding the natural boundaries of a story — where  it begins, how it unfolds, and where it ends. Some of the best writers have difficulties with these stages. There are many nuances of writing that can be developed and improved, as Victoria’s blog makes clear, but a story really need strong bones if it is going to hold together.

Being able to discern these boundaries take practice, but there are a few basics that have withstood the test of time. In the 1800s, Gustav Freytag, a literary scholar, analyzed Greek and Shakespearean stage drama and came up with what he called a dramatic pyramid.

This pyramid has five components:

• Exposition, in which the characters are introduced and the scene is set
• Rising action, in which the characters experience some conflict that needs to be resolved
• Climax, the turning point at which the resolution becomes inevitable
• Falling action, in which the conflict unravels and the resolution is presented
• Dénouement (from the French for “to untie a knot”), when all the loose ends are tied up

In writing stories, particularly short stories (3000-7000 words), I prefer to distill this five-act classic structure down into three stages: Beginning, Middle, and End. I like to joke that this is because I have a hard time spelling “dénouement”, but in truth writers were using this three-part structure for a while before Freytag — a long while indeed, as even Aristotle says in the Poetics, A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

The Beginning

Stories always begin at the beginning, but that point is not always where the writing starts. Anyone who has read Henry James knows that chapters can go by before anything of substance happens, even in absolute classics. So where does it start?

The story always begins when the main character does something that impacts the rest of the tale. Whether the story is long or short, you as the storyteller must know where the action starts and then work backward to find the shortest number of words you can use to get the reader to that point. Sometimes that point is zero and you leap into action, introducing the characters as you go. Sometimes, particularly in emotionally dramatic stories, the back story is necessary in order to understand the movement. But don’t get so caught up in the back story or in the descriptions that you lose sight of the actual beginning.

The back story plus the first action is what Freytag calls the Exposition. It’s the first act of your play.

In practical terms, sometimes you have to creep up on a story to find out where it begins. Start writing at a time point earlier than the action, ignoring the back story for now. If your narrative is about a day in someone’s life, start the afternoon before. You might discover that something important happens that evening. Be willing to experiment with the beginning, and be willing to write several alternates.

The Middle

Once things have begun to happen, they have to keep happening or the reader wanders off. As a species, we have a very short attention span.

Freytag calls this part the Rising Action and the Climax, the second and third acts. In a short story or a play, the action might well follow the classic rise to a climax shown in the pyramid. In a novel, however, and even in a short story, the rising/climax/falling theme might be repeated over and over in several small sub-plots, each of which moves the main story one step farther.

I think the important thing to remember in the middle, just as on a journey, is that each step is an important story in itself, as well as a step on the path toward your final conclusion.

The End

Endings are tough to locate sometimes. It is easy enough to locate an end to substantive action, but rarely does a good story simply stop. (There are exceptions, of course.) This is what Freytag calls the Falling Action and Dénouement, when the conflict into which you have taken your hapless characters is finally resolved, one way or the other, and any unsatisfied plot points are brought to a conclusion and usually explained.

Although Freytag’s diagram shows the End as equal in size to the Beginning, this is not always accurate. The End is typically smaller than the Beginning, just enough to drop the reader where the author wants, and this results in a skewed rather than a classical triangle.

The action stops at the End, and that is as important to remember as in the Beginning when the action started. Just as it is wise not to bore the reader with a ton of back story at the beginning, it is paramount to send them off with their blood moving.

Conclusion

So when someone asks you how you write stories, you can tell them there are only three things you have to really work on: the beginning, the middle, and the end. Other than that, storytelling is easy.

Jeffrey Osier-Mixon is a fiction author and senior technical writer. His short story, How to Roll a Perfect Cigarette, won 2nd prize in InterText Magazine 1994, and he co-authored The GNU Binary Utilities, iUniverse 2000. He presents on the subject of documentation and online community at Summits and Embedded Linux Conferences in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Please visit his webpage at: http://jefro.wordpress.com

I’m very happy to post this guest essay by the curiously refreshing Amy Carey, author of numerous articles on parenting, fitness, travel, and health:

I used to think writer’s block was a myth. Maybe writers got distracted or felt uninspired, but certainly they weren’t unable to write.

Then, for several months last spring and summer, I found myself approaching my laptop with every intention of finally producing a sentence, only to spend the next twenty minutes glaring at a blank Google Doc. Every time I attempted to get something down — even a blog post or an idea for an article — I would eventually wander away, having typed nothing. My belief in writer’s block was cemented after only a couple of weeks of drumming my fingers on my desk and yanking my hair out, strand by strand.

I finally broke through my block last October, when, desperate to get the words flowing, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (with little intention of completing the challenge; who can average over 1,500 words a day for an entire month?). I wasn’t even going to tell anyone about it.

Low expectations aside, I immediately found myself writing. And talking about writing. And blogging about writing. By the end of November, I had a lump of 50,000 words. The challenge of NaNoWriMo — I hate to lose — along with the novelty of writing fiction, something I haven’t done much since high school, fueled me through the month and a bit beyond.

Completing NaNoWriMo built my confidence as a writer; I could power through those nights when I felt less like writing and more like swigging wine and reading blogs. But the experience didn’t cure my writer’s block for life. I continue to struggle — sometimes daily — with putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. When I do, my inner writing coach spurs me on with a few suggestions for working through the block.

* Write something else. Whatever it is that you’re trying to write, it obviously isn’t working. Go a different way. Start a new blog, write a sappy scene for a romance novel, document how to cook cashew chicken. After you get some momentum going, if you must go back to whatever it was you were trying to write, maybe the words will flow more easily.

* Don’t think ahead. Put aside any thoughts about, “Who is going to read this?” or “Where is this going?” Wondering who will buy the essay you’ve just started or about all the obstacles that stand between you and getting a novel published only encourages writer’s block. For now, focus on getting something written.

* Change your venue. If your brain goes into hibernation at the sight of a blank page in Microsoft Word, buy a composition book and write freehand for a while. Or if sitting on the couch with your laptop inspires you to do little more than play Bejeweled and watch American Idol, go to another room or leave the house altogether.

* Take on a challenge. Don’t simply promise yourself that you’ll write for 30 minutes every night. Instead, find a writing contest to enter, compete with a friend toward a measurable goal, or at the very least, set a timer and write as many words as you can in a short amount of time.

* Deny your inner perfectionist. When every sentence seems to be coming out wrong, just keep going. You can fix it tomorrow. And for the love of God, turn off the spell checker.

Amy Carey is a full-time writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been selling freelance articles since 2000, inspired by her children, what she reads, and where she goes. Her work has appeared in Women’s Health and Fitness, Baby Years, iParenting.com, and Bay Area Parent. Amy is also an experienced technical writer who specializes in software documentation for end users and developers. She is a survivor of NaNoWriMo 2008. Check out her website at: http://www.amycarey.net/

I’m pleased to post this guest essay by the talented Gary Presley, author of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio:

I am very much a believer in the idea that writing both creates and destroys, a whimsically ironic perception I contrived long ago after I read “We Are Norsemen,” a short story by the novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Boyle’s narrator is a skald, a Viking poet, and the story chronicles a raid on the Irish coast. At the end of the raid, the skald destroys an illuminated manuscript in the presence of its monk-creator, an irony of the first order since the skald fancies himself an artiste, an intellectual among brutes.

What does writing create, and destroy? For me as an essayist and an author of a memoir, I think I create and destroy truth and illusion. Of course, it is sometimes painful to pull the rug out from under someone’s perceptions. A few readers of my memoir believe I fester with toxic anger. I don’t, if you’re interested. But I don’t care to disguise whatever anger lives in me. The anger is true. But at the moment not toxic.

That sort of writing doesn’t come easy. For one thing, the rug came out from under some of my own perceptions. For another, there’s an element of narcissism that’s less than appealing – too much thinking about who I am and what I want to write, about organizing the raw material, about writing it down, and about discovering what it is.

And narcissism can lie to itself if it is not careful.

And this leads me back to another writer who apparently influenced me before I knew I wanted to write: the black humorist Peter DeVries. Each time I feel as if the world has failed me – “How dare it!” – I remember a line from one of DeVries’ novels. “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

I don’t except myself. We are, every soul alive, flawed creatures. I suppose I am saved from disgrace only because I am thoroughly willing to dirty up my own self-image in trying to confront and explain what I know about the world. I’m even willing to appear “shabby” simply to confront the anxieties and insecurities of being alive, being mortal.

Here’s a thing you may learn while attempting to tell the truth: it is a fearsome thing, this living, this being human on our lost outpost circling somewhere within Infinity, and sometimes it is enough to cramp our guts with a visceral fear so dark that we might rip apart an illuminated manuscript in terror.

My memoir – Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio – was in fact an act of creation, an act of affirmation. What I didn’t know when I set out to tell my little story is that I would be required to abrade myself down to the point where elementary emotional qualities reign, to burn away illusions and then dig through the emotional ashes to find some sort of truth that you, the reader, did not know.

Of course, there is irony piled upon irony, for as the poet-prophet who penned Ecclesiastes wrote in his first chapter, “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.”

But like DeVries, I tend to prefer the sardonic, and so I will pair Ecclesiastes with that lost soul, Ambrose Bierce, who surely read the prophets thoroughly enough to agree, and then take it one step further as a writer should, “There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.”

All that’s fine, and I agree. I told no truth that had not been told before. In fact, I could be persuaded there is but One Story, a Truth which is made up of an infinite number of multiple stories. But I destroyed an illuminated manuscript in the process, one decorated with all the figments of my imagined reality.

In fact, I might offer the opinion that unsparing observation, both introspective and external, is the obligation of fiction authors as well, even if a good measure of the human psyche exists in mystery – in illusion – beyond the reach of art.

Gary Presley’s work has appeared in Notre Dame Magazine, the Washington Post, and Salon.com. His memoir was published by The University of Iowa Press, October 2008. Learn more at his website: http://www.garypresley.com