Howdy, all.
Whew—can you believe the year is already half over? Time flies.
I hope y’all here in the USA had a great 4th of July. The fireworks in my area were more numerous than I’ve seen them in many a year, and they carried on strong well into the night—well past my bedtime. The reading of the Declaration ceremony with my family was wonderful as ever. I always enjoy the list of grievances the colonists had against Great Britain—almost any one of them seems like a good story prompt, and they are quite amazing to think about from that perspective.
The six-month mark is always a cue for me to reevaluate my yearly goals and renew my dedication to accomplishing them. I like to ask these three questions, looking forward:
What one thing do you want to do/accomplish before the end of the year? Or, put another way, what would you regret not doing or putting off for another year?
What are the milestones for that project? When do you need to accomplish each of those, in order to finish by the end of the year?
What’s the next step that you can take—today—to start moving in that direction?
For me, my goal is to write more stories. I haven’t lived up to my aim to release a short story each month—and that’s the one thing I’d regret if I never managed by the end of the year. It cuts into my novel writing time, but it’ll be worth it to have a half-dozen finished stories!
So—what is your big goal for the remainder of the year? Are you motivated more by the positive desire to do something—or by the threat of regretting something you didn’t do? Let us know in the comments!
Here’s to another six months of prolific writing. Let’s “get kraken!”
Strangely Enough…
I’ve always found the events in history to be stranger and more marvelous than most any fiction, and certainly the past several years seems to have borne that out on a massive scale. Who would’ve thought in 2012 that in the next ten years we’d see…well, half of what’s happened? Donald Trump becoming president, two years of Russian collusion investigations, impeachment, then a disputed election in the country famous for its system of government, gas prices tripling, the invasion of Ukraine, overturning Roe—need I continue?
All through the past several years, my constant refrain has been, “Not even a best-selling novelist could’ve written this.”
That is one reason why I love studying history as a writer. I’ve no interest in writing historical fiction—I’m not cut out for that level of mind-numbing research and fact-checking. But the twists and turns of historical (and even current) events are often beyond my capacity to invent, which certainly is worth looking into when you hope to create engaging, suspenseful, and freshly surprising stories.
It’s true that some things are predictable, or seem so in retrospect, but when you dig into most any sequence of events, and the characters involved, it just becomes more and more clear what a strange thing it is for events to have gone the way they did. Sometimes it seems miraculous—other times, tragic. But the same principle is operating in both cases: Life is weird.
The Exercise—Part II
Last week we began working on a narrative imitation exercise where we retell a historical event in our own words, striving for clarity and entertainment value (or “interestingness”).
If you haven’t already, pick your historical event, and put together a clear timeline of its actions. If you had time over the holiday weekend to write a rough draft, great! Gather your research, timeline, and draft together for the next stage.
The purpose of the timeline (and research) recommended in Part I of the exercise is to nail down the facts of the event, and its most logical sequence. That is how a story is clarified—made easy to follow.
The next part of the exercise is to mess around with the delivery of these facts and events to present them in the most interesting way possible.
This involves a lot of trial and error. (I may be working on mine for longer than a week… we’ll see.) The trick is to balance interesting with clear. Piquing interest and perhaps withholding information can’t make the reader confused.
The goal with both interest and clarity is to keep the reader moving forward through the text. If things aren’t interesting, the reader gets bored and stops reading. But likewise if things aren’t clear, the reader stops, maybe goes back to re-read something again—and their progress is stalled.
The Exercise Process:
To start, identify the most interesting moments in the events. A good way to find them is just to ask yourself: Why did you pick this historical event to write about? These moments should be the most interesting to you. They might be different for other people—and that can help your version be interesting from the get-go.
Then brainstorm ideas for how to deliver these moments. (See below for some starting points.)
Write (or revise) a rough draft using one of those alterations to your timeline/outline. Add in more one at a time to get a feel for how far you can push the story before the clarity breaks down. Or stick with one, and try different options. You may end up with a couple decent versions; pick the one you like the best.
And remember—we’re fantasy writers here. If at some point you slip out of the real events of the historical moment you chose…it’s okay to go with it. I won’t fact-check you.
Ideas for Adapting the Delivery:
As the writer, one of your superpowers is choosing exactly when and how a reader finds out information. That is the key skill in writing suspenseful or surprising—or even just interesting—scenes.
When is the last possible moment you can reveal that essential detail to the reader? How can you hide an important detail in the flow of other actions and events so that they don’t realize it’s important until later? How can you deliver this information so that it has maximum impact on the reader?
These are a few that I came up with in my own brainstorming. Feel free to add to the list in the comments below!
Start writing the story in the middle so the reader is racing to catch up with what’s going on. Fill in the most essential details from the beginning where necessary (in dialogue, flashbacks, etc). How much can you leave out and still have the story make sense?
Start at the end, then jump back to the beginning (or middle) and go forward from there. Readers are thinking: How on earth do these events end up there?
Since this is a historical event, the ending is already known. What part of the story, or character, or angle is least known? Emphasize that.
Which character knows the least of what’s going on? Make them the narrator.
Eliminate interiority (internal dialogue). Write the scene (or scenes) action by action, leaving the reader wondering at the end of every phrase what is going to happen next.
Move POVs around. What could you reveal to the reader through another character’s POV (or simple omniscient narration) that the main character doesn’t know? (This should make the reader worried about the character, or keep them wondering about something…)
As you write, remember interestingness happens on both a macro and a micro level. The arrangement of scenes and actions (which most of these suggestions focus on) is more of a macro level. But even on the micro level of single sentences or phrases, you can consider your delivery of information and how best to reveal it. Slip it in like a trick of legerdemain, “nothing to see here,” or hit the reader with it like a punch—or anything in between.
This is only an exercise, not a school assignment! Play around and have fun with it.
That’s all for this week, folks. Stay shiny and write on!
—AF