What if the story is actually bad?

What do you do then? The first thing that I must admit is that I am a novel writer. When I get stories in my mind they are huge, sprawling stories that can span generations or at the very least, multiple books in a series. This brings me to rule #1 for writing a bad short story:

Rule #1 : Make it Epic.

If you want to absolutely, positively ruin your chances of having your short story published, then go right ahead and make it epic. Without a doubt, this is the rule that I violate most. I violate it before I even sit down to type. The short story in my mind is a scene or a chapter from some epic confrontation or vast story with hundreds of tendrils of plot and intrigue. I’m not ashamed to admit this – this is how I think as a novel writer. The problem with thinking like a novel writer is you’re going to come up with crappy short story ideas. My solution to this is to take the epic topic I’m thinking about and run it through the following filter: “What would Edgar Allan Poe do with this?” If the answer is chuck it, then heed that advice.

Rule #2 : Don’t Have A Point

This one is also particularly nasty for any budding, hopeful short story writer. If you want your story to fall flat (and there’s a reason I use the word flat), then make sure it doesn’t have a point. Leave your reader saying, “Great narrative, but, what’s the point? Why did I just read that?” The thing that drives a truly tight, crisp, powerful short story is a clear sense of purpose. Even if you don’t want you reader to know your purpose, you must have one. Your purpose can be as simple as “I want them to get to the last page and gasp when they see my surprise ending!” or as complex as wanting them to feel compelled to do something to save the environment once they’ve finished your story. Bottom line is that any editor, whether they can express this to you or not, will reject a short story that is not driven by singular purpose. Oh yeah, I’m guilty of this one.

Try out this little self-help test: If your short story started out with you saying (aloud or to your mind) to yourself, “Wow, this would make for a fantastic scene!” Then you could be in trouble. Short stories are not scenes and should never be thought of as such. Yes, I’m guilty of that as well.

Rule #3: Don’t Care About Exposition

This one is actually really important and can often take the most time and effort to get right for a given story. If you don’t particularly care about exposition or spend any effort thinking about the pacing, order, and amount of exposition in your story, then feel free to wallow in the rejection letters. (This may be getting tiresome, but yes, I’m guilty of this as well).

If you front-load your story with exposition and spend the first two pages with narrative explanation about what’s going on and identifying your non-epic purpose, you may have satisfied rules 1 and 2, but you’ve ignored rule 3. People who pick up a novel typically have a pre-conceived notion that it could take them as long as 50 to 100 pages (depending on the length of the novel) to become truly engrossed. With a short story you do not have that luxury. The reader will only give you a few paragraphs to hook their attention, not pages.

Likewise, if you spend no time at all on exposition and leave the reader absolutely clueless until the very end, they will have no concept of your purpose. They won’t know why you brought them along on this journey through your story and will be left feeling very unsatisfied… no matter what the ending, it will be anti-climactic because a confused reader is incapable of experiencing suspenseful build-up to a conclusion.

The hard part, of course, is to make sure you put just enough exposition to let the reader know enough about what’s going on to give them context so that as more information is revealed and action occurs, they’re following you on your trip through the story, eager to reach the end… rather than being pulled along clueless on a leash just to get to the end.

Rule #4: Don’t Revise

In your quest to build the world’s worst short story, you have decided to follow rule #4 and skip the revision process altogether. Sure, you might have edited a few paragraphs here and there, possibly cleaned up some awkward wording, but otherwise once you’d spewed your first draft, you were just polishing the edges.

This is one of the worst things you can do. The information that comes out of your head on the first draft is raw, unrefined, stream of consciousness. In this form, you haven’t considered that characters are talking about things they might not yet have encountered, you haven’t made sure that each character has a unique, appropriate voice, and you certainly haven’t made sure that the pacing of the story speeds up when it should and slows down when it should.

To do this kind of revision, I will gather feedback on the stream of consciousness draft (to which I often refer as “plot vomit”) from others and myself. I will get all the notes on all the issues people have had with it and print this draft out. Then, I will read this over so that I can remember most, if not all, of the editorial comments. Then, and this is important, I delete the first draft. Every word. Gone. I then start typing it over from scratch. I keep in mind all the comments I had, but at the same time, I’m keeping a thought toward refining the stuff I originally spewed.

After this new revision, I’ll repeat the process until I really like the way the story feels and flows. Then I will go back and line-by-line, word-by-word, edit the craft of the story – revise sentence structure, change word usage, find synonyms, remove cliches, etc.

So, if you take these four rules and apply them to your own short story writing, you might produce great narratives, but you will not produce great short stories. I’d been going along producing halfway decent narratives that often made the short list, but after having a good friend of mine take a critical eye to my most recent story, I have a new appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into writing a truly good story. Not only that, but the story with which I am nearly finished is easily one of the best I’ve ever written precisely because I avoided the pitfalls outlined in this post.

Certainly there are thousands of other pieces of advice that writers can give about making better short stories, but avoiding the pitfalls in this post helped me write some of my best short stories ever.

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I got up from my desk, and got about halfway to the kitchen when it hit me. It wasn’t the typical “I just got an idea for how I want to work the next scene” idea – those are fairly subtle and I file them away in Evernote on my iPhone so I don’t lose them. This idea, however, appeared before me and bashed me in the face with a Louisville Slugger.

To set the stage here, I’ve finished the outlining (word doc, index cards, and a table full of sticky notes) for my fantasy novel. I’ve written Act I, and am about 30,000 words into the book as a whole. When I’ve had a chance to write, I’ve typically been able to nail a 3k+ scene during that session. I have committed to this novel and I’m in no way feeling frustrated with it and have no desire to give it up.

The idea that hit me is truly unique. I spent several days googling and searching book store keywords for anything that resembled what I wanted to do – nothing. This new idea is not fantasy, but set in current times and will probably have a faster pace. It is also part of a genre for which more agents accept queries, that prints more books, that has a vastly higher readership.

So the dilemma : This story is now haunting me. During the day, the time my brain normally spends thinking about my fantasy novel is now mostly consumed by this new idea. This idea is far more character-driven and doesn’t in any way resemble the “epic fantasy” of my current project.

I have been told many times that dropping a WIP in the middle to pick up another one is one thing that separates published writers from “aspiring” writers. That said, this idea is haunting me and I’m not sure how to get that out of my head.

So, if you’ve ever had this problem – you get knee deep into a WIP you love and an idea hits you in the face and won’t leave you alone – what do you do? What techniques have you tried for calming the second idea so you can finish the first or have you actually dropped the first to finish the second?

I would love to hear how other writers handle this situation.

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One of my favorite places to get ideas for characters is Wal-Mart. Now, before you start throwing flames my way, let me say this: I am in no way demeaning that store or the people who frequent it. The reason that I like this particular store is because everyone shops there. If you go to a trendy mall, you’re only going to see a particular type of people at that mall. If you go to a salvation army store, the breadth of economic bracket of the typical consumer there is also going to be limited.

But, at Wal-Mart, you see everybody in one place – everyone from people on food stamps to a guy who drove up in a Benz. You’ll see mentally challenged people there with their case workers, struggling to maintain a hold on their independence and dignity in a world that shuns and degrades them. Single mothers (teenage or otherwise), bachelors, college students, parents with eight kids trying to save a buck here and there on the essentials, and of course, that guy who drove up in the Benz who wants to save a few bucks on the HDTV he’s putting in his 5th guest room.

If you want a reader to be able to sympathize and empathize with your characters, then you need to be able to do the same with actual, living, breathing human beings. People from different walks of life as you, people with problems you can’t possibly imagine, people with advantages you know you’ll never have.

What I’ve found really rewarding is going into a Wal-Mart and just watching, observing. Take a look around you, but not that cursory glance you normally give that is filtered with the blinders of your past experiences and your own preconceptions. Take the blinders off and look around you with fresh, objective eyes: the eyes of a reader waiting to be guided, thrilled, excited.

Take a look at the woman pushing the cart with her kid in it. What do you think her daily life is like? Is she happy? What do you think she daydreams about while she pushes that cart through the grocery aisles? What does she want out of life and what’s preventing her from getting it? Asking yourself these questions and filling them in with complete fiction is a great way to build your characters. If the fictional backstory you build for these people fits what you’re looking at, then it might also fit scenes you write for such characters.

Places like Wal-Mart (as well as thousands of other good places to people-watch) are endless fountains of ideas for characters. So, the next time you’re stuck looking for ideas for new characters or the ones you have lack dimension, then just get in the car and do some character shopping.

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I was thinking about this and suddenly came to the conclusion that my college professor was an idiot. First of all, this same professor “taught” us that using said as a default attribution is a bad idea and taught us a whole bunch of other things that an editor recently told me were all wrong. I am now in the process of unlearning all the garbage I was taught by this particular professor.

When I was a kid I remember taking one of those aptitude tests, the ones designed to tell you, based on your scores, what sort of future career you to which you might be suited. This test told me that I should pursue a career in “sanitation”. That’s right, the aptitude test told me that I should be a garbage truck driver. The moral of the story: I’m done letting other people tell me what I can and cannot do.

I firmly believe that if you have that raw spark (neurosis?) within that makes you a writer, then you can hone your craft, learn your tools, and produce great fiction. I think it is foolish and the greatest form of hubris to think that one can be a writer and never once pick up a book on how to write.

Imagine a musical genius whose instrument of choice is the guitar. The man can hear songs in his head that are absolute gems, pure musical perfection. Now, ask that musical genius, who has never lifted a guitar, to go and play the songs in his head. With the exception of a few savant types, this musical genius is going to struggle to play “Happy Birthday” on the guitar, let alone the complex songs in his head. He needs to know how to use the tool, he needs to learn the chords.

Knowing that, in the heavy metal genre, an A chord with the distortion cranked up will make your audience want to punch stuff (a good thing) is essential if you plan to compose heavy metal songs. You wouldn’t know that, regardless of your level of creativity, if you didn’t know all of the chords, how they sound, and the emotions they produce.

The same is true for a writer. We can’t create a page turner without knowledge of plot and structure. We can’t make readers cry without knowledge of characters and character bonding. We can’t make readers so immersed by our fictional world that they ignore the pot of boiling water and the pets with full bladders begging to be let out unless we have a mastery of plot, structure, characters, description, setting, dialogue, and every other tool in the box.

So I picked up a bunch of books on how to write. I’ve already read a few, including those by Stephen King and David Morrell,  but these books were down and dirty technical manuals for how to convert raw inspiration into truly readable fiction. I must admit that I ate quite a bit of humble pie in reading those books. Rather than being upset about it, I ordered about 10 more books. Every speck, every tiny granule of knowledge that I pick up teaches me to better hone my stories. The end result is a work of fiction that is not only more fun to read, but much more likely to be published.

So, to summarize: You can’t create music on the guitar without knowing the chords. You can’t create good fiction without knowing the techniques available to writers. Learn your Chords and your readers will thank you for it.

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What all of this means is that readers will put the book down if they don’t identify with, sympathize with, or want to be like, characters in the book. If the reader has no emotional investment in any of the people in the book, then they don’t give a crap about what happens to your protagonist. They won’t want to see the antagonist get his (or hers) in the end. They won’t care whether the love interest blossoms into a relationship. They simply won’t care – no matter how good the plot is. You can have a fantastic plot driven by flat, unbelievable, caricatures (not characters).

One of the things that I see a lot, especially when reading the fantasy genre is that an author will fail to make their character real enough by making them too perfect or sometimes even the reverse: too flawed. When characters reach an extreme like that they cease to be people with whom the reader can form a bond and become nothing more than an archetype. You could easily replace “Character A”‘s looks, personality, background, and name with an entirely new persona and the book would read the same way. This is because “Character A” is just that - generic and lifeless. They’re a placeholder, not a source of motivation or inspiration to the reader.

I’m not saying that this is a cardinal sin. No, if you look at the bookshelves of a Barnes & Noble on any given day, you’ll see countless popular books with archetype placeholders instead of living, breathing characters. Some readers can tolerate it.

If you think about your characters like real people then giving them a rich, full history filled with joys and sorrows, flaws and positive traits, becomes easy. Think about all of the things that motivate your character through the book – the history and life experience that pushes them to make the decisions they make. You could leave all of that stuff unsaid, or you could turn all of those motivations into chances to breathe real life into the character. What if your ultra-brave soldier protagonist suddenly has a burst of paralyzing fear because the sight of the enemy recalls some childhood horror? To me, that’s far more believable than a soldier who is brave and strong throughout the entire book. What if your main character has an addiction that they are constantly fighting and struggling with? Not only will millions of readers be able to identify with that problem on some level and immediately bond with that character, but it provides a wealth of opportunity for coming up with great struggles, climaxes, victories, failures, and plot twists.

The bottom line is this: think about all of your friends and family. Think about every single one of them. They all have flaws, dents, dings, cracks in the armor and skeletons in the closet. It could be an innocent skeleton like having a secret love of green frosting, or it could be the story of a childhood victim or someone who suffered through a terrible loss that effected them tremendously and changed who they are today. All you have to do is look around you and at the people you live with, talk to, love, and barely know and you will find a plethora of flaws, character traits, and histories that chisel your character into a real person instead of a bland, generic archetype.

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The three biggest offenders that will ruin your scenes are: Acts Against Motivation, Acts Against Rules, and Acts Against Soul.

Acts Against Motivation

An act against motivation is pretty self-explanatory. This is when a person (not a character, I hate calling them that. They are fictional people, characters are mockeries or shadows of people) does something in a scene either without visible motivation or worse, against their current motivation. Huge offenders in this category include a lot of fantasy. In many fantasy tales, characters go off on these world-saving epic quests without ever being properly motivated. For a lot of people this can be overlooked, but for some, seeing some farm boy leave home and everything he holds dear without proper motivation is a huge turn-off and enough to put the book down.

Every single thing every person in your story does needs to be motivated. They shouldn’t eat if they’re not hungry, they shouldn’t fight if someone in their position wouldn’t fight. When people move from scene to scene in a story without ever being properly motivated, what you have is a thin plot. Movies often take short cuts in the motivation area because they simply don’t have time to build up the proper motivation and most moviegoers accept that. A 700-page epic fantasy, however, should be rife with motivation and you, as the reader, should never ever doubt why a character did what they did (unless the author wants you to doubt it… but authors that can do that don’t have to worry about spinning motivation properly as they’ve already mastered it).

So next time you put down a book and have that strange, unidentifiable feeling of “this sucks but I don’t know why”, ask yourself if someone in the book just did something without any clear reason for doing so other than furthering the contrivance of a flimsy plot.

Acts Against Rules

This one is far more subtle. The more complacent the reader or viewer, the harder it is to spot these problems. Every world, fictional or real, has an internal set of rules that govern everything that can or cannot take place in that world. In the real world, these rules are simple:  the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, etc are the rules that everyone and everything must obey. In a fictional world, however, there is usually a second set of rules. These rules dictate how magic works, or what level of technology exists in the science fiction world, how strong people are, what the average person can do versus what the protagonists and other heroes can do. If someone in your scene violates the world’s internal rule set, everyone will immediately know it. The reaction may range from almost no reaction whatsoever to outright rage.

A standard plot tactic to enrich a story often involves hindering the protagonist somehow at the behest of the antagonist. The classic “villain traps the hero” scenario. This, unfortunately, is also where a lot of stories violate their own internal rules. Let’s say you have a character that is a master thief. This character is then captured and placed in an ordinary prison cell. Your brain expects that thief to break out of that cell and, if written well enough, you might even have been in suspense waiting for that thief to break out. However, if the author leaves the thief to rot in the cell while someone else breaks them out, you will feel disappointed. This is because the world rules were violated: thieves, especially protagonist thieves, can break out of ordinary confines.

Here’s another example. Let’s say J.K. Rowling throws Harry Potter with his wand into a locked room in a muggle house. If Harry were to spend more than 30 seconds confined in that room against his will, we would all feel disappointed because we know the rules, and we know that a muggle door is no match for a wand.

World rules can be an author’s worst enemy but they can also be a huge ally. Think about this: take that same ordinary prison cell and lock someone like Gandalf up in it. When the reader sees Gandalf not escape, the reader is likely to start thinking that something else, something bigger and more epic might be at play. The reader, knowing Gandalf’s true power and position in the universe, is probably thinking that Gandalf has something up his sleeve. None of that has to be explicitly told to the reader, the reader will guess that something is amiss because world rules were intentionally violated, or at least, appeared to be.

I’m going to leave this topic cut off here because I could spend several additional blog posts on the topic of world rules alone. Suffice it to say that if you trap superman in a wooden box and there’s no kryptonite around, your readers will stop reading.

Acts Against Soul

This one on the surface might look like an act against motivation but if you think about all of the times in all of the books where this comes up, a character often has to choose between the direction of motivation and the direction of their soul.

If someone in your story does something that is so completely against their true, inner nature then you run the risk of jarring readers out of your world and back into the real world. If you see a highly moral character turn and suddenly start butchering innocent women and children, there’s a problem. If a character who has consistently made choices to never sacrifice the innocent suddenly chooses a selfish path that hurts everyone around him, it can cause problems and halt the reader.

On the other hand, if you deliberately make one of your characters do something against their true nature, you can, if done properly,  use that to great effect. This is often called “hanging a lantern”. In other words, if you’re going to break a world rule (or commit one of the 3 illegal acts), you’d better hang a lantern on that fact so the reader knows you’re intentionally doing it and that it isn’t the result of you being a terrible author.

In my opinion, the scene in one of the (bad) Star Wars movies where Anakin kills all the kids in the school is a classic rule breaker. In fact, it breaks all three illegal acts in a single scene. First, it breaks the “Acts Against Soul” rule. I don’t care how much propaganda he’d been filled with, it should take a LOT more than we saw to convince a Jedi learner to murder innocent kids. Second, it violates the “Acts Against Motivation” rule. There is absolutely no clear motivation for him to kill the kids. You can tell in a blatantly obvious way that particular scene is nothing more than a contrivance to get the plot from point A to point B. Everything in that scene is a rule breaker. Finally, that scene also violates the “Acts Against Rules” rule. Given everything that everybody knows about Jedi, the Jedi homeworld, and everything they’ve seen up to that point, the fact that a pile of guards doesn’t immediately rip Anakin to bits once they discover what he’s doing is just inconceivable.

So, in conclusion, I always keep these three “illegal acts” in mind when writing a scene. Before I edit a single piece of grammar, spelling, or writing style, I double-check the scene to make sure that everyone is acting in accordance to the world rules, to their inner core, and to their motivation. If a character isn’t motivated or is otherwise breaking rules, I re-work the scene. To me, breaking any of these three rules means I don’t have a scene and I need to fix it immediately.

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