Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
Stories can come from the most unexpected places. Training yourself to pay attention to these small moments of inspiration can help you to find the stories that are floating around you in everyday life.
Case in point: even just your regular trip to the grocery store can be a goldmine of potential stories. Here are three prompts to help you develop that paying-attention-to-the-mundane muscle.
F. G. Haghenbeck 282 pages Oceano (2018)
Read this if you like: Magical realism, Mexican culture, speculative non-fiction
tl;dr summary: Frida Kahlo’s life story, mostly.
As a reader, you can feel the difference between a rounded and a flat character pretty quickly, even if you’re not sure why. Rounded characters are the ones you can picture having a conversation with, or walking down the street. They’re the ones with the power to make you feel—you might love or hate them, but whether you’re thrilled by their successes or infuriated with the decisions they make, the elicit real emotion when you read them on the page.
As a writer, figuring out how to create that kind of fully-realized character on the page isn’t quite so easy. But it is imperative to figure out if you want to truly immerse readers in the stories you tell…at least, most of the time. Let’s take a closer look at what makes a character three-dimensional, how to build that into your characters, and when you need to.
In Game of Thrones they’re mounts and symbols of ancient power. In The Wheel of Time, it’s the title and symbol of the Chosen One. Then there’s Smaug from The Hobbit, the dragons of Pern, the various species encountered by Harry Potter—and so on.
It makes sense that dragons are one of the most popular mythical creatures in modern fiction because they’re just as common in folklore and myth. Just about every culture around the world has some kind of dragon in its ancient legends—and, interestingly, they’re often called a very similar thing. Drage in Danish, Drak in Czech, Ddraig in Welsh, Dreki in Icelandic, Draak in Afrikaans, Dragun in French, Drakon in Greek—you’re sensing a theme here. Then there’s the East Asian cluster, with names like Long (Chinese), Naga (Indonesia/India), and Rong (Vietnamese), which might not look as similar on the page but still bear the signs of a shared source.
Just about every culture has its share of monsters, and whether they’re slain by a hero or said to be still haunting the deepest, darkest, children-shouldn’t-go-there-iest parts of their landscape, these creatures can be excellent fodder for the storytelling imagination.
Part of my mission during my recent deep dive into world mythologies was to learn more about some of these lesser-known cryptids, critters, and beasties. Here are some of the ones that most tickled my fancy.
I’ve been part of the same writing group for some ten years or so, now, and like many things in my life, I basically stumbled into it. I was at one of my usual bars, working on the novel I was writing at the time, and ran into a friend who’d just started a novel-writing workshop group. He asked if I wanted to join and the answer was—as ancient astronaut theorists would say—a resounding yes.
Obviously, there have been some changes since, as there are in any group that goes on for that long. We started off meeting every other Tuesday and every member would submit work for each workshop session. As people finished the manuscripts they’d started off writing, we started workshopping other things—short stories, poems, CNF, even some scripts and graphic narratives—and relaxed into a less rigorous submission schedule since not everybody had new stuff ready for every session. We had some new people join, other members who moved away. Eventually, we started hanging out on the Tuesdays we didn’t meet, too, which morphed into a weekly workshop. That changed into 3 monthly meetings once we started running the After Happy Hour journal, with 1-2 Tuesdays every month now devoted to editorial discussions, issue launches, and other journal-type things.
Juan Villoro (trans. Kimi Traubb) 136 pages George Braziller, Inc. (2015)
Read this if you like: Denis Johnson, Roberto Bolaño, Mexican culture
tl;dr summary: Magical realism without the magic in modern Mexico
There are always stories all around us, waiting to be told. Finding those stories is often just a matter of looking at things in new ways, taking the time to uncover the narrative within them.
That’s the goal of the exercises below: unlocking the stories that are inside objects you see and use every day. You can use them to start a new story from things in your environment, or picture the objects in your characters’ environment in a work-in-progress when you’re stuck in a story and not sure where to take it.
I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.
This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.
I’ve been cleaning up some relatively-new stories to submit to journals lately. I tend to overwrite on my first drafts, so this process of “cleaning up” usually consists mostly of cutting and condensing—sometimes removing entire characters and scenes that I realize I don’t need, other places removing words and sentences to give the voice the right rhythm and keep the story’s momentum pushing forward.
The ending is one place I consistently overwrite, especially when I’m writing a story that’s driven more by emotion or relationships than narrative. Even when it’s a plot-driven story, though, it’s not always obvious exactly where it should end, and just getting to the narrative conclusion doesn’t necessarily give it that satisfying sense of resolution that great short stories have.