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.
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.
Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.
Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.
High fantasy has a long-standing tradition of borrowing from myth and religion, and anyone with even a surface knowledge of world mythology will see that right away reading Wheel of Time. I think I noticed some of this even when I read the books as a kid, but my current re-read coincides with a deep dive on world mythologies, making the familiar names and concepts stand out even more vividly than on my past reads through the series.
(Note: Thar be Wheel of Time book spoilers ahead—if you haven’t read the whole series and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now)
I’ve been reading novels in Spanish for about a year—successfully, at least. One of my main motivations to become fluent was so I could read Marquez in Spanish, and as a chronically impatient human, I made an aborted attempt at Cien años de solidad a few years ago, well before I had the skills to navigate it. I had to stop multiple times every sentence to look up words I didn’t know, making it impossible to just sink into the story; I set it aside after about a page.
