Bringing back Trope or Choke, but this time live. The pressure’s on to write a story in 20 minutes.
The set-up:
Characters: A retired witch and a pimp
Tense: first person past
Tropes: Never too old for an adventure
Setting: Backstage at a concert
Genre: Historical romance
And the result:
Love Me Do
Her name was Lily. I knew she wasn’t supposed to be there. First she was old enough to be someone’s grandmother. And she wore this long black dress that reached down past her ankles, like something straight out of the 1920s. How she got backstage I don’t know but there she was, too close to Ringo, the kid was all bug eyed gawking at her, as if she put a spell on him, and for a moment I thought the girls I got him were all wrong. Maybe he was into older women.
I circled around the rear of the stage. The Beatles finished playing their first stateside concert not 20 minutes earlier. I still couldn’t get the screams out of my ears. I had it all lined up for them, two girls each, blondes for Paul, brunettes for John, they could take one or both, not my concern, as long as they paid cash money. But this lady, she was like a dragonfly buzzing around, regal and purposeful, and the last thing I wanted was for Ringo to ditch my girls, or I’d lose that fee.
“What’s your name?” she asked me. I didn’t know how she managed to get so close, like she suddenly materialized out of thin air.
“Rick,” I told her.
I’m Lily,” she said. “I know you from somewhere.”
I laughed. “I doubt you’re too familiar with my line of work.”
“Which is what?”
“Let’s just say I’m in the entertainment business. Listen, about Ringo, he has a prior commitment.”
“How entertaining,” she said. Then the stared at me so directly I had to swallow hard. I felt myself flush as she peered even closer, like she was opening doors and walking through each one. All around us people buzzed but all I could see was those eyes like green fields and suddenly I felt dizzy. I crouched down to steady myself and closed my eyes, the rush of people and clamor of voices hammering my ears and then it was all gone. I kept my eyes closed and kept my crouch and then she speaks to me.
“Yes, it’s you. We had a past life together. You burned me at the stake in 1542.”
I kept my eyes closed. “Lady you’re nuts.”
She laid her hand on my head and it’s the softest, most beautiful thing I’d ever felt. “But before that, many lifetimes, in fact, we were in love.” Then she sighed. “I thought I’d never find you in this lifetime. I retired, in fact. I gave it all up. But something told me to come here, to see these Beatles, and I did and I’m so glad. Open your eyes.”
I rose slow and unsteady. The rush of voices was gone. All I heard was birds and running water. When I opened my eyes we weren’t backstage anymore but in a sunlit forest, and Lily was young and beautiful again. She reached up and kissed me. “Let’s go, Rick. We’re never too old for an adventure, that’s what you always used to tell me.”
What should we do with the era of Covid? As a society? As writers?
It’s an understatement for sure to say that it was a difficult time. I look back in anger, and maybe not for the reasons that you might, and that fact makes reckoning with that time period all the complicated–we probably see different villains.
Nevertheless, as writers, our lives bleed into our work. It better to some degree, unless you want writing that’s sterile.
With that said, back to my original question – what do we do with the Covid era? I touched upon it from a distance in my recently published story, One More Darrell, by zeroing in on the isolation of the main character (isolation being one of the Big Bads of that time period for me).
I’ve heard chatter that writers SHOULD be incorporating the Covid era more concretely and directly into stories. Fine, do that. I likely won’t read it. I don’t want to be reminded of it. Forgetting is the best medicine (weird cliche but go with it). Unfortunately (or fortunately) I slipped up and read Emily St. John Mandel’s time-hopping novel Sea of Tranquility, and while it is not about the big C per se, it hits on epidemics. Hard.
Luckily, Mandel, who wrote the mega-successful Station Eleven, is talented enough to push me past my resistance. Also, it helps that it’s not a story ABOUT pandemics. It’s about rips in the fabric of space and time. It’s about people from different eras sharing a common experience. And it asks what is the real nature of the world we live in?
Sea of Tranquility opens with a British nobleman migrating to Canada on the eve of World War 1. He’s a lost soul in the sense that he’s purposeless, and he stumbles on a strange incident in the forests of British Columbia he stumbles upon a strange incident that leaves him forever changed.
From there the novel time jumps ( from the 1910s to the 1990s-2020s, the 2200s, the 2400s, and back and forth). We meet characters including a novelist, Olive Llewelyn, and a time traveler named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. To explain more of the plot wouldn’t do this book justice (and frankly it’s not so easy to explain without giving it all away). But I will say this. At its heart, Sea of Tranquility is a time travel story. I love time travel stories, but they’re damn near impossible to pull off (the series Dark did it well, so did the movie 12 Monkeys).
But Mandel manages to do it, successfully. She ties together all the back and forth and the here and there that ranges from cities on the moon to the forests of western Canada. It’s a small story; it’s not about the end of the world, or saving the world, or anything like that. It’s just about a group of people who become tied together across space and time through a series of events. Lives are lived and lost and remembered. Sea of Tranquility is a quick read, it has a compelling storyline, and the characters are drawn well.
But I’ve got to knock a star off of my review, and the reason why comes back to my question way at the beginning: what do we do with the Covid era? In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel harkens back to the particularly paranoid aspects of that time, and while it all made sense in the story, it ripped me right out of the book. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time spent reading it. Time travel plus beautiful prose is the key to my heart.
Story ideas are all around. You just have to open your ears. You can find them in all manner of places, including a pub in Ireland in a town called Renvyle on the Connemara coast, a pub called Paddy Coynes, small and dark and warm, which would’ve been smoky in another era, over a pint of Guinness, naturally.
That’s where I first came up with the idea for my story, The Two Burials of Francisco Collins, recently published in Folklore Review.
I was in that pub with my cousin and his wife. We were spending the weekend in Renvyle celebrating their tenth anniversary (they were married there, not the pub but the town), and that night over that pint my cousin’s wife told me of an Irish documentary about a man in Ireland whose body was buried twice. The documentary is called Con Carey and the Twelve Apostles, and I never got around to listening to it (probably will today after I write this) but it gave me a hell of an idea for a story.
An idea that stuck. That’s what good ideas do. They stick. Often I’ll tell myself I’m going to use something I hear or see in a story, but oftentimes it doesn’t stick. This one did. The premise was simple enough, but the question I needed to confront was this: why would a person be buried twice?
For that I went to one of my neglected literary loves: magic realism. The king of that is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and truth be told I’m woefully deficient in my knowledge of magic realism, but to me it’s a close cousin of speculative fiction. It deals with events that are fantastical and improbable or impossible in our world, but totally in keeping with the fictional world in which they occur.
That’s my baseline for this story. In it, an old man recounts the true story of the events surrounding the two burials of the title character, a patriarch of a ranching family, and what led his son, Xavier to do what he did.
So the documentary gave me the idea, the genre gave me the vehicle, and for the heart of it all (every story needs a heart) I went to my own.
It’s been several years since my own father was killed in a plane crash, so I drew up my own personal experiences and feelings around his life and death, our relationship, and I funneled them into this story. Sometimes things get complicated. Sometimes people are complicated. Sometimes relationships are complicated. And truth be told it’s not always easy to reveal some personal things. But that’s my job as a writer: to put it all on the page, to leave a piece of myself behind, for the reader to see, for the world to witness.
Here’s the latest entry in the structured, timed prompts series. This one’s called Person, Place, and Thing.
The set-up: take ten minutes to write intensively about a thing, a person, and a place (that’s ten minutes for each). And then, take another ten minutes to weave all three into a story. The purpose behind this exercise is to develop descriptive skills, to learn how to really get into the language behind whatever it is you’re writing about.
Here are my results:
Thing
No one knew where this lighter came from. There were no identifying markings on it. No made in China or USA or wherever such things are fabricated. No name. Not a single word to place it somewhere in the universe. It was larger than most lighters typically are. It felt meaty, solid in your palm, like something forged for a king or a queen. Its case was gold, not pure gold but steel colored in gold, or so one assumed. On one side the image of a dragon with ruby stones for eyes, its scales raised as if it longed to break free of its metal prisons. On the other side was a heron with a slender neck and long beak that jutted out to a sharpened point. Its feathers felt light to the touch, almost. If you stroked your finger along them you might think they were real, as if a bird could be shrunk and trapped in metal. Its lone eye visible in profile was a purple gem.
The lid sat tight on its hinges, with two fingers needed to pry it up, the light wheel so finely serrated it almost felt like silk, and it glided with just a flick of your finger and sent a spark that blinked and sputtered, and then the flame, uncontrollable and ravenous and shooting up inches into the sky, so bold and cruel that if you held it too close to your face it would singe your eyebrow clean away.
Person
Molly wasn’t a crier, that’s what she always insisted but she knew in her heart it wasn’t the truth. She’d only cry alone, in her bedroom, the place where she could lock the world out, the place where she could see herself as she believed herself to be: old at 45, too old. She wore clothes that never quite fit her right: too tight in the middle or too loose in the shoulders, never hugging her hips as she believed they should, but always colors, the bolder the better, a dare to herself; she never wanted to be looked at, but she insisted she needed to get over that silly insecurity, though she never did. Hair that never fell just right, light brown that frizzed with the slightest humidity, resistant to any product, hair in a constant state of rebellion, a rebellion that the teenage Molly never dared to partake in.
She considered herself not quite pretty but not quite plain. But there was one thing she appreciated about herself—appreciated more than loved—her eyes, wide and violet, an almost unreal color, blue edging close to purple, and with those eyes she compensated for the litany of shortcomings that looped through her mind. She used her eyes to capture people. Tame them. Her eyes made friends of enemies.
She’d tell herself out loud that she could heal all those old wounds that never seemed to stay closed, that she needed to, and she’d wring her hands together until her joints burned. But even with all of this she managed to hold on to that one bit of crucial hope that despite the past, the future would be hers, her lined and unlipsticked mouth set firm with a smile.
Place
Somewhere in the distance a fire burned. Smoke not unpleasant but somehow rude, filtered through air that carried the scent of the sea. Just a few people sat out here on this beach with sand so fine-grained that it almost felt like water, sand that seemed as if it would swallow you up but not with any evil intent but with love. The water lapped the shoreline with slow rolls that emanated a hum, rhythmic like a heartbeat that pulsed along the sand and reverberated through your body. A smattering of palm trees weak and lonely edged the sand behind you, and behind them, the lights of the houses, eyes that stared at the ocean that stretched out into a black infinity. Every so often a voice would carry through the night, a woman’s shrill laugh, a man’s rough bark, these noises alien and jarring, interrupting the calm, breaking something precious. Figures moved near that distant firelight, jostling and rolling and shifting, so distracting that you’d have to blot them out from your existence and focus solely on the warm breeze and the fell of the sand and the sheen of salt that hugged your skin and the forever ocean that whispers to you that there’s so much more to this world than what’s behind you.
And the story
Truth be told Molly hated that lighter. It belonged to her grandfather, and he willed it to her thinking that he’d done her a favor but she couldn’t help see it as a curse. It was bigger than a normal lighter, gold but not real gold, weighing heavy in her hand. She did love the dragon on one side. When she was a girl she’d named him Clyde and imagined that this red-eyed beauty would break free of its metal cage and swoop out and burn everything down, everything except for her, of course. Or that the heron on the other side, with its one eye a purple so close in color to her otherworldly eyes, would fly free and carry her off to that secret kingdom where she was originally from, the one she belonged in. She’d named the heron Matilda.
Still, she hated the lighter because it was the last remnant she had from her own family but she could never get rid of it. She stared out at the ocean, so black and calm and endless. She felt the pulse of the waves as they lapped the shore in time with her own heartbeat and she wished she could stay on this moonlit beach the rest of her life, her frizzy hair be damned. The world would just have to get used to her wildness, then.
She caught the scent of the bonfire, far away but not far enough. Who were they? Those happy people laughing and shouting, moving ghoullike in the glow of the fire. She considered going up to them, luring them in, making new friends but she declined. Not this night of all nights.
It was a necessary thing, she told herself, and she would cry about it later. Perhaps. But she’d only do it alone. Not in front of anyone, not ever. She cradled the lighter in her hand and on a whim she pried open the too-stiff top and flicked the light wheel and watched the flame soar and flicker and she shone it on her bare ring finger with its band of pale flesh and she felt no sadness, no regret. She hovered the flame close to her skin, just enough to feel the heat but she had no intention of hurting herself. She vowed she wouldn’t do that to herself, ever. She was single, once again, as she always should have been, perhaps. She closed the lighter’s lid and let the moonlight coat her and she stared out into the black sea that promised her some new forever.
You might recognize that song lyric. If not, it’s from Britney Spears’ song Hit Me Baby One More Time. Believe it or not, that lyric was the inspiration for my story, My Loneliness Is Killing Me, which was just published in the literary magazine Periwinkle Pelican (note, you have to download a PDF to read the story, but it’s free).
So how’d this one come about? Actually it originated from a very common phenomenon: when you get a song stuck in your head, no matter if you’re a fan or not, and it gets lodged in your brain and plays on repeat. FOREVER. Until it vanishes. Usually it’s a Bon Jovi song for me for some reason (not a fan, but I don’t hate them).
This story came from that. As luck would have it, on that particular day I didn’t have much to do. It was a Saturday. A beautiful day. A HOT day. So I went into Manhattan and bummed around with that lyric repeating in my head.
And an image. Of someone day drinking. Wasted and wasting their life away.
The weekend before I was with a bunch of people drinking and we watched the Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You. I’m not a rom-com fan but the idea of romance was still thick in my mind. As I walked around the city, this story came to life for me. I would run the lines through my head and then stop at random points and scribe lines into my phone. At one point I passed this white hipster guy who had this perfectly styled mustache, just short of cheesy, but great all the same, and I knew that his mustache had to be a part of my story (which it is).
By the end of my sweaty sojourn through the city, and after a few frozen margaritas (hence the Slurpee reference), I pretty much had the story all written. It’s short and fierce and I’m immensely proud of it. It’s not the type of story I usually write–nothing supernatural at all in it–but it’s loads of fun. And I have to give credit to a great writer, whose work I was reading and whose freewheeling style was most definitely an inspiration: Bud Smith. Check out his great collection Double Bird. His writing taught me you can be ridiculous as long as you’re getting to the guts of your character.
And my favorite part of this story? The opening line: Fuck off, Britney.
Here’s a new exercise: power prompts. These are timed exercises that center around a specific writing theme. This one was about Character Perspective, which is what a specific character is seeing in the story. This contrasts with Point of View, which is how is the story being narrated. [NOTE: There are three POVs: first person (I), second person (You) and third person (He, She). But this prompt was solely about Character Perspective.]
And the prompt itself: in five minutes sketch three distinct characters. Then, in thirty minutes insert them in a city cafe on a rainy afternoon where they witness stabbing.
Here are my results:
The Characters: Callie, 35, with her toddler in a stroller, she’s stressed about her job, very type A personality. Her toddler is acting up while she’s on the phone with her sister who’s upset over her fiance’s suspected infidelity. Callie doesn’t have the energy to deal with her sister but she’s trying her best.
Justin, 21, is falling behind in his classes. He’s thinking about dropping out of college – money’s tight, but he doesn’t have any plan b besides wanting to go surfing in Hawaii, and he doesn’t know how he’d tell his father, who’d kill him. His father always makes him super nervous. Even thinking about that conversation makes him sweat.
Marissa, 17, she’s run away from home. She’s sleeping on the couch of a friend of her cousin’s. Her mom’s drinking has gotten out of hand and she can’t be around her anymore. She has $700 in savings and she’s trying to think about what kind of job she can do. She definitely can’t go back with her mother, and she refuses to get stuck in the foster system. She’s not afraid, just determined to get her life started out right, on her terms.
And the Scene:
Marissa wished she had an umbrella. It wasn’t one of the things she even thought to shove in her backpack. Not like she woke up yesterday thinking, yeah, mom’s gonna be on her worst bender ever, so you better pack all the things you’ll need for life on your own. It was after the half empty Jameson bottle went flying across the room and nearly hitting her head that she decided to bolt.
Lucky for her she found a couch to crash on. One week, they told her. One week was more than enough time. As long as the dickhead behind the counter would stop making the millionth flat white and give her the time of day to hand her an application. She could do barista. She could do anything. Anything to stay out of mom’s and anything to stay out of foster care. Six months she’d be eighteen. Nothing could touch her then. But she needed A JOB.
“Listen, all I need is an application,” she told him.
“Okay, give me a minute,” he said, looking through her, looking over her. She pulled up a stool and sat herself right at the counter. She would make him see her, make him give her the time she needed. Five minutes past. The line kept growing, flowing. Then it stopped as a woman pushing a baby stroller, a kid bucking and squirming inside it, cell phone propped against her ear, complaining about her cappucino, about it being too cold or too milky or something, and that baby fussing and whining.
Marissa swore to herself she’d never have kids. Well, at least not until she was old, like 30 or something. Bored and eyeing that barista dude, who was way over his head, sweat stains spreading along his underarms, she went over how much cash she had left. About 700 bucks. Wait, I bought pizza last night, she thought. She deducted that princely sum, and that was when she heard the scream.
It sounded like a goat. She pivoted her head, slow motion, and there, at a table by the door, was a lady dressed in an tan raincoat and Uggs. Her hair was all stringy and wet and her makeup was a mess. The lady reared up and that’s when Marissa saw the knife. It was a steak knife, the kind you get in fancy restaurants. The lady stood tall, then she slammed the knife into the table. Marissa heard a squelch and a scream, a real scream. Then the squirt of blood. That’s when Marissa decided she’d be better off working in a CVS.
God Justin hated this job. Never in his life did he dream of making fancy coffees for people who could barely even look him in the eye. Hey, but it paid the bills. Barely. College wasn’t cheap, and as he made some wall street finance bro his double mocha macchiato, triple red eye and passed it over to the guy who stood glaring and drumming his fat fingers, that’s when it came to him. He’d quit college. It wasn’t a choice. It was a knowing.
But then one of his panic attacks threatened to bite him in the ass. Dad will absolutely murder me, he thought. Nobody had a father as terrifying as Justin’s. That he was sure of. But this knowing. He had no choice now. That’s the way his mind worked. He tried to reason with himself, talk himself out of it, and he got so lost in this that he forgot about the waiting cappucino. He looked up at the angry girl, the one who’d been pestering him for an application, and he could feel her judging him for being such a shitty barista. He took a breath and shook it off and gave the lady her cappucino, and not two minutes later she was back at the counter, insisting it was too something.
But he wasn’t listening. Tanya was back. Tanya came in sometimes, and it was never good. She looked a mess, more a mess than usual, and she was bothering some old guy sitting near the door just drinking his coffee like any normal person. That’s when he saw the switchblade in Tanya’s hand. He ran around the counter and watched her raise that switchblade in the air. He bounded over a stroller with a crying kid and nearly tumbled to the ground. But before he could reach Tanya, she’d slammed it onto the table.
Justin couldn’t ever remember hearing a person scream so loud.
The last thing Callie needed right now was another of Alicia’s messes. Her sister had the worst taste in men, and Callie long ago vowed to stop giving relationship advice to someone who’d never take it. But here Alicia was again, crying on the other end of her cell about her cheating fiancee. Callie yes’ed and sure’d her, hoping Alicia would take the hint and hang up. She didn’t.
All Callie wanted was a damn cappucino and a few minutes of silence. This was supposed to be her day off, exploring the city with her two-year-old Susannah. But the rain wasn’t letting up and Susannah was fussy beyond belief and then of course there was that presentation she had to wrap up later tonight and now Alicia. She rocked the stroller and listen to her sister bitch while spitting out her order, only to get her cappucino from the vacant surfer dude barista and sip it and find out that it was already lukewarm. Plus, too much foam.
“No, no, no, this will not do,” she told him. Alicia snapped at her. “Don’t tell me how to live my life.”
“No, not you. The coffee,” she said. But Alicia kept on being Alicia, all woe is me. Callie tried to hush Susannah who refused to sit still in her stroller and tell that dopey barista what exactly he did wrong, convinced he was most likely high, when she heard someone yelling, a woman, and then all of a sudden the barista was out from behind the counter pushing past her and nearly falling over Susannah in her stroller. Callie lunged forward instinctively and raced after him to give him a piece of her mind, when she saw the woman, not homeless but definitely something, and the knife, so big, like a goddamn machete. The woman had one hand planted on the table and she raised that knife high and then slammed it into her own hand.
Between the crazy woman screaming, the barista frantically patting at the blood, and Susannah launching into a royal tantrum, Callie decided the best course of action was to head straight back home and crack open a bottle of Cabernet. The last thing she did before scooting past the bloody, writhing woman was hang up on Alicia.
Someone once said books beget books. I can’t find out who. I thought it was Virginia Woolf, and since I read and really liked Mrs. Dalloway, I’ll go with her.
In my case, short stories beget short stories, or more specifically, a throwaway line in a story included in an anthology on time travel was the seed for my short story, One More Darrell, which was published in the anthology Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Three.
I tried to find the exact line and the story it appeared in but I had no luck. It was something about a pill that let you experience a moment in someone else’s life. That struck a chord in me, so I got to work writing.
A brief flashback: I wrote this story during the height of the Covid lockdowns. I’d spent a lot of time on my own in my house drinking too much and lost in the online world. So just like most of the world. That whole experience left me with a profound sense of disconnect. Again like most of the world. And I began to reflect how we as humans tend to lose ourselves in other people’s stories, everything from fiction to theater to movies and TV, porn and video games, even social media to an extent where we become not so much ourselves but a curated persona.
And I also thought of the story in terms of one of the seven deadly sins: envy. It’s a seductive trait. That person over there has a better life than you do in some way. Imagining what they feel like with that benefit, with that gift, with that luck or skill or talent or blessing, can feel great. But it also cuts you off from your own life.
This is the framework I approached in writing One More Darrell. It’s about a near future where you can take a pill that lets you relive a perfect day or hour of someone else’s life. The pills are named. Some are more popular than others. Our poor narrator can barely manage the stress of his life without popping one pill or another, and his fave by far is Darrell. But his world begins to fall apart when he learns that Darrell is going to be discontinued.
This was one of the easier stories for me to write. It came to me pretty quickly, it was fun to write, and it connected with something in my life. Win, win, win. Not all stories are like that. Most are a hell of a lot of work. Hard, hard work.
And to all the so-called writers out there who don’t read fiction, you’re missing out on a universe of inspiration. Go pick up a book and read it. You never know what story will come out of it.
When thinking about writing this piece you’re reading at this very moment I struggled to find the correct word to use to describe a specific type of incident. Every word I could come up with felt wrong, and for a writer, that’s one of the most frustrating feelings.
So I gave up searching for that perfect word and kept on working the concept for this piece in my mind and then I sat down to write it, which is actually similar to the writing process for my recently published short story, Splinter, a tale of brothers Nate and Hud and their tangled dependency.
Here’s where I got stuck. November/December 2023 was interesting for me. I had three events happen to me in quick succession, three intense events. Each one on its own was something to handle. The three piled up led me to write Splinter as an outlet for what I’d experienced.
Now, what to call them. My first go-to was Trauma. But that word is so overused in our current society, it’s become a cliché. If everything can be traumatic then nothing is really traumatic. Incident? Police procedural Events? Bloodless. Nothing seems to fit.
So I’ll switch over to the three things (ugh I hate that word) that led me to write Splinter. I’ll skim over the first two, for personal reasons. One involved a family member over Thanksgiving that painfully plucked at old childhood strings. The second involved a night that included shrooms and whiskey and a friend going through some serious shit, probably among the strangest nights I’ve experienced, which is saying a hell of a lot if you know me.
The third was a garden variety street attack I experienced, where I was slammed to the ground by some asshole. I landed on the concrete on my back, upper left side. He was long gone when I got up. I felt fine. I think I even laughed. The next day and for a couple weeks later I had a sharp pain in my back. I told myself that violence is just a part of being a man in this world, of being a human. In other words, cope and denial.
Mostly I can handle pretty much anything that’s thrown my way, at least that’s what I tell myself. But this triplet pile-on began to claw at me. My dissociative skills were having trouble managing them, so I turned to my what’s been my salvation: writing.
The concept of Splinter is an ancient one. It has its roots in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel: two opposite brothers who (can or) cannot coexist. The challenge I gave to myself was as follows. First, incorporate all three “events” to some degree. Second, thread the needle between realism and speculative fiction. Third, take a panoramic view of the lives of Nate and Hud.
None of this was easy.
First lets get to the technical challenge. Rather than focus on a single event, I chose to lengthen the story out and follow the brothers over several years. I jumped back and forth through time. I interspersed Nate’s “splintering” with his recounting events in the past with a part of the story set in real time. Not easy. What I did was develop different styles for each of the three sections in order to make it easy for the reader to know where they were at any given moment. This took tons and tons of work. Any writer who says that writing is easy is either not good at it, a liar, or incredibly blessed.
Regarding the speculative element, I absolutely love writing spec fiction: light horror, contemporary fantasy, sci-fi, anything with an element of unreality in it. I love how there are fewer limits on your imagination. I love the playful aspect to it. Could I add a speculative element to this story without cheapening it? I chose a very subtle approach (some might call it cheating). I embedded some speculative options, sort of a choose-your-own-adventure take on this story, letting the reader decide for themselves. I’d say it worked: this is the quickest turnaround I’ve had from writing a story to getting it published.
What about the emotional aspect? My primary goal was to work through those three events I’d experienced. How did I do that?
By being as honest as I could bear.
No story is successful unless you get to its heart, and in order to do that you have to cut through flesh and bone and bleed. You have to go to the most painful points. You have to leave blood on the page. That’s what I set out to do here. Most of Splinter is fiction, but some of Splinter is fictionalized, if not factually then emotionally. No, I do not have a drug-addicted brother, but I could transpose sets of feelings that are true. No, I did not witness (or have) a breakdown at my father’s funeral but I could connect feelings of abandonment.
And to me, that’s what successful fiction is: embedding your words with feelings that are true, even if the events are not.
A couple years ago I read the collected fiction of Flannery O’Connor, all of it, her short stories and her two novellas, from start to finish. She’s a master, and what she taught me is that you have to bleed on the page. You have to go to those places you don’t want to go. You can incorporate and reconfigure your own biography in your fiction.
Readers can tell when there’s something real on the page, and after all, isn’t that what we all want from the stories we read and listen to and watch– to feel something real?
Read by Kevin 