The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:
Characters: Pretty little devil and Stephen King
Genre: Alternate history
Setting: A boxing ring
Trope: Devil in my ear
POV/tense: Third/present
And the result:
Underground
“You know you want to do this, don’t you, Stevie boy?” she says as she strolls among the tubes and flasks in the workshop.
He wipes the sweat from his eyes. He’s burning up like never before. It must be some kind of fever, he tells himself. “Come on, Carrie, don’t be like this.”
She reaches him and she dances her fingers along the back of his neck. “Like what?”
“Like trying to get me to do something that, I don’t know, maybe I’m not totally sure I want to do.”
Carrie stretches her long legs out and Stephen stares at them, wondering how someone could be so damned beautiful. She catches him looking and she smiles, red ruby lips, black hair parted in the middle that falls past her shoulder. “Yes you do. Now say it after me.” She arches her back. “Say it, Stevie. Yes. I. Do.”
He feels the flush of heat all around him and he says, “If hell was like this I don’t think I’d ever want to leave.”
Her eyes flash. “Then say it.”
“It wasn’t enough that I left my wife and kid for you? It wasn’t enough that I left my career for you.”
She laughs. “What career? A schoolteacher?”
He sputters. “No. I was gonna be a writer. A good one, too.”
She gets on the floor and crawls toward him. She stops at his feet and looks up. “You know you want this. You know this is what you were really called to do, don’t you, Stephen?”
He swallows hard. He wants to look away but he can’t. He’s never felt passion like he does with her. He knows he can’t give that up. He knows he’ll never surrender. He knows it’s worth whatever price he has to pay. “Yeah, I do. I know it all too well, baby.”
Carrie climbs onto his lap. She straddles him and wraps her arms around him. She smells like sweat and sugar. She smells wrong and dirty and amazing and inescapable. “Promise me you will,” she whispers in his ear.
“Yes,” he tells her. “Anything you want me to do, I’ll do it.”
After an hour of heaven on the floor of the workshop, Stephen King, the Weather Underground’s latest recruit, goes to the Las Vegas Convention center where Muhammad Ali fights Ron Lyle and he plants a bomb beside the ring. Thirty four people are killed in the blast. Including Ali. Including King.
The origin story for my recently published piece, Envy, a User’s Guide (published here at Eulogy Press) is on one hand simple, and on the other hand, hard as hell.
Several months ago I took an online workshop on microfiction. What’s microfiction? It’s one of the latest in a series of subcategories of literature, mostly defined by length. You probably know of short stories and novels (short vs long). There are also novellas (longer than short stories) and novelettes (longer than novellas but not quite novels).
And then on the other end of short stories there’s flash, which is 1000 words or less. Now, writing a complete story in 1000 words or less is pretty damn hard. But you can go even shorter. With microfiction we’re talking about 400 words max.
(Disclaimer: there aren’t hard and fast rules. Surely people will have different guidelines for these lengths.)
I’ve dabbled in shorter than short. Like, 150-word pieces. I even got a 100-word story published. The thing is, at that length, you have to jettison just about everything that makes writing (and reading) fun: the color, the expansiveness, the luxuriousness, the flavor. And it’s HARD. I think the shortest story most people know is this six-word one from Hemingway:
Baby shoes for sale, never worn.
Great in terms of giving some heartache with the fewest words. But that’s about it.
Still, I took this online course in microfiction, and one of the things they stressed was using that constricted canvas to experiment, to let your story live in a borderless zone between prose and poetry. Get a little wacky.
So I decided to give it another shot. I went in thinking less about telling a traditional story and instead I viewed it as a way to convey a different kind of reality. The one I chose relates to my favorite deadly sin. Envy. I wanted to get into the head of someone who experiences envy as a crippling, phenomena. I wanted to present envy as a physical reality versus an ephemeral one. I wanted to get as close to personifying envy as Envy as I could without making it a literal person.
The hardest part of this story was the wordsmithing. When you’ve got only so many words, every one of them has to do a ton of work. I revised, at the same cafe, morning after morning, a couple weeks straight, to the point where I almost killed it (that feeling when you’ve wrung out every bit of originality and smothered all the life out of it). Apparently I didn’t, because some brave editor out there responded to it and published it.
Am I eager to take on another microfiction piece again? Not so much. But I did learn something valuable: don’t shy away from taking on a writing challenge. You never know when you can create a bit of art out of it.
We’re back for another round. The challenge: write a story in 20 minutes using the following prompts:
Characters: Heart surgeon and Astronaut
Setting: A wine cellar
Genre: Cozy mystery
Trope: A very cheap date
POV/tense: Third person future
And the result:
The Case of the Orange Feather
It will be Betty who first notices the safe. Open, with a single orange feather resting on the bottom.
“That wasn’t like that before,” she’ll tell Alex.
“What do you mean?”
“When you first brought me here, down here to this wine cellar, of all places…”
“Of all places, what do you mean by that?” Alex will say.
“A first date is supposed to be romantic. Dinner, candlelight. Not, mildew and hypothermia.”
He’ll slide up close to her and wrap an arm around her. “How could I ever impress the best heart surgeon in the county by dropping five Benjamins at a steakhouse. I know that a woman like you deserves better. So I figured I’d bring you to a wine cellar—I was on the space shuttle a decade ago with the guy who owns it—and we can explore a little.”
“Explore as crack open a bottle of something pricey?”
He’ll raise his hands in mock surrender. “Hold on now, these bottles go for a grand a pop. I don’t think so.”
She’ll grunt at him, deservedly so, but she won’t be ready to end the date, not quite yet. “What about the safe?”
“What about it?”
“I know for a fact it was locked when we came down here. Did your friend, this mysterious friend, come back in when you were leading me through one of the caverns here?”
Alex will scratch his chin. “No.” He’ll reach in the safe and pick up the feather. “Strange. My friend has a parrot back home. But I don’t think it had orange feathers. Or did it. Hey, do birds have orange feathers?”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly the lights will turn off. Betty will yelp and Alex will reach for her hand in the dark. She’ll find it and grab it. Then he’ll whip out his phone and shine the flashlight, revealing nothing but dark rows of dusty wine bottles.
Behind them, a crash.
“What was that?”
“I…I don’t know,” Alex will say.
“If this is some kind of practical joke, or scheme to make you fall for me…I know about how adrenaline can affect people, and I’m telling you, I’m not falling for it.”
“This isn’t a game. Trust me.”
Together they’ll walk closer toward the sound of the noise. They’ll turn a corner and see on the floor a busted bottle of 1901 Pinot Noir, the red wine flowing in a rivulet until it reaches a man’s loafer, and attached to the loafer a leg, and a body. While Alex shines the light on the man Betty will reach down and with her trained hands she’ll determine that the man is indeed…
“Dead,” she’ll say.
“I’m guessing he was stealing this prized bottle when he bit it,” Alex will say.
Betty will raise her hand to her mouth. “Who could have done this?”
Alex will hear a rustling from above. He’ll shine his light up and spot the biggest parrot he’s ever seen, the proof of what the parrot did on its claws and beak.
“Guard parrot,” he’ll say. “Who would’ve seen that coming?”
Recently I checked out the 2024 indie film I Saw the TV Glow. Ask me what genre it is and I’d have to take a moment. Somewhere in the dark contemporary fantasy camp. Not quite horror but wishing it could be.
First off, what it’s about.
High schooler Owen befriends an older student, Maddy. They bond over a cult TV show called the Pink Opaque, which is about two psychic girls who fight bad guys. Owen is too young to watch the show at home, so he sneaks over to Maddy’s house. Stuff happens. Maddy is a lesbian and Owen is apparently asexual (more on that later). Owen’s mother dies of cancer and he’s stuck with his ignoring father. Maddy runs away then returns claiming that they are really the characters from the Pink Opaque and have been trapped in this fake world, then she’s gone again and Owen is left to figure out what’s what for himself.
My overall take is that there are things I enjoyed about it. The movie had a fun retro indie shoestring vibe (I mean that as a compliment). It had heart. It was a little goofy and it played to the tropes. Also, the show within the movie, the Pink Opaque, was clearly a callback to one of my favorite TV shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including the font used in the credits, and a cameo by Amber Benson, who played Tara in Buffy (Fred Durst, the Limp Bizkit frontman, also has a very small role).
And I didn’t mind that the ending is left vague. In fact I liked that ending. And the writers earned it.
What hold the movie back, massively, is the character of Owen.
I’m of the camp that protagonists are make or break to your story. They don’t have to be likeable or noble or superhuman. They don’t even have to be relatable or identifiable. But there is one thing that every protagonist absolutely must have. He or she must WANT SOMETHING. It can be a small something (to go get a Slurpee) or a big thing (to save the universe from collapse), but there has to be something.
Poor Owen. He didn’t seem to want anything. Clearly he was disconnected from the world. He tells Maddy in a key scene that he doesn’t have any sexual feelings whatsoever, like he’s been scooped out hollow. If he was just a normal human like one of us that would be sad and probably a cause to get therapy. In a piece of fiction? It’s a huge red flag. It signifies your character is disconnected from his own wants and desires.
Now this could be a great launching point. How does that character reconnect with his internal desires? How does he take concrete action to fix this?
But that’s not what we get in this movie. Instead Owen drifts passively through life. His voice rarely rises above a whisper. His facial expression barely changes. Clearly this is a guy with some serious low-grade depression. Again, normal in the real world but do we want to watch this play out for two hours?
By the time we get toward the end of the movie, after Maddy returns and tells Owen that he’s really one of the characters from the Pink Opaque, trapped in this fake identity, we’re aching for Owen to do something, but all we get is nothing. Even after the climactic scene, the one where you can make a case that a) yes, he really is that trapped character or b) no, he’s just seriously mentally ill, Owen is back to being the same old mopey Owen we all know and don’t love.
Like I said, there was a lot of goofy charm to this movie. I really wanted to like it. But poor Owen left me not caring in the least what happened to him. So my take: give your protagonist a purpose. Give him a goal. Make us root for him.
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.”
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.
Read by Kevin 