Story Puzzle

Mutual Support by George W. Hart

Hart's sculpture is based on what he calls a puzzle design. Each piece is made of an identical windmill shape. See it here. He notes, with no apparent irony, that assembling this puzzle-sculpture was "harder than it looks." Holy crap, I would say that it's exactly as hard as it looks!

"The story comes together as we discover or invent all of the pieces that we need."  

So says David Farland in his Daily Kick in the Pants post where he talks about story as puzzle. He explains that story ideas are better thought of a pieces of a puzzle, and that assembling a story has less to do with letting your imagination run amok and more to do with channeling it.

Then I read Stephen Pressfield's excellent post about why one of my favorite movies is such an enduring classic. He talks about making sure the stakes in your story align with the overall theme.

"Robert Towne’s Chinatown is about secrecy. It’s about things seeming to be one thing on the surface—and turning out to be completely different underneath. Chinatown is about duplicity and deception. Therefore the stakes and jeopardy must be about secrets. Their drama must be played out on a landscape of deception."

I have to admit that I'm not a big puzzle person. When I think of them, I usually think of "doing" or even "working" them. At least until a few years ago. When my oldest daughter was just beginning to get chatty in that learning-to-talk way, she would tell me that she wanted to "play" her puzzles. And we would sit together and assemble, for the nth time, one of her puzzles, the universe or the whimsical painting of Greek gods and monsters or the miniature landscape filled with anthropomorphized vegetables.

The problem solving and assembly wasn't work to her, but play. Of course the joy of playing puzzles is seeing the big picture slowly come together as you find each individual component and lock it into place. When you can fit things together to reveal a bigger picture, that's what people talk about when they say a work of art is more than the sum of it's parts.

Order vs. Chaos: Writing a Story a Week

Check out more Order vs. Chaos pictures here!

Order vs. Chaos, the Yin and Yang of creative life. I've always come down on the order side of things. I like revising  at least as much as writing. Around the house I'm a neatnick, which is just another expression of my compulsive need for order and routine. While my family may think my pick-your-shoes-up-and-make-your-beds habits extreme, in the context of previous generations, my standards are pretty lax. I don't wash the inside of the kitchen cupboards like grandma did, nor do I annually take down the curtains and drapes and wash them, and all the windows inside and out, like my mom.

Things have to be in order for me to concentrate.

Here's a story that sums up my family's housekeeping ethos: One day my grandma was visiting my mom and dad (she lived next door). She said she wasn't feeling well and walked across the lawn to her house. When mom checked on her a couple hours later she could see that the house had been cleaned top to bottom.

"I thought you said you weren't feeling well, why did you wear your self out cleaning the house?" my mom asked.

Grandma's answer: "A clean house rests me."

I know exactly what my grandma means by that. But when I'm writing, over and over I get the lesson that I must allow a mess. I know this, but that doesn't make it any easier. The only way to become okay with this is to practice making a mess. That's the biggest lesson so far from my story a week project.

Having a one week deadline, not just this week but every week, made me realize just how much I was revising during the first draft and how it can really screw up the CHAOTIC FLOW of the work. I can see now that whenever I hit a tough spot, I slip into revising as an avoidance measure. You know, I'll just tidy up a couple of these paragraphs or move some things around. Pretty soon all my writing time is gone, and I haven't moved the story forward from where it was the day before. Now, whenever I catch myself reading around and tidying up, I put my cursor back at the bottom of the page and force myself to work on the next scene, or any unwritten scene.

I've written two stories (not finished but ready-for-revision drafts) this month. This week I'm working on my third. Something that was supposed to be a flash story, but is looking like it will come in at about 3,000 words. Today it's still a mess, but that's okay.

Laundry's folded, let's get to work.

Change

Making New Year's Resolutions means that you want to make a change. One look at the Self-Help shelves in any book store and it's clear that everyone loves the IDEA of change, but real, meaningful change; we don't love so much. Because real, meaningful change is hard, and being creatures of habit, we resist it for all we're worth. Luckily, it's January and that means that there's lots of how to stick to your resolutions advice floating around the Internet.

I found a couple things that seemed worth a try. First, James Clear's post about identity-based habits talks about how important it is to change from the inside out. Every aspiring writer has heard that they should start thinking of themselves as a writer and calling themselves a writer. That's all well and good but Clear's advice adds a level of concreteness that makes all the difference.

After reading his example, here are my examples:

I'm the kind of person who writes 1,000 words a day

I'm the kind of person who finishes a story a week

If I keep doing this, then being the kind of person who sells stories will follow.

"When you want to become better at something, proving your identity to yourself is far more important than getting amazing results."

He stresses that you prove your identity to yourself with SMALL wins. Baby steps here, people. I think of it as, first overlaying your new identity onto yourself, then encouraging yourself to GROW into that person.

The small wins are important because of the need for PERSISTENCE. And, to help with that Lifehacker posted an article about Seinfeld's productivity secret AKA: Don't Break the Chain. 

Of course there's an app for that and I've tried it before, but this is just thekind of thing that works better analog. Actually making big red Xs on a paper calender is surprisingly satisfying. Here's mind so far:

My daily minimum is to write 250 words on that week's story. Once I write that, I can put an X on the day. If I write 1,000 words I'm adding a gold star. I have two gold stars on last Saturday because I wrote over 2,000 words that day. Who doesn't love getting a gold star? Again, very satisfying. 

So my first full week is nearly over an my first story of the "a story a week" in 2013 is nearly drafted. Win!

A Story a Week in 2013

Not every story will be a butterfly, so write more stories!

I have my ongoing writing goals and a queue of story ideas waiting to be written so I was debating wheather to come up actual resolutions this year. But the fact is, I kinda like making resolutions, even if only 10% stick, I figure I'm still in the black. Then I read Chuck Wendig's post pooh poohing the anti-New Year's resolutioners:

"This is of course the time of the year when frowny-faced naysayers tell you your resolutions are stupid and why are you waiting till today to make them and keep them, as if your today must conform to their today, as if your decision to evolve or change or Do Something is somehow offensive to them. It’s the same cynical thing you hear at Valentine’s Day — “I don’t need a day to buy flowers for my wife,” they say, which is true, but of course they probably don’t buy flowers for their wives on any other day anyway."

And that sealed it!

Not only am I going to make resolutions. I'll tell you about them so that you, fair reader, can hold me accountable. First, be sure to read the rest of Wendig's short, inspiring rant here.

Then on New Year's day, I stumbled upon Jay Lake's great essay where he gives his own four rules of writing:

1) Write a story every week.

2) Finish everything you start.

3) Don't self-critique while you're writing

4) Work on one thing at a time.

I think I'm ready to step up my game to produce a story a week, so I've decided to participate in Write 1 Sub 1 This year.

I am modifying this challenge since while I think writing a story a week is achievable, I agree with Lake that not all those stories will be keepers. So, I am resolving to write (i.e. finish) one story a week and to submit two stories per month allowing for a 50% success/failure rate. It will just about double my submission numbers which were closer to one per month last year. I like how Lake looks at his stories as inventory with the point being that you want lots of inventory.

I'm going to keep up with my daily freewriting with a timed piece of true free writing and a timed piece that is a story exercise from one my my many prompt books, games, apps, etc. This represents about 20 - 40 minutes of warm up activity - what any good athlete or musician puts in.

I will still be blogging every Thursday and might even post a flash story or three. 

Working the Problem: Guns in America

Saturn devouring his Son
by Franscisco Goya

I haven't been able to write a word of fiction since last Friday. I will return to my work, but today I'm hijacking my blog to talk about guns. My youngest daughter is seven and all this week, when I look at her, she is surrounded by the ghosts of those 20 massacred children and by the adults who sacrificed their lives for them. The heartbreak of their parents and loved ones has accompanied me on all my last minute holiday errands. I think of the horror and helplessness of the first responders and my heart aches for the whole broken community.

I feel like this nation is devouring itself. Like Goya's disturbing picture of Saturn (the Greeks called him  Cronus) who, fearing that his children would overthrow him, devoured them. The media is partisan, politics has devolved to brinksmanship. And dialogue or debate on any important topic is too often drowned out by voices that scream the same tired talking points, like accusations, at the other side. 

Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books begins to articulate our sick relationship to guns in his essay titled "Our Moloch"

"That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year). "

Attending the sorrow that I feel for those families in Newtown, and for those killed every day in America, is the realization that my inaction makes me culpable. 

In response to Newton The Poetry Foundation's Poetry Off the Shelf featured a poem by Dan Beachy-Quick. 

This is not a poem of comfort. 

The poem begins at about 3:40, but the whole thing is less then eight minutes long and the preamble is informative. In the introduction Curtis Fox explains that the poem draws from the Euripides play about Hercules where:

"A god inflicts him with the madness that leads him to kill his wife and three sons, it's not a tumor it's not his father, its a god. Hercules didn't recognize his family and thought they were his enemies. A chorus of old men looks on helplessly as they tell us what's going on, not unlike our media today."

It is a poem that looks at madness and murder. In it I see the madmen who reap mayhem in our malls and movie theaters, in our schools and holy places. In this poem I also see everyone else, all of us who everyday create the world we and our children live in. In it I see myself.

Chorus and Hero 

by Dan Beachy-Quick 

I have no interest in the extremes on either end of this argument. While we should be free to own guns, we should also be free to go safely into gun free zones. I believe that we can regulate ourselves as a society so that we do not have to retreat into a bunker mentality where every public space is filled with criminals, madmen and armed vigilantes. 

There are so many things that we cannot control in this world but there are many things which we can. We make the world for our children. To make a world worthy of them, we have to become adults.

Adults who participate in real and candid dialogue. The kind of discussion you engage in with others when everybody is interested in SOLVING a problem, not just getting their own way. We've solved many highly complex problems. That kind of invention, innoviation, and stubbornness is the American way, right?

"Wake up anybody you need and get them in here.

Let's work the problem, people.

Let's not make things worse by guessin'." 

-Ed Harris as Gene Kranz in Apollo 13

Gene Kranz working the problem

Thinking Deeply

This cake's done, but my story isn't ready to come out of the oven yet.

One of the things I forgot to list in my gratitude post was how writing stories forces me to think deeply about the story, about the world, about myself, about everything really. What I love about writing science fiction and fantasy is that it forces me to imagine what it means to be human in a universe populated with other - other what? With the Other. There's nothing like creating a world that is alien (either alien of our own making or otherworldly) and thinking how we would behave around those Others. 

This is the part I think of as cooking the story, and it's what I mean when I say the story isn't "done" yet.

"You're finished," my mom used to chide, "cakes are done."

Maybe I should call it baking a story. In any case there's a lot of head work before a story is "done" enough in my brain, by which means it has arrived at the point where I can begin writing.

It's why a lot of writing looks like this --

-- though most of it still looks like this.

How to start thinking deeply in genre:

In fantasy you must establish the rules of the world of the story. If there's magic, how does it work and more importantly what are the limits? Because there's the rub as Shakespeare would say. And it's the rub, the obstacles that the characters must overcome that give your story its teeth. In science fiction the rules and limits align with what we know of the natural world, sociology, physics. 

Just remember the reader doesn't really care about the rules, not the way you do Don't waste pages laying them all out, turning your story into an instruction manual. The rules matter to your characters. Decide them then internalize them so that the world of the story can become compelling to your reader through your characters' thoughts and actions as they moves through their world.

A New Genre Magazine: Deimos eZine

and a handsome cover too!

I am proud to have a story in this first issue of Deimos eZine. My story Fairview 619 may be familiar to you as it was previously at Revolution SF's website. That little story has legs!

According to their website:

"Welcome to Deimos eZine. Deimos comes from the Greek Δεῖμος, one of the many words translated as dread. Deimos eZine embodies dread in the stories we believe in, the artwork we showcase, and in the lifestyle that many writers lead."

I don't know if I have a "dread" lifestyle (as cool as that may sound), but I've started to read through this issue and so far I like the company. I'm looking forward to getting to know these other writers through their work. The editors have plans to make Deimos available on Kindle and Nook as well as in print. 

For the writers among you, they are open to submissions and are also running a contest for longer pieces:

"We accept longer pieces for the contest, up to 7,500 words, and the contest winner receives a monetary award and publication in the September issue in a special Contest Winner section."

Whether you're interested in writing or reading, go check out this new kid on the genre block.