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I have a habit, bad or good, I’ve no idea, where, once I’ve written something, I read over it several times, almost obsessively, trying to imagine what some other reader would think of it. I’m not sure why I do this, and I’ve always felt at least a little silly about it, but there it is.

Last night I finished the first draft of the prologue of my novel. It’s not long as prologues go, and from experience the chance that it will end up exactly the way it is in the final product are slim, but after I’d written the last moment, which I had been quite excited to get to, I immediately started reading it from the top. Each time I went through it I tweaked a bit, changing a description, adding detail, correcting a word or a spelling, but the tweaking wasn’t why I reread it.

As I said, I had been very excited to get to that last moment while writing it out and I think I wanted to assure myself that I had led up to it properly, that it was sufficiently startling. Getting to that moment was why I’d actually started writing at all. I’ve been doing a lot of background work for the novel, imagining people and places, deciding on conflicts, living through the cycles and thrusts of the story, both viscerally and philosophically, but the starting off point, the thing that propelled the story into motion had been missing. Last night I realized that I had it, that it had been there for a few days without my knowing it, so I sat down and wrote what lead up to that moment. In the process, my two main characters started breathing a bit more.

As I write, when I write like that, when the story is becoming complete somewhere in my subconscious, I know where it’s headed (of course I do) but on some odd level I experience the writing as if I were reading someone else’s story for the first time and I want to see how it turns out. That’s not completely accurate, but I’m not sure I can describe it exactly. I can say that, when I’ve done good preliminary groundwork building, writing it down is, or at least can be, a thrilling experience. Perhaps one of the reasons I reread a piece so often right after I’ve finished it is to keep that feeling alive longer before it inevitably fades.

In any case, as I reread it, I decided that I liked it. That it is a fine beginning, as far as it goes. That it nicely sets things up, but in a way that isn’t obvious. I don’t think that moment, the one I was so keen to get to, is nearly as startling as I’d thought it would be, but I also now think it needn’t be.

Now I need to complete the groundwork for the next bit, which is rapidly getting to the point in my head where it must also be put down.

(To see all the posts dealing with the novel Old Magic, click here: http://www.tipsonwriting.net/blog/tag/old-magic/ )

If you are writing stories from your life, there are may reasons to fictionalize them, or at least fictionalize elements of them. I’m going to briefly focus on three:

1. For your benefit
2. For the benefit of the people you’re writing about
3. For the benefit of your reader

We’ll start with the most obvious, for benefit of the people you’re writing about.

For the People You’re Writing About

The old cliché from the television show Dragnet that ran from 1951 through 1959, “… the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Often, though, just changing the name might be insufficient. Consider: You are writing a story about an experience that your child had. If you simply change his or her name, but leave the locations, characteristics and circumstances the same, it will become very obvious to anyone who cares to look who the model was. The child will grow up and feel violated by the story. I rather doubt that a parent would want to make their child feel violated.

In this case, I recommend changing enough that the essence of the story is still there, but the particulars are imagined as if the entire thing were a fictional story you’re writing. If your child is named Bill, consider changing it to Janice. This will immediately remove the story from specifics that will embarrass the child.

If the person isn’t a child, some of the same things might apply.

For Your Readers

When you write something from your life, you are crammed with information about the incident or incidents. There are things that happened in real life at the same time that aren’t really directly related to the incident. There are steps that happened that are really inconsequential to it. It is very difficult to edit these things out because it feels like a violation of the truth and you are telling the story, after all, because it is the truth. (I realize the irony, but I say that by fictionalizing it, you are telling a bigger truth.)

By giving yourself fictional elements, you must then really look at what the point of the story is, what beginning, middle and end that would express that point and what people you need for that. It becomes much easier to edit a story that you aren’t as invested in. In reality, the third and fourth time your teacher screamed at you were as awful to experience as the first. For a reader, however, the first and second will probably be more than sufficient to get the point across and more than that might make their mind wander. (Don’t look at the numbers, here, look at the point itself. I know you wouldn’t be all rigorous on my math, but I must say that for my own sake.)

Here is where fictionalizing can be powerful for the reader.

For Yourself

The parody of the Dragnet quote is, “The names have been changed to protect the guilty.” This was funny through about the mid-sixties, but it is important, here. Besides the benefit for you of making it easier to edit, fictionalizing your story will make it much less likely that you will be sued, or, at the very least, harassed by someone you have exposed or profiled.

This is not a small thing.

As I said, this is a brief discussion of why fictionalizing a story from your life might be effective or wise. These are not rules. (You may have noticed that I don’t much like rules when it comes to creativity.) So forget everything I just said and go write your life.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a19)

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This is my penultimate post in Connie Green’s 30 day challenge (I’ll end with 31 posts.  I’ve always been an overachiever.  Okay, a teacher’s pet.  You can say it.)  Because of this, and because I’ve already covered Beginnings and Middles, today I’ll talk about endings, and use Mr. Shakespeare’s title without compunction or permission.

What is an ending?  That is where the ultimate consequence or result of what is set in motion in the middle is realized.  (The ultimate consequence can be implied rather than explicitly described.)  Again, simple.

Endings, however, in life and in stories, can be varied and can be confusing.  They can be unsatisfying and they can be thought provoking.  They can be trite, they can be abrupt, they can be sentimental.  Some are happy, some tragic, some, contrived.  Like in life, some are perfect, some are messy.  Some stories, The Lady or the Tiger by Frank R. Stockton is a prime example, end by very consciously not ending.  Don’t be fooled.  Even that influential story has an ending, it is just rather enigmatic.

Endings can also be circular, where they lead back to the beginning.  They can be the beginning, as in Pinter’s play Betrayal or Christopher Nolan’s movie Memento.  In both these examples, the beginning explains everything.

Often, stories will end at a new beginning.  The hero will come home, look around at his life, then look out his door at the new possibilities and adventures awaiting him.  (Hollywood loves this kind of ending, because it leaves the possibility of a lucrative sequel wide open.)

Many writers, notably O Henry and Guy de Maupassant, end their stories with a completely unexpected twist.  This is a very satisfying, but not easy, technique.  A twist that makes no sense is worse than a cliche ending.  A twist has to make sense, given everything that has lead up to it.  If you can master that, however, you will be a master story teller.

Some writers, especially beginning writers, will often be tempted to resolve every issue in the story, and resolve them completely.  The cliche way to say this is “tie everything up with a neat bow”.  This is unnecessary.  It is also rarely satisfying to the reader.  Resolve your main conflicts if you must, but you can resolve them with a question rather than with an answer.  This can leave the reader thinking.

Just because the ultimate consequence of what is set in motion are realized, it doesn’t at all mean that it is all necessarily resolved.

I’ll end this essay about ending with a quote from novelist Jerry Pournelle.  “And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg… we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is.”

If your reader wants to know how things come out, in the end that’s a good story.

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

P.S. Listen to the replay of our tele-seminar on the process of writing – go to http://CreativeWritingStrategyTips.com/

A few days ago I posted about beginnings of stories, which can actually happen in the beginning, the middle or the end of the written work.  Now let’s look at the middle.

Often, I’ve heard that the basic reason that much writing doesn’t quite work is “the muddle in the middle.”  I think this can be true.  A writer will have a great idea for a story, will know where it starts and know where it ends.  He will write a great beginning, and a good or great ending.  But then he must get from one to the other and is often confused as to how to do that.

First, remember that confusion is a very high and powerful state to be in.  Don’t fight it, celebrate it.

Then, there are things you can do to help you on your way.

What is the middle?  What is set in motion in the beginning progresses and develops, often in unexpected ways.  Again, pretty basic and simple.

The middle is also most of your story, not just the middle third of it.  This intimidates some writers.  Don’t let it intimidate you.  You’re the one in charge of the beast and your story will thank you if you take the reins firmly.  To stretch a metaphor a little.  Which can be fun.

So what do you do?  First, step away from the computer and do some imagining work.  You’ll need to know your characters.  You’ll need to know your settings.  Imagine them well before you start to write.  Give them quirks, if you want.  The characters, I mean, not the settings.  Although giving the settings quirks might be fun, too.

Once you’ve imagined them, write down what you imagined.  This is for you, just notes, not part of the story itself, although much of it may end up in the story.

Once you’ve done this, if the getting from A to Z still doesn’t become clear, throw some circumstances at your characters (or settings.  Or both) to see how they would react to them.  Again, this is just for yourself, but again, a lot of it could influence your story in very interesting ways.

The main piece of advice I have, however, once you feel you know your people and where and when they are sufficiently, is to imagine the unfolding of the events of the story.  Live through it in the senses of your mind.  Feel the events, smell them, hear them, see them, taste them.  Do this before you are actually writing it all down.  If something occurs to you in this imagining, make a note of it, but keep imagining.

Then just tell the tale you’ve imagined.  This will be the basis of the story, and, since you’ve come to it organically and have personally experienced it yourself, anything that is missing will become obvious.  The muddle will melt and the middle will move meaningfully forward.  To use too many alliterations.  Which can also be fun.

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

P.S. Listen to the replay of our tele-seminar on the process of writing – go to http://CreativeWritingStrategyTips.com/

It’s a new year, and as such, I thought I’d talk a little about beginnings.  The western notion of story structure (no, it’s not Universal, I’ll talk about that in another post) dictates a beginning, a middle and an end.  It dictates setups and payoffs.  It dictates some sort of change to happen to a circumstance or a character.

In the beginning, something happens that sets something else in motion.  Pretty simple.

In linear story structure (1~2~3) the beginning happens where you would expect it, at the beginning, but there are many other ways of doing it.  There is a device called framing, where you “frame” your story with the last scene.  (3~1~2~3.) Usually, with this device, the last scene is broken in two and the story starts with the first half and ends with the second half of that scene.  Sometimes the last scene is repeated, but on the second reading, we know much more, so it seems new, the meanings of the moments seem different. The beginning happens second in this technique.

Sometime, you might tweak this even further and start at the middle, then go back to the beginning and tell the story through to the end.  (2~1~2~3.) This can be a very exciting way to tell a story when handled well.  It creates an immediate intrigue, then goes back to explain what lead up to it, how it happened, then resolves it.

One of my favorite non traditional story telling techniques is the non-linear structure, where things happen completely out of sequence and the reader isn’t sure of anything until the final moments of the story.  (3~2~6~1~4.  Or something.) In these, the beginning can be in the middle or, as with the movie “Memento“, at the very end, or anywhere in between.  This is a difficult device to use well, but when it is mastered, it can be thrilling to read because every moment keeps you guessing.  A very formidable but gloriously satisfying (and marvelously surreal) novel that uses this technique is Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.  That one not only starts somewhere in the middle, it starts mid-sentence!

Even within these non linear or non traditional ways to tell a story, however, the piece itself has a beginning.  It needs that moment or event that makes the reader want to know what’s next.  No matter where in your story you start, starting on something that creates tension or surprise or confusion or recognition or  something is very highly recommended.  At least in the Western notion of story structure.

Happy beginnings!  The rest of the story is wide open!

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

I love short stories.  I have read them all my life.  I have had subscriptions to New Yorker, AGNI, Omni, Asimov and other magazines just so I could read the short stories.  I have collections from Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post.  And, of course, many, many collections of science fiction short stories.

I have written short stories most of my life.  I think I wrote my first one when I was, perhaps, eight or nine.  My mother kept a copy of it, but I have no idea what has become of it.  My earlier stories were dark and brooding, the product of a self-pitying teenaged mind.  I still have a few of them around.  They amuse me.  I want to hug that kid, then tell him to get over it.

Over the years, I’ve honed my writing.  Eventually, I began to notice that, although each story I wrote demanded it’s own creative process, I approached each one in a very similar way.  It seemed magical and intuitive, but there was something familiar about it each time.

Several years ago, about the same time I started writing with Steve Mancini, I started examining the process I used to write.  It seemed very close, again, to the process Steve and I used to write together.  I realized, as I looked at it dispassionately, that the process was repeatable, that it could be replicated.  That it could be taught to others.  This was an exciting discovery.

After Steve and I wrote our how-to guide on writing with a partner that we give away for free, we thought about what else we have to offer, what else people ask us about.  It seems to me that I’ve always heard that writing fiction seems a mystery to many who would love to do it.  I am committed to people finding and pursuing their passions, and what better way than to de-mystify the process of writing a short story.

So Steve and I wrote a how-to guide on just that.  Since we published it, we have gotten several notes from people that, using the book and following along with it, they have written their first short story.  Whenever I hear this, my chest glows a little with proud warmth.  As I have said before, I cry at supermarket openings, so you know I tear up when we get those messages.

If you have ever thought you’d like to write, or if you’ve ever been confused by any of the parts of the process, I urge you to get our book.  If you are a writer and find yourself overwhelmed with ideas or lack any new ideas, or if you frequently experience what people call “writer’s block”, I urge you to get our book.

It’s called “On Writing a Short Story” and you can find it at http://www.WritingAShortStory.com

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of such how-to guides as On Writing With a Partner and On Writing a Short Story.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I had a thought that I hoped wouldn’t become a cliché.  It turned out that the thought was so cumbersome and convoluted that chances of that happening were very small.  (I almost said moot, but that would be entirely too cliché.)  However, it started my mind swirling around with the whole notion of cliché.  It is almost a cliché to say, “avoid clichés at all cost.”  Actually, it’s almost a cliché to say, “it’s almost a cliché”, so it’s hard to avoid them.  As I said in a comment on Laura Christianson’s Blogging Bistro blog, they are insidious, sneaky little buggers, and creep in to your writing without any warning.

Things that have become clichés usually started out as profound or poetic thoughts, very clever and original ways to either describe something familiar or make understandable something very obscure, but devolved due to over use to become almost meaningless.  Salvador Dalí said of clichés, “The first man to compare the flabby cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”

When used consciously, clichés can actually enhance good writing, they can be a comfortable entry point to a more complex bit of thought.  They can be a good source of humor, especially if you somehow acknowledge that you realize you’re using the cliché.  If you’re using several clichés strung together like pearls on a string, the turns of phrase can play well with others or fight like cats and dogs, they can gum up the works, or be your trump card, which can put the lie to thinking outside the box or become an actual Deus ex machina, making you eat your own words with an evil laugh, which is food for thought for anyone who sees the writing on the wall and really, really wants to avoid cliché.  They also taste like chicken.

Okay, I think I just wrenched the soft tissue in my brain.

More seriously, as a writer of fiction, I always strive to avoid cliché phrases and (to use a cliché) turns of phrase. When I notice them on my page I try to reword them in a new and original way.  “He breathed a sigh of relief” might become “He breathed in sharply, then released the breath slowly as he realized the shadow crossing his path was simply the old man who sold newspapers on the corner.”

Doing this does two things.  It makes your writing have more of a unique voice, and it will usually make it more viscerally exciting because you’ve had to experience then describe what the cliché actually means, and that’s what you really want to communicate to your reader.

Allow the clichés to be there in your first pass.  Then, when you go back through to polish it, think about them.  Make them yours.  Wrestle them to the ground.  To coin a phrase.

~Geoff Hoff