Writing Prompts

Where does this path go?

Right now I'm in the midst of a flash fiction contest over on Codex. With four stories written and one left to go, I thought I'd post a few story prompts on the blog today to inspire you to write your own flash or short story, or heck, even a novel if the idea that grabs you is big enough.

The Minotaur

Art in the park - a little creepy, if you ask me

Random shoes left behind, along with a lighter. I wonder what happened here

If you come up with a story based on one of these pictures, let me know. If you publish that story, definitely let me know. Good luck, and happy writing!

Thumbnail Thursday with Jake Kerr

Today I'd like to welcome Jake Kerr to the blog. Read on to find out more about him and how researching for a story can bring greater understanding.

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on my first novel. It’s a contemplation of memory and how people’s memories are such powerful and yet inconstant things. What if a good memory is a false representation of a moment that was actually bad? Does one’s memory of the best moment of his or her life actually deserve that designation?  By having my characters experience these things directly via an SF mechanism, I hope to address these and similar questions.

What's your pre-writing ritual?

You know, this is something that I would love to have. I love the calming power of ritual, and even something as simple as making tea, arranging a desk, and then closing my eyes for 60 seconds before writing would be a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, with the chaos in my life, I tend to just open the laptop and start typing. Even finding a quiet location is often a challenge. So my ritual is that I don’t have a ritual. I open the laptop, read the previous few pages I wrote before, and then continue.

What is one of the most surprising/interesting things you've discovered while doing research for a story?

It was perhaps not surprising so much as powerful and illuminating. I was researching a novel that would feature an emotionally abused woman, and as I read books on emotional abuse I saw things that were familiar in friends and learned the profoundly sad nature of women trapped in such a relationship. It was so painful that I ended up scrapping the novel. I just couldn’t do the character justice.

Tell me about your favorite story that you've published. What inspired it, and what does it mean to you?

My favorite story is probably the one that Lightspeed just purchased. It will be released in March. It’s titled “Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince,” and it was inspired by a story in a contest that I read. That story partially used an indirect story-telling method—a eulogy—to illustrate a character. I loved the idea of indirectly telling a story and doing it on both the personal level and the global level. In short, could I tell a story about a person’s life without any straight narrative really involving him at all, and—at the same time—tell the story of a global catastrophe that never actually addresses the catastrophe? In short, we are being given external fragments of a person’s life, and it is entirely about HIM, but by learning about him we learn about this global catastrophe. I’m very happy with the result.

You can have lunch with any writer, living or dead. Who would it be, and why?

I don’t know why, but I find this question really hard to answer. My first thought was Charles Dickens. I absolutely loved his characters and his novels are still some of my favorites. Then I thought Ray Bradbury, because I really aspire to be the writer he was. Then I considered maybe Cormac McCarthy, because I am in awe of his ability to carve a novel down to its essence. But wait! What about Stephen King? Or Edgar Rice Burroughs? So, in the end, I have to just say that I can’t answer this question as there are so many writers I would love to spend time with, I can’t just pick one.

What's one of the best novels and/or short stories you've read recently?

I am in awe of both “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan and “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green. Both of which I’ve read in the past month.

On the short story side, “The Waves” by Ken Liu is extraordinary. It was in the December Asimov’s, and there are so many things going on in that story. At a high level, his ability to use science fiction to examine the nature of creation and the nature of God is breathtaking, but then you look at what he actually DID in a novelette, and it shouldn’t really be possible. To take a personal story about a woman and her family and then extend that out to the distant distant future on a cosmic scale, and he pulls it off in a short story. Beyond that: The way he plays with point-of-view. It’s something a reader may not even notice, but his characters speak via a telepathic type device, and as a result the points-of-view move from character to character. Everyone is in everyone else’s head. But then when the protagonist decides to isolate herself, her interactions with everyone else are all from her point-of-view. It’s that rare story that is truly epic and yet thoroughly personal and executed with genius. Go out and read it.

Writing is a sedentary endeavor. What do you do to stay healthy and active?

Unfortunately, this is something I need to work on. About the most exercise I get is walking my dogs, which, while certainly not to be laughed at, is a far cry from a three mile jog.

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You can find out more about Jake here.

Thumbnail Thursday with CL Holland

Welcome to another edition of Thumbnail Thursday. Today I'd like to introduce CL Holland. Read on to find out a little bit more about her.


 What are you working on right now?

At the moment I'm writing poetry, which I do to give my mind a rest from fiction, and some fantasy stories. I'm participating in Write 1 Sub 1 this year, so I need to write at least a short story or a couple of flash stories each month.

 What's your pre-writing ritual?

There has to be a cup of coffee ready for when I start, and I have to know where my fingerless gloves are in case it gets cold. If I'm writing by hand, my notebooks have to be attractive, and at the moment I've got a thing for sunny-coloured inks.

 What is one of the most surprising/interesting things you've discovered while doing research for a story?

Some of my stories have involved historical research, which I always find interesting. But the most bizarre thing was when I looked into numbers stations for "The Noise" - the trigger at Kazka Press was the Russian station UZB-76.  They broadcast seemingly random things like numbers and strings of words, and are very odd indeed.

Tell me about your favorite story that you've published. What inspired it, and what does it mean to you?

It would probably have to be "The Reflection of Memory", which was published in Writers of the Future Volume 25. Not only was it my first major sale, but two of the characters, Yaphen and Kestrin, had been waiting for years to be written. I don't remember where they came from, but the story came from the moment I realised they actually belonged in the same story. I had Kestrin find a stranger in the snow and waited to see what happened.

You can have lunch with any writer, living or dead. Who would it be, and why?

Probably Tim Powers. I had lunch with him once at Writers of the Future, but I was so overwhelmed and jetlagged that I don't really remember much. Plus he knows where to get the best hamburgers in Hollywood.

What's one of the best novels and/or short stories you've read recently?

The best novel I've read recently is Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain. I love the worlds she creates, the language she uses, and the way she doesn't feel the need to explain every little thing. Sometimes things just are, but they always make sense within the rules of the novel.

The best short story was "Blue Lace Agate" by Sarah Monette, at Lightspeed magazine. I loved her previous stories about Jamie Keller and Mick Sharpton at the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation, so to get something new about them was a fantastic surprise.

 Writing is a sedentary endeavor. What do you do to stay healthy and active?

I have an office job four days a week, and I try to fit in a walk at lunchtimes if the weather's not too bad. Since we get 260 days of rain a year it's sometimes difficult to fit in.

***

C.L. Holland is a British fantasy writer and sometimes poet. She was a winner of Writers of the Future in 2008 and her story "The Reflection of Memory" is now available as an eBook. Many of her works can be found online: a full bibliography and links can be found on her website Conversations with Dragons. When she is finally able to give up the day job she intends to dye her hair purple to celebrate.

Some Good News for Pantsers

Even with several complete novels under my belt, I still struggle with writing them. One of my biggest issues in writing fiction is making sure my characters come across as believable, as living, breathing creatures with a past, a present, and a future. I love a story where a character (or characters) takes over and comes to life, and I strive to create that kind of story, but sometimes my characters come across as flat.

This leads to some big problems when writing the rough draft of a novel. I tend to shudder when somebody mentions the word 'outline,' and immediately flash back to high school and those outlines my English teacher made me do. You know the ones, neatly laid out, with each new idea under the main idea getting its own letter or number or what-have-you, and an indentation. But writing by the seat of my pants (or pantsing, as some call it) produces an awful lot of unusable words, and I'd really like to streamline the process and get as much of it right the first time through.

This leads to my other problem, which is, when I come to something that will end up changing an earlier section of the story, I have the compulsion to go back and make that change before I can write on. I've tried following the advice of some, which is to ignore the changes and push on, but that results in a gobbledy-gook of a mess. I've given in to the compulsion and gone back to make the changes, only to lose that forward momentum and the passion that was driving me initially. What I needed was a way to barrel through the first draft without making huge changes along the way, without giving in to the need to go back and fix things, and all while breathing life into my characters. Easy, right?

This year I entered the novel contest at Codex, which is a lovely group of writers. The point of the contest is to finish a novel by December. I started in March with an initial outline of a novel. I wrote out the usual stuff, like what the characters look like, what they do for a living, blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong, that's important stuff, but what I end up doing during my first draft is figuring out who the characters really are, hence the need for major rewrites and revisions later. They sort of go around doing random things while I get to know them.

At any rate, I wrote a first draft and liked some parts, but really hated others, which is standard operating procedure for me. Then, I heard about the 90 day novel, a book that was supposed to get your butt in gear and produce something decent in three months. You can read more about Maya here. She talks about her own struggles with pantsing, which convinced me to try the 90 day novel.

The gist of the book is that you answer a bunch of questions about your characters before you even write the first line of the novel. These are great questions that delve into the psyches of the characters. I had tons of fun doing this even though I'd already gotten a first draft down, and came up with some amazing insights. You spend an entire 30 days getting to know your characters before you start drafting, then you have 60 days to bang out a draft.

I had addressed some of the questions already, but just a handful. I didn't follow the guidelines exactly. I didn't feel that I needed to. I spent about 3 weeks answering questions and writing out little scenes and bits of dialogue, then I plunged into a complete rewrite, saving only a few essential things from the first draft. I was initially on target to finish by mid-November, but I'm happy to say, I finished the second draft a week ago. I do have a couple of scenes to add from the atagonists' POV, but the good news is, I didn't feel the urge to go back and fix things, I came up with an outline that worked (!!!), and I kept that passion and drive the entire way through the book. I can't wait to try this from scratch with the next novel and see what happens.