Writing Sword of the Stones

In case you missed the news last week, my most recent story “Sword of the Stones” was published in Havok’s latest issue. Get a print copy here or check it out on Kindle. Today, I wanted to share a little background info on its creation.

First off, since I knew I wanted to submit a story to Havok’s Extraordinary Exploits issue, I started with the prompt. I latched onto the examples of Indiana Jones and The Librarian. But, as is usually the case, my first few ideas looked very different from the final story.

One idea was to submit a story that read like an artifact retrieval form. It would include stats like where a certain relic was recovered and what properties it possessed, as well as a brief report of how it had been retrieved. Another idea began with a teenage boy cleaning out his grandmother’s attic, then finding a hatching dragon egg. But when I got into writing both of them, I realized that it was taking way too long to get to the action.

So I started brainstorming ideas of how to get straight to the action—as well as what kind of relic would lend itself to the pseudo-supernatural element of the prompt. I decided the best place to start would be literally seconds before retrieving the artifact, which would in turn activate some sort of (again, supernatural) defense system that would try to prevent the adventurer from escaping. (It should also be noted that, in my head, the main character is known only as “The Adventurer,” and doesn’t have a real name.)

That was when I had a mental image of an angel statue perched on top of a building, holding a sword while lighting flashed around. Those first few paragraphs went through quite a few revisions as I tried to balance scene-setting with action (and a little humor/sarcasm).

Funnily enough, the sword originally was the main relic—and would’ve been a lot more effective against the gargoyles. But the more I thought about it, “able to defeat animated stone” felt like a really random power, and wouldn’t be very useful in other scenarios. That got me thinking about what would be a cool supernatural ability bestowed by an artifact. Wings and flight seemed like a natural answer given the angel statue, and so the medallion worked its way into the story.

It wasn’t until after I started writing the animated gargoyles that I realized they are an unintentional callback to a short story I wrote in college. Something about those monstrous faces and the notion of living rock just strikes me as sinister. Technically, these ones are probably grotesques or chimeras because “gargoyle” specifically refers to carved spouts that carry water away from buildings, but I elected to keep the term “gargoyle” because it’s the one that most people are familiar with for what I was trying to get across.

Half by virtue of the sword losing its abilities, and half due to rapidly shrinking available wordcount, the fight on the roof ended up being shorter than I had first envisioned. I would’ve liked an epic battle on the monastery roof between Adventurer and gargoyle as lightning flashed and thunder roared, but by the time he picked himself up from the fall, I realized that the story needed to start wrapping up. I was happy to get that epic leap from the roof timed perfectly with a lightning strike. In the movie version, that scene is in slow-mo.

For the ending, it’s worth noting that my first draft was a couple sentences longer. I wanted to bring a sense of completion into the story, and I did that through a brief exchange of the duo talking about their next course of action (and the Adventurer thanking Veronica for saving his life). But when my brilliant wife/first editor read it for the first time, she pointed out that the story ended just fine with the “You got the short straw of artifacts this time” comment. Realizing that she was right (as usual), I removed the dialogue for an even shorter word count! Plus, I think the way it draws attention back to the relics gives the story a better sense of completion.

And those are the main points I remember from writing the story. I hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes of “Sword of the Stones”! Just in case it didn’t come across, I had a blast writing the story—and I hope you enjoy(ed) reading it! Have any other questions about how it came together? Or about my writing process in general? Feel free to ask in the comments 🙂

Submissions Guidelines and Developing Stories

For the past week, I’ve been researching possible publications to submit a short story to. The most helpful website in finding publishers/markets that accept genre stories (science fiction/fantasy/etc.) has been Ralan.com, but just searching has also yielded a few possibilities.

This post, however, begs the question of whether I may be getting ahead of myself. You see … I haven’t actually written a new short story to submit to any of these publications. I’m mainly seeing what’s out there and reviewing their submission guidelines. And that’s making me (re)consider my current writing approach.

The reason? Nearly all the stories I’ve been writing recently have been based on provided themes. But as I research other publications, I’m finding a lot of options that give free rein (within the SFF space). This, in turn, means I’ll need to adjust how I end up writing this new story. Instead of getting ideas from (re)interpreting story prompts, the entire idea and its development are on me. Which is exciting! Yet also terrifying.

That’s not to say that these publications are entirely without guidelines. Most of them are extremely helpful in explaining what they’re looking for in stories (though the best way to figure that out is always to read past issues). And as you can imagine, writing a story based on what a publication likes to see increases its odds of being selected. Even if many of them don’t have specific themes, they do have certain elements that they’re looking for. If I write a new story with those notes in mind, it would likely perform better than a story written without such guidelines.

(It’s worth noting that this doesn’t refer to instructions about how to format or submit a story — those are set in stone to make things easy on editors. The “guidelines” I’m referring to here are broad notes about what kind of stories they do or don’t want to see.)

On top of all that, these publications have deadlines that are all over the place. Some are a week away. Others don’t close for a couple months. But if I start writing a story for a specific publication, you can bet I want to make sure I finish and submit it before the submissions period ends. Yet if I write a story without guidelines, there’s no telling when relevant submissions periods would be open to it.

It’s an almost paralyzing situation to be in — which is never good when your goal is to write as much as possible. I wonder if I’m putting too much pressure on myself to write something that gets selected. I need to remind that that’s a stretch goal, not a goal-goal.

At least I’m still writing blog posts, haha.

The Motivation of (External) Deadlines

If there’s one thing that my writing journey over the past year has taught me, it’s that deadlines are extremely useful. I think the only reason I’ve been able to finish writing ten stories in that timeframe is because they each had a submission deadline every month or so. Even most of the posts on this blog (including this one) can chalk up their publication to the fact that I’ve given myself a Wednesday deadline every week.

Of course, it’s not like deadlines were a foreign concept before last year. They’ve been a part of my day-to-day writing job as long as I’ve had one. And they’ve been super useful! But for better or worse, I find them considerably easier to meet than implement.

Part of the reason this is on my mind is because I’ve been working on a flash fiction story. I started writing about six weeks ago … and stalled soon afterward. But with the deadline approaching this Friday, I suddenly find myself with renewed inspiration.

Suffice it to say, the story is practically finished. But the situation paints other 2018 goals in a new light. I’m realizing the need to establish deadlines for the goals that don’t currently have them. But there are two issues standing in the way: 1) I don’t know what realistic deadlines would look like and 2) I’m not sure how I’d set them up as “external” deadlines.

I could pick an arbitrary date and post it here, but I question whether that’d be effective. So in lieu of establishing a deadline that way, I’m going to try to use the stories that have deadlines as deadlines themselves. In other words, the plan is to divide the short story/game (not sure which one first) development into segments and set a goal of completing those segments before submitting flash fiction pieces throughout the year.

Will it work? Maybe. At the very least it’s a plan and offers a similar sense of structure to what deadlines provide. I’ll try to keep you posted in these posts, including short updates in addition to the main content of each. So stay tuned and let’s see how this deadlines once-removed experiment works.

Interpreting Story Prompts

Happy New Year, reader! Yes, you! I hope your end-of-the-year festivities were great, however you personally define the word. Mine would best be described as unexpectedly tiring followed by pleasantly relaxing. But now, on to the post.

As you’ve may have noticed by reading past stories of mine, I’ve mostly been writing flash fiction based on prompts. When that’s the case, it means those stories are necessarily being read at the same time as others that share at least a few similarities.

Stories generally begin as some sort of idea. It could be a character, a plot, a setting, a scene, or countless other concepts, but there’s generally some seed of an idea that grows and/or combines with other ideas to develop into a complete story.

When I first began writing stories based on prompts, I interpreted those prompts as this core idea. The stories I wrote were often the first ones that came to mind based on the prompt. And I think that was a perfectly serviceable way to write, and was pleased enough with those stories even though they weren’t being selected for publication.

Then I received a comment on one story that helped me rethink these prompts. In this case, the prompt (how many times am I going to say that word in this post?) was to take a classic story and reimagine it in a different setting. I wrote a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, placing it on an alien planet and casting the Tom Robinson character as an “otherworlder” (Scout was also called Cadet).

It didn’t get selected, but I did get solid feedback on it. And one comment in particular stood out to me: “Unfortunately we received a lot of sci-fi retellings and only had room for a few.”

Getting that note helped me view my story a different way. I figured my story was written decently enough that it wasn’t rejected outright, but still wasn’t strong enough to compare with other sci-fi retellings. In my head, it wasn’t being compared to all the submissions, but primarily other sci-fi stories written for this prompt.

This totally reframed the way I wrote most of my following submissions. From that point forward, I tried to think of the least likely interpretation of a prompt, and craft a story around that premise. For example, an ancient history romance prompt led to a story taking place in the Maya civilization. A mythical clash featured creatures battling with wits instead of brawn.

You haven’t read those stories … but hopefully you’ve read a couple others that grew out of that thought process. When I imagined a prompt about medieval characters would lead to a bunch of stories set in Europe, I thought about Marco Polo and wrote “The Journal of Wonders.” When one prompt asked writers to combine several holidays, I figured Chinese New Year would be an uncommon choice and wrote “Lunar Eclipse.” I like to think they were selected for more reasons than simply being different, but I’m sure that helped!

I want to acknowledge that none of this is new. Writers have been putting unique spins on concepts for centuries (and doing it a lot better than me). We’re supposed to transform the normal into the unexpected. That said, getting that specific feedback on my To Kill a Mockingbird retelling helped me consciously reframe prompts not as the seed for a story, but rather a seed for how to start thinking about a story. A subtle difference, but one that I’m trying to keep in mind with future submissions.

This takes a little more brainstorming time (at least in my experience). And while I’m in the midst of it, I still find myself fighting the urge to default to a certain interpretation. Plus, I’m still concerned that one day I’m going to bend the prompt so far that it breaks, rendering the story out of scope for a particular theme. And I’m already struggling with situations dealing with more generic prompts like sci-fi or dystopia (especially with tight word counts).

Needless to say, different prompts will lend themselves to this train of thought to varying degrees. Theoretically speaking/typing, there’s ways to play with things like genre conventions, the writing itself, or other elements of the story. I don’t know if those can be defined as creative choices directly inspired by a prompt, but it’s an intriguing exercise to think about.

I’m sure that plenty of other writers who’ve submitted stories based on prompts have considered this. Nevertheless, it was the topic that came to me this week, and it seemed like a nice way to begin 2018. Plus I’m glad to be starting the year with a longer post. Hopefully there’ll be even more to come. And let me know if you have any thoughts on this, or prompts in general!

Podcasts on Story Structure and Length

One of the main podcasts I listen to is Writing Excuses. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s hosted by a number of established authors talking about the craft of writing. It’s in its twelfth season (!) and they’re still coming up with interesting topics every week.

They’ve recently recorded a few podcasts about how to structure stories of different lengths. Since I currently focus on flash fiction but would like to expand to novel-length stories one day, I thought they’d be good links to a) share with people who might be interested and b) save for posterity for my own sake, too. I thought it was particularly useful in the short pieces episode when they talked about short story publications. So here they are!

Writing Excuses 12:32 Structuring a Short Piece

Writing Excuses 12:36 Structuring a Mid-length Piece

Writing Excuses 12:40 Structuring a Novel