My original science fiction stories “The Future, One Summer Behind” and “Letters Submitted in Place of a Thesis to the Department of Chronology” are out in two anthologies currently available for purchase.
In keeping with the season, both are summery kind of stories, with big storms, summer jobs, festivals, and doomed short-term relationships because one of you is a time traveller from a post climate-collapse timeline!
You know, the usual.
Letters Submitted in Place of a Thesis to the Department of Chronology
When Miki signs up to study in the late 21st century, she expects to meet an entire culture of selfish fools who care more about their own luxuries than the state of the planet. The truth, of course, is much more complex than that.
Caught up in the thrill of experiencing real weather on her first trip out of the 32nd century’s carefully protected arcologies, Miki will have to choose between her studies and her present or her new friends—and humanity’s future on the planet.
Told in a mishmash of formats, including a thesis excerpt, emails, and actual letters, “Letters Submitted to the Department of Chronology in Place of a Thesis” is a story about deterministic pessimism, time travel, climate change, academia, and not giving up, with a queer/poly romance among the central characters.
The anthology also features stories by Laurence Brothers, Michael M Jones, Holly Schofield, Liam Hogan, and many other excellent writers. Go check it out!
The Future, One Summer Behind
Every year since she was six years old, Kirsi has dreaded Maricourt Crater’s summer festival. The festival’s famous darkroom—supposed to let you experience a thirty-second burst of your own future, one summer ahead—has only ever showed her a feedback loop of anxiety and anticipation.
Now that she’s out of creche, she’s really too old for kids’ stuff like that. As her summer job kicks off, though, she can’t help wondering: what if it’s her own indecision and uselessness to blame for what the darkroom shows her every year? What if she decides to change, before visiting the festival one last time?
The anthology has stories by L. Chan, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, Liam Hogan (yes, again!), Aimee Ogden, and many other great writers as well. This one is a breath of fresh air in these turbulent times and definitely worth picking up.
My story is technically a prequel to another story featuring Kirsi and Aala and the Maricourt Crater community, “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” which came out in last year’s No Police = Know Future anthology from Experimenter Press. If you missed that one, now you have an excuse to go add it to your bookshelf as well!
I’m not just talking about new writers, either. Established professionals also need to revise their writing, often multiple times, before it does what they want.
Today, we’re going to talk about revision. What is it? How do you do it? When do you do it? How do you know when you’re done? Why revise at all? Isn’t it better to just finish a story, send it out, and start on a new one? Why hasn’t anyone sent me ten million dollars for my Great American Novel yet?
So many questions!
Why Heinlein’s 5 Rules for Writers Aren’t Great
If you’re a beginning writer — and especially if you’re writing science fiction — chances are good that at some point somebody has talked to you about Heinlein’s Rules for Writers.
If you haven’t run into these before, Heinlein’s Rules are five steps that writers can follow to make sure they are commercially successful. Here they are:
You must write.
You must finish what you write.
You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
You must put the work on the market.
You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
On the face of it, these rules seem pretty straightforward.
William Shakespeare: Skilled, lucky, and definitely a reviser.
Obviously if you want to sell a story to a magazine somewhere, you do—at some point—need to actually write that story, finish it, and submit it. Likewise, if you stop submitting after your first rejection, you’re not going to sell very many stories unless you’re very lucky and very skilled.
Unfortunately, some people insist that you have to adhere to these rules completely if you want to be a success at all. Personally, I think that’s a mistake.
Anders suggests that the main problem with Heinlein’s Rules is rule number three: “You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.”
It may not be shocking, given that I spent most of a blog post talking about how there’s no One True Way to Write, but I agree completely with Anders on this point.
I think “refrain from rewriting” as a fixed rule is a terrible idea.
It might have worked well for Heinlein, but in my experience you’re going to miss out on a lot of opportunities for growth and opportunities for actually selling your stories if you never rewrite anything until after it’s sold.
That goes double for newer writers, who may still be figuring out what they want their writing to do. (I’ve been writing since 2008 and I’m still not certain.)
There are two aspects to the “no rewriting” rule that are worth pulling out further.
Is Revision Rewriting?
First, what does “rewrite” mean, exactly? Is it the same as revision, or is it something different?
“Don’t rewrite” doesn’t, in my opinion, mean you shouldn’t revise a story before you consider it finished.
Based on the rest of this so-called ‘rule,’ what Heinlein actually means here is that after you’ve written, revised, and otherwise ‘finished’ a story, you should start submitting and refrain from editing it ever again until and unless an editor offers to buy it if you make specific changes.
That’s very different from saying “revision is bad; don’t do it!”
But…
Why Rewriting can be Good
The arrows represent continuous improvement. The gear represents your anguish when people say, “are you still working on that novel?” Icon by Nhor, used under a CC-BY license.
I actually disagree that rewriting is bad, also.
Revision is an important part of “finishing” a story for me. But is a story ever really finished?
Sometimes, I’ve looked at a story after I’ve sent it out to every pro-paying market and thought, “Wow, no wonder nobody’s buying this. I need to make [obvious change]!”
It sucks to realize that only after you’ve used up your chances at publication, let me tell you.
Once I even found that I had inadvertently been submitting a story with all my italics deleted. Yikes!
Personally, I think distance from your story’s first draft makes revision much easier. If you can get that distance before you start submitting, great! If not, and you send the story to a few places before you sit down and figure out why it isn’t working, that’s also great.
An approach that works for me is to read through each story every few rejections and see if I still think the story works. If it doesn’t, I’ll sit down and revise it. If I still think it works, I put the lack of success down to a mismatch in editorial and authorial tastes and keep on submitting. (We’ll talk more about this in another post.)
If I get a personal rejection from an editor, I’ll do the same thing.
Do I always rewrite when I get a reject? No way. Who has the time?
Can an obsessive focus on rewriting stimy your writing career? Sure.
But putting forth “never rewrite” as a rule is misguided and every bit as harmful to your growth as a writer as obsessive tinkering is.
Why Revision Matters
There are two reasons why revision is important in my approach to writing. I think these reasons should hold true for most people, but it’s possible they don’t!
It’s hard for me to get the ideas in my head onto the page coherently
It’s hard for me to see the words on the page properly, because of the ideas in my head
In other words, writing is — for me — partly a process of reconciling ideas I thought were brilliant with the dreck that ends up on the page in my first drafts.
That isn’t always true. Sometimes I’m quite happy with stories after a single draft — even more rarely, I can sell them without doing more than fixing typos. These happy circumstances are few and far between, however. In almost all cases, a story I’m ready to submit is a story that’s gone through several rounds of revision.
The flip side of this, as Charlie Jane Anders points out in her discussion of Heinlein’s rules, is that building revision into your writing process gives you way more freedom in your first drafts.
If you only ever let yourself write a first draft and then submit it, you’re putting yourself under immense pressure to get everything perfect (or at least “good enough”) straight away. Not only is that very, very difficult, immense pressure does not lend itself to writing well or to finding joy and satisfaction in writing.
At least for me, I’m much more willing to experiment and innovate, and much more likely to be happy with stories I’ve written, if I give myself permission to write things that are confusing, obscure, or just plain purple as I work on a new story. The reason I can give myself that permission is because I know I’m going to go in later and revise, making the confusing stuff clear, the obscure stuff apparent, and the purple stuff more readable. (In the interests of full disclosure, I like purple prose as much as the next writer. It has its uses!)
The second item in the list above is similar to the first, but subtly different.
I want to get my ideas down, and I struggle with that. But what I also struggle with is figuring out if I’ve actually managed to get my ideas down.
Think of the expression, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.”
This is kind of the opposite.
Where do the trees end and the forest begin?
When I have an idea in my head of how a story goes, why a character does what they are doing, how the rules of a specific setting work, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell whether other people will be able to figure that out from what I’ve written down.
I know what the big picture (the forest) is, so I can easily see it when I look at the text on the page (the trees). Other readers, however, may just see ten specific trees, metaphorically speaking, planted in a confusing pattern.
Revision is where I make sure to put my signposts that say “Hey, reader, this is a forest!”
This second item also ties into my next revision practice: waiting a while.
The second part of that assignment was a little counter-intuitive. I also asked you to not submit it yet.
If you were wondering “What the heck?” about that, here’s the other shoe, ready to drop.
Distance from your story’s first draft makes revision much easier.
For me, it’s hard to break away from my idea of the story and see what I’ve actually written down until I’ve taken a break from the story.
While I do revise things as soon as I’m done writing the draft (or the second draft, or the third draft), I’ve also found I have a lot more success at telling effective stories if I wait a few weeks and then take one final revision pass before I start submitting to magazines.
That distance helps me read the words on the page with a more critical eye, because I’m just seeing what’s written down, rather than the ideas I had when I thought up the story in the first place. I’m much more likely to notice when I’ve introduced a character poorly, been vague about important setting details, or skipped over something that was obvious to me but not to readers.
Short version: by letting a story rest for a while before you decide it’s ‘finished,’ you can judge its merits and flaws a little more objectively.
My revision process
The revision process is going to differ for every writer. You don’t have to follow mine!
That said, this is what I do when I sit down to revise a short story:
Print out the story
Read through the story
Write revisions on the printout
Type up the revisions
Many other writers stick to a computer the whole time, and that’s fine too, obviously. Not everyone has a printer, and paper does get expensive if you’re doing a lot of revision.
My revision process is messy. I sometimes end up moving whole sections and crossing out large chunks of scenes, writing in half-sentences and deleting others. For me, it’s easier to do that on paper than it is on a screen, but your mileage may vary!
A lot of blue pen here, but this is pretty normal for my revision process.
Some other tricks for revision that I see thrown around include changing the font in your word processor to trick your brain into reading what’s there instead of what you think you wrote and reading the story aloud.
If you’re just starting on your writing journey, I’d encourage you to try different things until you find a process that works for you.
How do you tell when is a story ‘finished’?
Honestly, it’s difficult to tell when a story’s finished and ready to submit.
I usually see two answers to this question. One is a punchline, and the other is of questionable use.
How do you know when a story’s finished?
When it sells. (womp womp)
When your revisions are just changing it instead of improving it.
That joke answer is, honestly, the only way I can tell for certain. If an editor’s purchased a story, I’m done! Usually. Most of the time.
The second answer is good if you have enough experience with revision to know when changes you’re making aren’t actually improving the story.
But if you’re new to revision, or if — like me — you have trouble seeing what’s on the page and what’s in your head, it can be difficult to tell if a change is improving the story or not, so it doesn’t really solve the problem so much as restate it.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon — well, I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
If your ‘revision’ is just messing with commas, it’s probably time to let the story go out into the wide, wide world.
Otherwise, you just have to give the story a rest, read through it, and see if it does what you want it to.
Another important step in revision — especially if you’re new to writing — is getting feedback from someone who isn’t you. I’ll talk more about that in another post, when we learn about giving and receiving critiques.
For now, let’s finish up with our assignment!
Assignment: Revise your story!
This week’s assignment is pretty straightforward:
Read the 500-1000 word story you wrote earlier (or some other completed story draft).
Revise it!
It might be that after reading the story, you think it’s already good enough. Usually, I’d be down with that. For the purposes of this assignment, though, try to find something you can improve.
Look for things that are confusing. Descriptions that are redundant. Dialogue that isn’t as clever or convincing as it could be. Ask yourself, as you read, if your goal for the story was met by its end.
What you revise and what your revision process look like is up to you, but at the end of completing this assignment, you should have a revised piece of flash fiction.
Got there already? Nicely done, writer!
But don’t rest on those laurels just yet. Now that your revisions are made, next week we’re going to learn about sending that story out to some other writers to see what they think of it.
Writing is a lot of fun, but can also be kind of a struggle.
Especially if you’ve gotten yourself into a negative headspace about something, it’s hard to get words on the page or revise them.
In this post, I’m going to talk about some strategies you can use to get past that feeling, commonly called “writer’s block.”
Is Writer’s Block Real?
Writer’s block is kind of a catch-all phrase writers use to describe any time they’re having difficulty writing.
People like to talk about writer’s block as if it’s some well-defined specific ailment, but — at least for me — I haven’t found that to be accurate. Instead, I tend to think of writer’s block as a symptom of some underlying issue, and not in itself the root cause that needs to be solved.
For example:
Are you burnt out from writing too much?
Did you read a great story that was similar to your own?
Is something in your life making it hard for you to focus on anything?
Did you get a negative response from a critiquer?
Is your imposter syndrome flaring up?
Are you troubled by the fact that you are secretly three dachshunds in a trenchcoat?
And so on. There are any number of things that can lead to writers being discouraged about their work and experiencing something like writer’s block. Because of this, it makes more sense to me to figure out what that underlying issue is, and try to fix that.
Photo used under a CC-BY license from Marcus Cyron
Of course, as they say on the Internet, the struggle is real. Whether you consider writer’s block to be a monolithic ailment with a single cure or just the symptom of something else, the end result is the same: the act of writing becomes a bitter struggle as you stare at that blank page for hours.
When writer’s block strikes, it’s easy to tell yourself you’re a failure as a writer and a human being, but neither of those are true. Writer’s block is perfectly normal, established authors deal with it all the time, and it certainly doesn’t mean anything at all about your worth or value as a person (neither of which are, spoiler alert, in fact tied to your writing and productivity).
So, how can you get past writer’s block? Here are eight different methods that sometimes work for me. If you’re stuck, try one or more and see if they help!
One: Fix the Underlying Cause
If you like my take on writer’s block as a catch-all phrase that stands in for any number of other problems, one approach is to figure out what those other problems are and try to resolve them. Of course, this is easier said than done. Some problems are pretty hard to solve, and there’s no guarantee that fixing anything will get rid of your inability to write.
All the same, if you’re experiencing writer’s block because you’re stressed about something in real life, it’s not a bad idea to try and take care of whatever it is that’s bothering you. If you’re lucky, doing that will help you write again. And even identifying that the problem is outside your writing can be a relief, which might relieve some of the pressure your brain is putting on itself to produce “good” writing.
As an example, let’s take “Did you read a great story that was similar to your own?” from our list of bullet points in section above.
Let’s say you’ve finally been getting into the groove with your brand new, soon-to-be-award-winning-assuming-you-finish-it novel about eighteen rabbits flying fighter pilots in a rebellion against the cruel fox overlords that have taken over a far-future terraformed Mars.
I mean, what a concept, right? How could it not be the best thing ever written?
PUMPED!
And then you see someone on Twitter gushing about this rabbit space pirate novel they’re reading by a multiple award winning, NYT bestselling auhor that everybody loves, and, well…
Oomph.
The next time you sit down to write — a climactic scene, where plucky young rebel Marigold is finally about to face off against the haughty, hungry Duchesse de Renarde — words fail you. You stare at that blank word document, the wind knocked right out of your (solar) sails.
The touching final scene, where Marigold looks out at the unrecognizable Martian landscape, only wishing that she’d been able to convince de Renarde that love was more powerful than the conflict between them.
There’s a pretty good chance in this case that your writer’s block is actually tied to anxieties about overlap between your in-progress work and a well-respected author’s already-published novel.
Once you realize that, it might be easier to move forward: even if you’re still upset, you have new strategies you can look to, things like focusing on the differences rather than the similarities, and other ways you can make your own writing stand out. Method three, “kick perfectionism to the curb” is probably also good in situations like this.
The bottom line is that figuring out what’s really bothering you and resolving that, instead of beating your head against the vague and menacing spectre of writer’s block, can be one good way to move forward.
And who knows! By the time you come back to your manuscript after some time off to figure out other problems, maybe you’ll feel refreshed and ready to tackle the words on the page even if that other problem still bothers you.
Two: Find Joy in Something You’ve Written
Let’s take another look at anxieties.
Maybe your writer’s block doesn’t come from an external source, but a general feeling of disappointment at perceptions about your own ability. If the words flowing from your fingers (or not) are getting you down, take a moment to go back through other things you’ve written.
Have a published story? Great! Take a read through it, break out that notebook and pen and write out your favourite line from it. Add the story title and your byline to make it official-looking and fancy, and tack it up near your workspace if you want to.
Or just bask in the glow of “Hey, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Haven’t been published yet? That’s okay, you’ll get there!
Find the thing that brings you joy about your writing and focus on that.
And you can still do this exercise. Just look through something you’ve already written for the best parts, and proceed as above. Even if you’re writing your very first story, there’s probably something you can find in what you’ve done so far that brings you joy. Failing anything else, think up something clever now and write it down.
Maybe it’s not even a line — maybe your characters bring you joy, or the idea of a particular scene. Find the thing that brings you joy about your writing and focus on that for a minute, then get back to the writing with that energy in mind.
Take that, writer’s block!
Three: Kick Perfectionism to the Curb
One big thing I struggle with in my own writing is perfectionism.
I’m the sort of writer who pays attention to the flow of my sentences, and likes a little bit of lyrical poetry (even when it seems like I’m just writing goofy nonsense). That means it’s easy for me to get bogged down in specific details, especially in a first draft.
Even if you don’t write the same way I do, it’s really easy to get writer’s block if you obsess over how different the vision you hold in your head is from what you’re writing down on the page. And first drafts can be particularly problematic.
Remember Hemingway? He famously said that “the first draft of anything is shit.”
A related quote (which proves Hemingway loved using the word ‘shit’ when talking about writing) is an interview in Issue 18 of The Paris Review (1958), where he says that “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit-detector.”
Hemingway digressions aside, this is worth reiterating: nobody writes perfect first drafts.
Think back to our SMART goals from lesson one. The whole idea is to break down a huge, daunting, impressive goal into tiny, manageable chunks, not do everything perfectly from the start. (Again: that’s impossible. Don’t try.)
Acknowledging (or accepting) that untramelled genius isn’t going to flow from your fingertips and into your manuscript as soon as you start drafting can sometimes help you to get rid of writer’s block. Giving yourself permission to write a shitty first draft can work, too.
After all, you can always revise a terrible first draft. You can’t even do that with an idea that’s still in your head. Focus on getting words down, not on proving how awesome a writer you “should” be. (Spoiler alert: lots of awesome writers also write terrible first drafts.)
Four: Take a Break
If none of the techniques above are getting you past your writer’s block, ask yourself if you just need a break.
I know there’s the idea out there that “real writers” write every day, no matter what.
Frankly, holding to that ideal can harm both your self-esteem and your ability to write.
Do some writers write every day, no matter what? Absolutely! And good for them. It’s nice to do it if you can.
Do you have to? Absolutely not.
The phrase “real writer,” incidentally, is garbage.
If anyone starts a sentence with “real writers,” you have my permission to ignore the rest of what they say unless it’s “Real writers are much more complicated than hedgehogs” or something.
Seriously, there’s no such thing as a “real” writer. The status of “writer” is based on practice, not “number of publications” or “has an Amazon page” or some other equally arbitrary qualification. (I see this especially leveraged against non-male, non-white writers, and it ticks me off every time!)
If you’re writing, have written, or are going to write, guess what you are? You’re a writer. Even if you are dealing with writer’s block, that doesn’t change anything.
Anyway, plenty of published authors I know don’t write every day. I sometimes go weeks at a time without putting down words. A friend of mine just started writing again after a two year break. Ernest Hemingway has been dead since 1961 and apparently he still comes back to writing for the occasional inspirational quote.
Life happens, and it’s okay to take a break. Even if life isn’t happening and you’re just not feeling it today, that’s fine. You’ll come back to it some other time, and then you’ll write. (Even if you don’t, life will go on, I promise you.)
Take a little time off to relax and practice some self-care instead of obsessing over productivity, and see if your writer’s block clears up the next time you sit down to write. You might just find that all you needed was a little distance from your work.
Five: Power through It
Sometimes, of course, the opposite to method four holds true.
While you don’t need to write every day, you do need to write sometimes. It’s just a matter of numbers. While you can write a complete novel in a year at 250 words a day (250 * 365 = 91,250), you can’t even write a single piece of flash fiction at 0 words a day no matter how long you do it for (0 * any arbitrary large number = well… 0).
Again, don’t stress about this.
But sometimes you do need to put words on the page. If you’re a “mind over matter” kind of person, forcing yourself to write even though you hate every word of it can sometimes work to beat writer’s block. At least you wrote something, even if it was terrible.
I often find that after the fact I don’t hate stuff quite as much, anyway. Or, if I’m being perfectly honest, that I hate things I loved when I was writing them about as much as stuff I hated writing.
The bottom line is: nobody can tell if you think your work is amazing or terrible, and what you think about it usually doesn’t line up with what readers do.
So if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t mind mechanically doing things you hate, you can try to power through it. I really wouldn’t recommend this approach unless you know you’re that kind of person, though. Forcing yourself to write when you hate it can lead to burnout.
Six: [Apply Brackets]
For longer stories and novels, I follow a pretty weird writing process.
I don’t just sit down with my outline, start at the first scene, and write through to the end. Actually, I often write the ending scene before I’ve finished most of the novel. I’m not afraid to jump around, either, especially if I’m getting stuck on a particular scene.
So if you think your writer’s block might be coming from the particular part of the story you’re writing, or if you find that your wheels are spinning over some detail — no matter how major it is — allow me to introduce you to your new best friend: the [bracket].
One lesser striped swallow (unladen). Photo used under a CC-BY license from Jack Versloot
Can’t figure out the average air speed velocity of a laden swallow? Just stick [speed] in there!
Facing a blockage because you can’t come up with a perfect name for your character? [name1] to the rescue!
This trick is infinitely flexible, up to the point where you can bracket off a whole scene to yourself to come back to later, if it helps you move past a point that’s causing you writer’s block.
You could also use parentheses for this, of course. But square brackets are convenient because you can run for [ and hop to the next thing that needs fixing when it’s time to revise. This is also why professional editors use TK to mark things that need to be fixed. Neither a square bracket or the combination TK is likely to appear in your manuscript file elsewhere.
Just remember that you will need to fill in your brackets eventually. I can’t count the number of times I’ve cursed past me because he’s left me a note like [insert clever dialogue here] halfway through the climactic scene of a new story.
Really, past-me? That’s the best you could do?! Ugh, past selves.
Seriously, though. Bracketing off something you can’t figure out can free you up to move forward with your story. Again, the goal is to get something down and fix it up later, not write perfection.
Seven: Remember Why You’re Writing
This is similar to method number two.
Again, the idea is to remind yourself why you’re doing this.
If you’re a goal-motivated person, just taking a moment to explicitly pull those goals up and remind yourself that there’s something waiting for you after you make it through everything can be enough to banish writer’s block.
Of course, if your anxieties about writing are at the root of your problem, or you’re the sort of person to obsess over every last thing that will keep you from your goals, this can backfire. So apply with caution! (See also: the next method in this list.)
Eight: Be the Friend
It sounds a little hokey, but think of what you’d say to a friend who came to you with writer’s block, or to express insecurities about their writing.
Please don’t feed the trolls. (Used under a CC-BY-SA license from Simplicus)
Would you say, “Well yeah, you’re garbage and so is everything you write LOLOL DON’T QUIT YOUR DAYJOB!”
Hopefully, no. No you would not. (If you answered “yes,” please re-examine your life choices!)
So don’t let yourself get away with talking to yourself in such a negative way. Remind yourself that it’s okay to not be at the top of your game all the time. That your worth as a person doesn’t depend on your ability to puts words on a blank page, or revise ones that are already there. Practice a little self-care. Build yourself up instead of putting yourself down.
Low self-esteem sucks, and can definitely impact your writing, so try this out if you’re the sort of person who’s pessimistic about your own abilities.
Or take a break, if you think it’d be helpful. Think about writer’s block, and come up with a plan for what you might do if it ever strikes you.
Laura Pearlman’s fiction has appeared in Nature, Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and a handful of other places. Her LOLcat captions have appeared on McSweeney’s. She’s a former associate editor at Escape Pod and editor of the almost entirely hypothetical CatsCast podcast. You can find her online at @laurasbadideas on Twitter
You don’t have to read the story to enjoy this interview (Laura’s just that good), but I highly recommend it. Not only will it help you figure out how the insights she shares can be applied to writing a story, it’s just such a fun piece of flash.
Interview
Stewart: Graalnak is one of my favourite pieces of humorous flash fiction. It’s got personality in spades (no doubt because spades are important for harvesting radishes), has multiple running gags, effectively mimics a real-life form of communication, and–even more impressively–it does all that while telling an actual story. Which part of the story came to you first, and how did you manage to keep all of those moving parts coherent in under 1000 words?
Laura: At some point, I noticed that the same “I am [name], [verb]-er of [noun]” structure showed up in Reddit AMA titles and Game of Thrones dialogue, and I knew I had to do something with that.
Pictured: Deleted Game of Thrones character, Everan Staedmon, Bearer of Regrets.
I made the jump to an alien overlord AMA pretty quickly. I had to make a few adjustments — my original concept was that the Vroon were grinding up humans for radish fertilizer, which, it turns out, isn’t funny — but it mostly flowed pretty smoothly from there.
The hardest part was the ending. I knew I wanted Graalnak to leave Earth. I eventually decided he should be tricked into searching for better radishes elsewhere, but my initial thought was that this would require a vast, complicated conspiracy. I couldn’t come up with a good way to convey this without breaking the format, though, so I scaled it down to the current ending.
As to keeping it all to 1000 words — one nice thing about this format is that there’s no need to spend any words on descriptions of characters, settings, or movement.
Stewart: Humans being ground up for fertilizer definitely would have been a very different story! It’s interesting how you jumped from AMA/GOT to alien overlords to uh… less murdery humour. Could you talk a little bit about your usual process for writing flash, and whether you stuck to that with Graalnak or not?
Laura: Graalnak was probably the easiest story I’ve ever written, because I had a strong sense of what it was going to be before I started writing. The details changed along the way, but it was always going to be about an evil alien overlord with an overbearing personality who eventually left Earth.
Most of the time, though, I don’t start out with a solid sense of what a story will be, so I tend to flail a lot. For flash, I might decide on a format (e.g., a Reddit thread), and I’ll write and rewrite the first paragraph until I have a good feel for the main character and voice. Then I’ll struggle to find a plot. At some point, I’ll wonder whether I’ve completely lost my ability to write. Eventually, I’ll either abandon the story or produce a terrible first draft.
Then comes the part I actually enjoy: iterating over that draft, finding threads (themes, running gags, character traits, voice, aspects of the world, etc.) and strengthening them, cutting away excess clutter, changing the ending, sometimes switching to a completely different format — basically, transforming that first draft into something I can read without cringing, then to something that’s maybe sort of okay, and then to something that’s actually pretty good, if I do say so myself.
Stewart: It’s definitely a great feeling to move from a cringey first draft to something that meets your standards! You’ve written flash and longer fiction. Do you think there are any noticeable differences between writing each form? Any tips for people trying their hand at flash fiction for the first time?
Regardless of what form you’re writing in, make sure there’s an actual story behind it.
Laura Pearlman
Laura: My goals are different for flash and for longer stories. When I’m writing a longer story, my goal is usually to more-or-less directly relate the events of the story. When I’m writing flash, I typically think about what events are happening in the story and then create an artifact (a reddit thread, one side of an email conversation, a public service announcement) that reflects those events indirectly, leaving it up to the reader to infer what’s going on. Just to be clear, I’m not saying all flash should be like that! Lots of excellent flash stories use a straight narrative structure to communicate clearly and directly; it’s just that none of those stories were written by me.
So here’s my advice:
Regardless of what form you’re writing in (straight narrative, epistolary, a series of yelp reviews), make sure there’s an actual story behind it.
Trust your readers. They’re probably better at picking up inferences than you think.
Of course it’s always good to show your story to someone else and get their opinion. But don’t think you need every reader to understand everything about the story — that’s an impossible goal, at least without overexplaining things to death.
Ignore this if it doesn’t work for you. There’s lots of writing advice that’s good for some people and bad for others.
Stewart: Excellent advice! Incidentally, have you noticed how “advice” and “radish” have almost all the same letters?Okay, maybe they don’t. But what’s the deal with the radishes in Graalnak? (I notice they’re also in the header image on your website.)
Laura: For the story, I chose them more or less randomly — I wanted something consumable that most people don’t have strong positive or negative feelings about (I don’t think the story would have been nearly as funny if Graalnak had been obsessed with bacon or kale).
Radishes started invading my real life around the time the story was published. My interviewer at Flash Fiction Online told me she grows radishes in her garden. Right after the story came out, my sister said she’d seen radishes at the farmer’s market had bought some because of me. Over the next few weeks, friends started telling me things like “there were radishes in my salad at lunch, and I thought of you.”
So radishes are my thing now. Also, they’re pretty.
Stewart: To be fair, radishes are delicious. I’ve always identified with Graalnak on a deep, primal level for… Okay, I can’t say that with a straight face, either. Anyway, thanks for letting me pick your brain about this storyand writing flash fiction in general!Do you have any other stories you’ve written that you’d like to share with people, or any exciting news?
You can read and analyze Graalnak, if you want to see what makes a great flash story tick. Otherwise, just keep writing with an eye to your goals and schedule, and take a breather if you’re feeling burnt out. Self-care is an important part of any hobby or career!
Next week, I’ll cover writers block and some methods for tackling it.
Starting a new hobby or picking up a new skill of any kind is difficult. There are basic concepts to pick up, strategies for success to consider, and — potentially worse — plenty of people willing to offer advice of questionable use.
Writing a short story certainly isn’t an exception to any of this.
One way turn your strong start into ongoing success is to start small. This doesn’t mean lowering your expectations or your standards for yourself, but to acknowledge your beginner status and focus on discreet, achievable steps that will eventually lead to your goal. (Remember those SMART goals from lesson 1?)
The lightning bolt — brief, surprising, memorable — is a commonly used metaphor for flash fiction.
These blog posts is designed around the principle that small successes can be reinforcing and lead to bigger successes, so we aren’t going to be starting out by writing an epic fantasy novel. Instead, we’re going to start small with flash fiction — a form of fiction also known as a “short short story.”
Flash will give you a constraint, a goalpost to aim for as you write, which I find is often helpful in sparking creativity in fiction and poetry alike. (Maybe this isn’t a surprising insight from me, since most of my poetry is haiku.)
Of course, practically speaking, starting small is also good for morale boosts: it’s easier to finish a very short story than it is to finish a very long one.
What is Flash Fiction?
Flash fiction is a term used for very short stories.
Also called short short stories, sudden fiction, or a half-dozen other things, the exact definition of flash fiction varies. In speculative fiction, most magazines use the term to refer to short stories of between 500 and 1,000 words. Literary magazines tend to have a broader definition, sometimes as high as 2,000 words, while some places add other constraints such as the use of non-traditional narrative structures. In most cases, though, the number of words in a piece of flash fiction is between 500 and 1,500 words, and the structure of the piece doesn’t matter.
Just because flash fiction is very short doesn’t mean it can’t be very good.
Good flash fiction tells a complete story, and is like a lightning bolt from a clear sky, surprising with its dramatic abruptness and leaving a lasing impression. Indeed, a very short story can even win awards. Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” published in Apex Magazine in 2013, is just under 1,000 words long but still won the Nebula Award offered by SFWA and was a finalist for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards—two other major genre awards.
Good flash is a lightning bolt from a clear sky, surprising, abrupt, and leaving a lasing impression.
In the literary world as well, there are authors famous for their skill at the short short story. Yasunari Kawabata, for example, received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. Although the award committee mentioned his novels as driving their selection, Kawabata also wrote over 140 “palm-of-the-hand stories” throughout his life, some as short as a page.
With its low word-count and equal potential for powerful story-telling, flash fiction can be a good starting place for newer writers — although of course the brevity of flash doesn’t mean it’s easier to write a short short story well, as such. Flash is also convenient if you’re really busy and can’t spend many hours a day on writing. Even if you’re an accomplished writer, a full-length short story can take weeks — months! — to finish to your satisfaction, and you necessarily need to pay more attention to tying up all your loose ends in 10,000 words than in 1,000.
Full disclosure: I might be a bit biased in my opinions about flash.
I’ve written and published a lot of flash fiction (including my first professional sale), and it’s a form I always enjoy. It’s a fun challenge to try and tell a complete story in a thousand words, to pare down what’s on the page to exactly what you need an nothing more.
As we’ll see later, you can also get away with structural things in flash fiction that are harder to pull off in a longer short story. You don’t have to stick to the traditional Western three act structure, although you certainly can stick to that structure, if you like. It’s certainly a familiar structure to anyone who’s had to analyze a short story in a high school or college class, and there’s a lot to be said for familiarity when trying something new.
Used under a CC-BY-SA license. Creator: UfofVincent
If you’d like to branch out, though, there are many other ways to write a story. We’ll talk about those later, though. For now, let’s briefly review what a story is.
The Basics of Short Story Writing
What is a short story, anyway?
There are many different ideas about what a short story should do. A lot of it depends on context, and of course in different cultures storytelling serves different purposes. For the purposes of this post, let’s say that a short story is a piece of fiction of under 7,500 words that shows a character or characters trying to do something, learning something about themselves in the process.
That is, to be fair, a terrible definition and one that doesn’t apply to some of my favourite stories. But for our purposes here, it’ll do!
A short story is a piece of fiction of under 7,500 words that shows a character or characters trying to do something, learning something about themselves in the process.
Most Western conceptions of the short story use something like the chart above, with an exposition that introduces the conflict, setting, and characters, a period of rising action that leads to a crisis, where the main character (protagonist) must decide how to act to resolve a specific problem or problems in the story’s climax. Not every short story follows this pattern, but enough do that you can probably think of a story you’ve read recently in these terms.
For example, in my story “At the Edge of a Human Path,” the first scene introduces the main character (K, a shapeshifting fox), the setting (ancient Japan), and hints at the conflict (K vs her mother). The next few scenes deepen our understanding of these three things, showing K acting to try and accomplish her goal in the story (convincing her mother to stop the Yamato from destroying the countryside rather than encouraging them to do worse) while also introducing new setting details and another character (Soga no Yoshitsuki, the warrior her mother has sent for her to entrap).
Towards the mid-point of the story, K has experienced her crisis point and decided that if her mother won’t act responsibly she must be removed. The tension continues to rise as she works towards this new goal, and in the climactic scene she and Soga no Yoshitsuki succeed in driving her mother out of the Yamato. In the final short scene, the story’s conflict is resolved, as K decides she will stay and guide the Yamato people away from their destructive habits to a lifestyle that respects the natural world.
Other people like to talk about a successful story containing “try/fail” cycles. In this conception of storytelling, the main character’s continued struggles to achieve their goal are what drive the plot. K first tries to convince her mother to return to beign a fox. When that fails, she keeps watch and consults a kami before trying again. It’s only after her first two failures that she changes her goal, and tries to convince Soga no Yoshitsuki to help her drive her mother away. This time, she succeeds, and the story’s main conflict is resolved.
There are many other ways of understanding a story, including the Japanese idea of kishōtenketsu, which uses a four-part structure:
Ki (起) – The introduction of the story setting, characters, etc.
Sho (承) – Additional development of the ideas introduced, with no major twists or changes
Ten (転) – The “turn” or twist, where an unexpected development appears
Ketsu (結) – The conclusion, which follows logically from the turn and brings the story to a close
A lot of people define kishotenketsu as “stories without conflict,” but that isn’t really accurate. It’s just that the conflict isn’t necessarily what drives the story — as opposed to Western ideas like the try/fail cycle and the three-act, rising-tension-and-climax model.
There are plenty of other ideas about narrative form and structure, as well. Jo-ha-kyu is a three-part conception often used in traditional Japanese drama, with the idea that a play should start slowly, speed up, and resolve rapidly. Aristotle suggested a play should be split into two parts: “complication and unravelling.”
Etcetera, etcetera.
Writing a Character Driven Short Story
On Codex, an online writing workshop and community for speculative fiction writers, one of my favourite answers I got to the question of “What is the poitn of a short story?” was from writer Addison Smith, who suggested the simple, yet compelling: “Feels over coffee.”
That is: a short story should make you feel something, but be short enough that you can finish it in about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
Coffee. (Feels not included.)
The idea of feels over coffee leads neatly into a discussion of character driven stories. A character driven story is one that focuses on character growth and change, rather a plot driven story where the focus is on events that happen. You might consider a plot driven story to be an action movie, with thrills and explosions a plenty, while a character driven story is a play in a theatre — the characters, not the events, occupy the metaphorical central stage.
Character driven stories can be very compelling, because they let you experience what life might be like for other people. They can build empathy and understanding, and honestly I just find it a lot more interesting to read about people than a string of explosions. (Michael Baybamsplosions!)
It’s an oversimplification, of course, to say that a story is either character driven or plot focused. It’s very hard to write a successful short story with only plot or character growth.
For flash fiction especially, though, “feels over coffee” isn’t a bad place to end up. So how do we make sure our feels hit home?
Character Arcs
A story’s plot is the changes that happen to the setting of the story. The character arc is a series of changes that happens to the character themselves.
Although “character arc” is the standard term for this, I like to think of character development as a helix, a three-dimensional spiral rather than a flat series of curves or a simple vertical increase. In a story, the character often returns to the same (external) struggle, but things have changed inside them; they’re not quite the same person they were. They’re able to see the problem from a different perspective, and that makes a huge difference that allows them to accomplish their goal.
Think of a spiral staircase: even though you’ve walked in a circle, you’ve reached a new level of the building at the same time.
You can also think of character arcs in terms of Classical Drama. In Classical Tragedy, the main characters have a fatal flaw — something that they can never overcome despite their struggles. The final act of a tragedy, because of this, usually ends in the character’s death or something even worse. The same happens in modern-day genres such as horror, where characters often stay the same and are ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming their struggle as a result.
Classical Comedy, on the other hand, has a happy ending. Misunderstandings are cleared up, the characters figure things out, and — at least stereotypically — everything ends in a wedding. Obviously, modern short stories don’t have to end in weddings. It’s probably not the best idea to even try. All the same, a character’s success at achieving their goal and clearing up the story’s conflict is usually a result of their changed understanding of themselves, rather than just trying harder and thinking more about the rules of their world.
What gives the best short stories their emotional impact, in other words, is the “arc” of a character’s growth. We see people learn and change (or not), and that affects us emotionally, because we’ve been invited into their heads and feel a connection with them.
Remember: feels over coffee.
Flash 101
Flash fiction is just a very short story. That means you want to try and do similar things but in less space.
Practically speaking, though, this isn’t useful advice. Here’s some that’s hopefully better.
Four Questions for Effective Flash
One way to look at flash is to think of it as a story that answers four questions in order:
What conflict does your protagonist want to resolve?
What does your protagonist do about it?
What happens as a result?
What is the resolution?
If you like telling stories in a straightforward way, with a beginning, middle, and end, you can fit each of these questions into 250 words a piece and end up with a 1,000 word story.
You can also get away, many times, with just implying some of the questions. By telling part of a story, you can show that there’s a world beyond the page, and engage your readers by letting them figure out what happens next.
What does a story look like when you only imply the conflict? When you spend 750 words describing your protagonist’s struggle but only hint at the resolution? Because flash is so short, these can also be successful strategies.
Non-Traditional Narratives
One fun thing to do with flash is experiment.
Forget “three act structure!” Break out of traditional narrative conventions altogether.
Tell a story as a list of bullet points, as a series of tweets, as a set of GPS coordinates. An AMA on Reddit.
By playing with structure in this way, you can simultaneously break up a story into many small scenes and give yourself tight wordcounts while still showing a larger story.
That said, you still need to tell a story, not just show off a clever list of things. Using your experimental structure as headers, with more traditional narrative in between each, is one way to do this. The story linked above, Laura Pearlman’s “I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything,” is a great example of this. Even though it’s just comments on a website, by the end of it we understand that an intergalactic conflict has been resolved.
Another flash shortcut is to look for patterns in nature or other kinds of art, and fit your story into them. Patterns are literally everywhere, so they can give you a boost if you’re stuck. (The technical term for this is ekphrasis.)
This technique works best when the pattern you choose actually relates to the story you’re telling.
A good example is Takamichi Okubo’s “Shinbu Unit 99,” the form of which mimics a haiku: five paragraphs, then seven paragraphs, then five paragraphs. Eleanor R. Wood’s “Fibonacci” uses the mathematical sequence of the same name, starting each paragraph with the next number in the pattern.
Description and Detail in Flash Fiction
Gustav Flaubert supposedly said, “Three details are enough to fix a strong picture in the reader’s mind — if they are the right details.”
In flash fiction, you don’t have the wordcount to spend 500 words describing the origins and history of a dress, but you can say it was eggshell yellow, ankle-length, and tattered, giving the reader a clear picture of it that helps them “see” your story’s world.
To find the “right” details, focus on your viewpoint character (if there is one) or the person central to your story. What are the details that are most important to this character? What do they notice, and why?
The right details will not just describe your setting, they’ll tell your reader about your character’s struggle, making it much more moving and memorable.
Three Signs of Ineffective Flash Fiction
In his management book Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni describes how anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurability can be warning signs for miserable employees. We can look at those same three things to figure out some potential things to avoid in flash fiction:
Anonymity: It’s hard to relate to a character in a short story if we don’t know something about who they are.
Irrelevance: If something isn’t relevant to your plot, character, or setting, it will distract your readers.
Immeasurability: If the main character of a story isn’t trying to do something and doesn’t grow as a person, readers may wonder why they’re reading about them. (Think character arcs!)
Obviously, you can write great flash that has all three of these elements. But it’s harder!
Convservely, if you’re writing a piece of flash fiction that tells a story about a specific character who tries to achieve specific goals, and if you focus on what’s important to that character and those goals, readers will be able to feel your feels that much more easily.
Assignment: Write a Piece of Flash Fiction
Now that we’ve talked about what makes a short story work — and flash fiction in particular — here’s your assignment for the week.
Write the first draft of a short story that’s 500 to 1,000 words long.
Don’t submit itanywhere.
Hopefully, you’ve been able to stick to your schedule (If not, that’s okay! Try again!) and have been spending some time every day writing or thinking about writing.
This week, we’re going to use that schedule to start writing more purposefully, with the goal of a finished short story that’s between 500 and 1,000 words — the wordcount most often associated with flash fiction. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can write more, but try not to set a goal above 1,500 words maximum. You want that word-count constraint to guide your creativity, and you’re also more likely to finish a 500 word story than a 5,000 word one, especially if it’s the first thing you’ve tried to write.
The second part of this assignment is counter-intuitive.
What’s the point of an assignment that tells you not to do something? I’ll talk more about my reasons for this in future lessons, but the short version is that my approach to writing and submitting fiction works better when you have more than one story you can send out. I also find it’s easier to revise stories (and make them better!) when you let them sit for a while.
So after you do write your assignment, don’t try to sell it right away. Set it aside in a drawer or file folder and just let it turn over in the back of your mind. If you haven’t used up your entire week’s worth of writing time, start something new! It’s even better to have two finished short stories than to have one.
The hardest part of any new habit is getting started. This is certainly true for fiction writing.
In fact, one of the things I’ve found as a writer is that no matter how many stories I’ve finished and submitted getting started on even a new story is hard, sometimes — that blank page just stares you down, and all your great ideas just flee in the face of the endless possibilities.
We’ll get into how to deal with that in another post. For now, let’s focus just on the idea of fiction writing.
In the post below, I’ll outline some suggestions for how to start a writing practice without burning out or beating yourself up, two things that turn fiction writing from an enjoyable hobby or career and into a grueling autopugilistic disaster.
First, let’s go back over our materials list. You don’t necessarily need to run out and buy a fancy planner or scheduler (unless that sort of thing motivates you!), but you’ll want to have either some paper and a writing implement or the digital equivalent on hand to write down a few things.
For bonus points, you’ll also need a friend who’s willing to receive updates about your progress — although if this idea gives you anxiety like it does me, I totally understand why you’d skip it.
Also, this is kind of a long post. If you don’t have a lot of time, you can split each sub-heading out into its own day. If you have more time, working through all of it at once should take you an hour or two at most.
Holding Yourself Accountable
Why write things down? Why set goals at all? Can’t we just start writing? Well, sure. Nothing’s stopping you, and if that invigorating rush of starting something new will sustain you in the long run, it’s worth a shot.
Speaking from my personal experience, though, I do a lot better if I have a goal in mind and a plan for how to get there. Writing it down gives me something to look back at if I forget where I’m going or how I plan to get there, and looking at goals can be motivated.
At this point I’d just like to reiterate something: There’s no One True Way to Be a Writer. If you’ve tried and succeeded in the past without written goals, or if for some other reason you can’t or don’t want to write stuff down right now, that’s okay.
That said, on this occasion I have SCIENCE to back me up!
I don’t really understand what this has to do with science, but it’s what my public domain stock image site gave me, so…
Science!!!!
Heck yeah, I guess.
Setting Goals for Fiction Writing
More seriously, psychologists have actually carried out empirical studies on goal-setting and writing things down.
This article from Michican State University cites a 2015 study by Dr. Gail Matthews that split participants into groups, with some writing down and sharing their goals with friends and a control group who just thought about their goals.
The result?
Of the participants who wrote down their goals and shared weekly progress with a friend, 76% successfully achieved their goals. Those who thought about their goals, but didn’t write them down, only had a 43% success rate.
It’s pretty clear from this study that writing down what you want to do and how you plan to get there can increase your chances.
Full disclosure: I suck at doing this, and it has 100% slowed down my attempts to draft and revise the novel I’ve been working on since 2018. For short fiction writing, where I actually keep track of my submission goals (and deadlines!) in a spreadsheet, I do much better.
This year I’ve set myself a goal of working on the novel revision for 30 minutes a day. It might be a pretty small number, but it’s something I can actually do. So far, I’ve been sticking to it and while I haven’t gotten a lot done yet, I know those 30 minutes will add up eventually.
Which is a nice segue into the next part of this lesson:
The Gentle Art of Goal Setting
Not all goals are created equal.
There are many different methods for creating useful goals, but one that’s worked for me is the SMART criteria system. Originally designed by George Doran in the early 1980s as a way of meeting management objectives, this system is easily adaptable to any situation, and is one useful way to guide yourself as you set fiction writing goals for yourself.
SMART, in this case, is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timey-Wimey. (Okay, maybe it wasn’t timey-wimey in the original acronym.) Let’s break down each of these terms.
Specific: Don’t set big goals like “become a best-selling author.” Break that big goal down into smaller, more specific ones. “Write a short story” isn’t as impressive on paper, but it’s much easier to do because it’s specific. Don’t think of this as compromising on your dreams — after you finish that one story, you’ll set a new goal. And another. And another. Keeping them specific just ensures you have a better idea of how to achieve what you want to do with your fiction writing.
Measurable: Measurable goals are easier to achieve because you can see how you’re progressing. If instead of “write a short story,” we say “write a 500-word short story,” then you can start feeling good as soon as you’ve got those first 50 words down — that’s 1/10 of the way there alraedy! It doesn’t have to be wordcount, and in fact some fiction writing goals are better without numbers attached, but try to find some way you can measure your goals, whether it’s words written, hours spent writing, stories finished, or even just number of strangers you’ve awkwardly introduced yourself to by saying “So, I write short stories….” (Advice: don’t be that person.)
Try to pick goals that rely only on you.
Attainable: This ties in with specific and realistic, but is a little different. Goals work best when they’re something you have control over. I have some fiction writing friends who set goals like “This year, I’m going to sell a story to [insert magazine name here].” That might be motivating, but it is (in my opinion) not an attainable goal because it relies on someone other than you. You have no control over the editor of a magazine, and can’t guarantee they’ll buy your story no matter what you do. If your goal, however, is “This year, I’m going to submit three stories to [insert magazine name here],” that’s entirely within your control. In short: Try to pick goals that rely only on you.
Realistic: Think back to “become a best-selling author.” Sure, who wouldn’t love that? It’s definitely on my writer bingo card. But it’s not super realistic, especially if you just started out. “I want to get better at writing fiction” is realistic, but it misses some of the other targets above, since it’s non-specific and not really measurable. Honestly, if your fiction writing goals are specific, measurable, and attainable they’re probably already realistic. Just make sure you’re aiming for something you have a chance of actually succeeding at, and you’ll be good here.
Timey-Wimey: Speaking for myself, nothing motivates me like a deadline. If I say “I’ll revise this story someday,” someday never comes. If I say “I’ll finish revising this story by next Wednesday so I can send it to Mermaids Monthly,” chances are good it will get done — even if it is only because on Tuesday night I started scrambling…
Of course, “write a 500 word short story” is maybe a bit too small for your overall goal. (But maybe it’s not! I don’t know your circumstances!)
Try to think of what you can reasonably accomplish in a 3-month period and shoot for that. Just Remember: You want something you can feel satisfied with, but not something so time-intensive and difficult you’ll want to quit.
Setting a Schedule for Fiction Writing
Goals are one big part of a sustainable fiction writing habit. Figuring out a schedule that works for you is equally important.
Now, I have two kids. I have a full time job. I do freelance nonfiction and have other commitments as well. That means it’s not possible for me to set an ambitious schedule (or at laest, not possible to keep it). Keeping my goals realistic helps, but I also have to make compromises and just drop the schedule in the short term if it’s not feasible.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are different approaches to fiction writing. Some authors do really well with an hour a day at the same time every day, and neither rain nor snow nor glom of nit will stop them. Others don’t write anything at all for weeks (or months!) at a time, and then crank out a story in a single day. Some even just write when they feel like it.
At some point, though, you have to write if you want to get anything done. Many writers in the speculative fiction writing community call this “butt in chair time.”
Keep all of this in mind as you think about what a writing schedule might look like for you. An hour a day? Thirty minutes? Maybe doing two 15-minute sessions a day is more workable, and will get you where you want to go. Setting a stopwatch or other timer can be helpful.
No matter what you go with, try and stick to it for a month and see how it goes.
Just like with goals, you probably have a better chance of sticking to your schedule if you write it down. Writing down your schedule also has other benefits: you can show it to people who might not otherwise understand quite what you’re doing when you lock yourself away (physically or mentally) and sit in front of a keyboard or notebook for an hour every day.
Don’t be rude about defending your time, but try to be firm — within the bounds of reason. Explain your goals and why they’re important to you, and why you need the time you’ve set aside to reach them.
That said, I have a 10 year old and a 9 year old. I’ve been writing at home since my kids were born, and have long since learned to drop my writing at a moment’s notice when they need me and pick it up again later. Learning to work around constant interruptions is actually a pretty great skill for fiction writing.
In the end, scheduling is about balancing fiction writing goals with not being a William Faulkner level asshole. Faulkner may have won the Nobel prize for literature, but he also once told his daughter “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” (Spoiler: She released an autobiography after his death, including this and other charming details.) This is not a recommended approach and is, frankly, abusive.
If your schedule doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world. I’m not saying I don’t get frustrated when my fiction writing is interrupted — it is frustrating — but rather that it’s important to me that I keep a sense of perspective.
If you get called away during your fiction writing time, try not to stress. It will be waiting when you come back.
Don’t Compare Your Goals (or Output) to Others
One last thing about goals and schedules, and then we’ll move on to failing (an exciting topic!).
It’s natural to see what other writers are up to and feel jealous, or to feel like you’re useless because Wuck Chendig can write 63,000 words a month and you can barely manage 1,000.
But here’s the thing: Wuck Chendig is in a totally different place than you.
Very different approaches can all lead to success.
He (or she, or they!) might be a full time writer, spending 4-6 hours a day on nothing but fiction writing while you’re only getting in half an hour a day around a full time job and family obligations. Or he might have started writing twenty years ago, while you just picked it up three months before.
Especially for fiction writing, there are huge differences in schedules, writing habits, and writing output. That’s all fine.
This goes in both directions, incidentally. One of my writing friends who’s only been writing for a year or two had six stories published in 2020, receiving critical attention and a glowing review on a major industry blog. Another friend who started writing around the same time I did also had a great 2020, with a lot of attention and buzz for several stories.
It’s hard not to look at my own 2020 and feel like a failure by comparison. To look at the attention other people are getting and not want to ask what I’m doing wrong because my own work didn’t get any buzz. It’s hard, but I try. But without that comparison I did pretty well for myself, with seven of my own stories published.
The short version of what I’m saying is this: Everyone is on their own path, and as long as what you’re doing works for you then what you’re doing works.
Comparing your own fiction writing successes to someone else’s is a surefire way to make yourself miserable, so my advice is to avoid doing that as much as you can. Instead, focus on meeting your own goals and congratulate yourself for meeting them when you do.
What to Do when You Don’t Meet Your Goals
Failure is a part of life.
Writers in particular seem fond of quoting Samuel Beckett’s “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better,” from the author’s Worstward Ho! (Oddly, nobody quotes the other parts, despite insights like “Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for missaid.” Gotta love modernism!)
Failure is inevitable. It doesn’t have to be permanent.
Anyway, the point is not entirely that absurdist drama is a questionable source of inspiration. It’s that failure is inevitable. However, it doesn’t have to be permanent.
What do I mean by that?
Unless you are unimaginably lucky (I do not like the word “talented” — talent is learned, not innate, and it isn’t all you need to succeed anyway.) you are absolutely going to fail at some point. That’s true in just about anything. In fiction writing, you might fail to your goals, you might stop sticking to your schedule, or you might . And of course, there’s dealing with rejection letters, and the many other wonderful ways fiction writing can go sideways.
The disappointing truth is this: failure is totally normal.
All writers have to cope with failure at some point in their career, and that goes doubly for most of us who write short fiction, which requires a steady submission habit. If you ask 10 published short fiction writers how many times they get rejected in between each story sale, the number is likely to be higher than you think.
Here’s an example: I sold ten stories in 2020. That might sound impressive. But I also received 103 rejections in 2020. Failure is everywhere in my short fiction career, and it vastly outnumbers my successes.
So when you find yourself failing, whether it’s by not meeting your goals, not sticking to your schedule, or whatever, don’t beat yourself up over it.
If you quit forever after failing at something, you’ll never get to where you want to be. Instead, review your goals to make sure they still meet the SMART criteria and that they still feel like goals you want to achieve. Review your schedule to make sure it’s a realistic one. Ask yourself “What went wrong that time?” and make a note of it, then try again with that in mind.
It’s sometimes hard to keep going, and that’s okay. Take a break! Refresh yourself! But if you want to meet your goals, you have to try again at some point. If you persist, you’ll eventually succeed.
Assignment: Set Your Fiction Writing Goals and Schedule
Your assignment is both simple and hard:
Come up with a list of two to three goals for your writing
Figure out a schedule you’ll use for your fiction writing
If you’re having trouble getting started, here are a few example goals:
Write, revise, and submit three short stories
Write, revise, and submit a single 3,000 word story
Write three poems each month in January, February, and March
and some example schedules:
Spend an hour every weekday on fiction writing
Write for three hours a week
Two 25-minute pomodoros of fiction writing a day, or 500 words a day (whichever comes first)
For extra credit, you can find someone to share your goals and schedule with and arrange weekly check-ins.
Other writers are great for this kind of thing. If you don’t already know some, check out the #amwriting tag on Twitter. You’re also more than welcome to comment on this post for accountability purposes.
I’m thrilled to announce that I have a new story out!
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” takes place on a terraformed Mars where different ideas of justice have taken hold in different, mostly independent city-states.
Take Aala, for example. They’ve scratched out a living for themself as a petty thief and pickpocket in the glittering, turbulent spray cast up by the endless waterfalls of Marineris City, where profit is king and men like Vasilis are its loyal, vicious servants. Kirsi, on the other hand, comes from Maricourt, where community, equity and compassion hold sway.
The most Aala ever hoped for in Marineris was to slip through the cracks, to avoid Vasilis’s wrath and out of the local law enforcement’s damp and dreadful holding cells. But all that’s all behind them, now, as they travel to Maricourt with Kirsi–who, for some reason, doesn’t think they’re scum and wants to spend actual time with them.
Maricourt and Kirsi between them give Aala more hope than they dare to admit, but theft is the only way they know how to survive. Will a change in surroundings lead to a happy ending, or will a slip back into old habits ruin their run in Maricourt before they ever had a chance to start?
If you want to find out, you’ll have to read “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” out now in No Police = Know Future, edited by James Beamon and available here from Experimenter Publishing.
No Police = Know Future
“What does a future without police look like?”
That’s the central question asked by the No Police = Know Future anthology, which came out in mid-December from Experimenter Press, the publishers of Amazing Stories Magazine. With stories from me and seven other authors, including Holly Schofield, Lettie Prell, Jared Oliver Adams, and Anatoly Belilovsky, the anthology presents some possible answers.
Also, if you’re reading this before December 27th (as opposed to in the distant future) you can also attend an online launch party for the book!
Join editor James Beamon and some of the authors (including me) December 27th, 2020, at 1pm Eastern Time to chat about the book, the future of policing, and the meaning of “justice.” Check the details here on the Amazing Stories website for information on how to attend.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep”
At the core of my story in the anthology is the concept of restorative justice.
What is restorative justice? According to the Centre for Justice & Reconciliation (CJR), it’s justice that “views crime as more than breaking the law – it also causes harm to people, relationships, and the community.”
This seems pretty obvious, but where restorative justice often surprises people is that it considers the reintegration of offenders and victims as part of its concept of “justice.”
That’s not to say that victims are less important than offenders. Rather:
Offenders also face stigmatization. Since crime causes fear in the community, offenders become vilified in the eyes of society. Incarceration separates them from their families and communities. Upon release, offenders frequently lack stable support structures, and even start-up money for food and clothes, housing, transportation, and other parts of a healthy productive life. At the same time, offenders face discrimination in their attempts to become productive citizens.
Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, “Reintegration“
So what does restorative justice look like in real life? That’s a tricky question, and its worth noting that there are many disagreements not only on how to implement it, but what it even is and whether it might (intentionally or otherwise) still cause harm to offenders.
The central idea, though, is one of respect. Respect for victims and respect for offenders, giving the former restitution while still allowing—and encouraging—forgiveness for the latter so they can become integrated into society, less likely to offend again and less likely to need to. Restorative justice is about healing and support, not punishment and submission.
Given the above (not to mention all the other things wrong with criminal justice in the USA today), why not try a system that doesn’t treat every single person who commits a crime as a malicious actor who needs to be taught a lesson? A system that acts from a humane, compassionate impulse rather than a neurotic, rules-obsessed, inhumane one? A system where the main idea is to actually help people?
If these questions intrigue you, or if you’ve just never thought about it before, I’d encourage you to read up on restorative justice at the links above. (Of course, you can also see how I approach it in my story!)
But what about Mars?
Look closely: that’s Mars, not Earth! Image credit: Daein Ballard. Used under a CC-By-SA license.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” is set on a terraformed Mars, where water is plentiful on the surface — as you might have guessed from the title.
The story opens as Aala and Kirsi take a monorail over a lake at the center of Maricourt Crater, and the metaphor of water as peace and justice runs throughout the story.
Marineris City, where profit is king? Turbulent waterfalls that fall ever downward. Maricourt? A tranquil lake which glitters in the sun. (Okay, so it’s not a very subtle metaphor.)
Mars has historically been associated with water in the form of canals, which don’t make an appearance in my story in particular (a missed opportunity, now that I think about it!). And of course, water development and management would be essential on any human-livable Mars.
I have a new story out today in Nature Magazine’s “Futures” column, titled “Five Things I Hate about Phobos.”
Illustration for the story, by Nature‘s regular story artist Jacey.
The story’s about love and the potential of loss, and ultimately asks the question of whether our eventual but inevitable demise is a tragedy or somethinge lse. You can read it (and a brief author’s note) online here in all its glory: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03505-9
In the spirit of the listicle-style title, I’ve come up with what you might call “Five Things about Five Things I Hate about Phobos.” If you’re into that kind of meta stuff, read on!
So meta!
1. It’s set on Phobos
Look at this guy, such a charmer.
Okay, pretty obvious from the title, probably, right?
That’s Phobos the moon, not the personification of fear and panic in classical Greek mythology.
Mr Fear and Panic makes a cameo, though, at least sort of, with the narrator commenting on how messed up it is that anyone would actually want to live on a moon named after him.
A moon which, incidentally, has an orbit that will eventually decay so far that it will crash onto the surface of Mars or break up into tiny pieces around a hundred million years hence.
2. It’s my fifth appearance in Nature
Which I actually didn’t notice until I checked just now!
That makes the title — and this post — even more numerologically concerned, especially given my Discordian tendencies. And that’s yet another connection to Classical Greek mythology, given that Eris, the goddess of discord and strife, is Discordia’s principal deity.
Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
Most of my other stories appear in the sidebar on the Nature site when you read the current one, or you can dig them up from my bibliography here, as well.
3. It’s got nonstandard pronouns
One of the characters in the story, Tashi, uses zie/zir pronouns.
If you’re not familiar with these, they work just like any other pronoun. Zie is the singular third person form (like he or she), and zir is both the object (him/her) and possessive (his/hers) form.
Zie (often also spelled ze) is a gender-free pronoun most commonly used online, so you can think of it as similar to they/them. Although if someone uses zie, that doesn’t necessarily mean zie identifies as nonbinary, or even considers zirself “gender free” at all — and it definitely doesn’t mean you should use they/them instead when referring to someone whose pronouns are zie/zir.
4. It draws on traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas about impernanence
The word “wabisabi” is somewhat of a buzzword in English design circles, used to describe a sort of vague “imperfectness” that’s treated as a catch-all for a Japanese-inspired aesthetic.
Actually, though, “wabisabi” is two specific terms mashed together: wabi (侘び) and sabi (寂び). Because these words share similar elements aesthetically, they are often connected into a single word: wabisabi (侘び寂び)
To be fair, judging from the number of Japanese-language articles titled things like “The difference between ‘wabi’ and ‘sabi’,” confusion over this often-paired set of terms is rampant even within Japan. (Which makes sense. How many people can easily rattle off a clear explanation of art nouveau as a design aesthetic?)
However, although these words are often paired, and both have something to do with accepting impermanence, they’re pretty different terms.
So what does wabisabi mean, exactly? According to the article linked above, from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun, wabi is “the emotion you feel when things are calm and quiet,” while sabi is “the emotion you feel when something is old or withered.”
This 16th-century Korean tea bowl was repaired with kintsugi, a Japanese repair aesthetic where “breaks” are an important part of the object’s history — often mentioned as an example of “wabisabi.”
Those definitions match up relatively well with the ones in jisho.org (my favourite Japanese-English dictionary), where wabi is “austere refinement” or “enjoyment of a quiet life,” and sabi is “elegant simplicity.” Taken together, then, wabisabi can be considered a feeling conveyed by something that’s simple, calm, old, and withered. More generally, it’s used as shorthand (at least in English) for “imperfect” things, especially those which were broken and then repaired.
Although life on Phobos in my story isn’t exactly elegant or refined, it’s hard to imagine the life of space-dwelling people to be anything other than simple in the near future. And accepting that — along with the fact of our own inevitable demise — would be pretty important.
On the other hand…
5. Celebratory light show!
A central part of the story is a festival held by those living on Phobos. This festival involves electrostatic charges and corona discharge on the satellite’s surface — which are a real thing, at least according to this Nasa study from 2017.
A plasma globe, one type of corona discharge familiar to many US school children.
In the story, those living on Phobos gather on its surface and sing, holding hands around a crater in a ceremony called The Harmonia (remember Eris? Her Roman equivalent was Discordia, which is Harmonia’s antonym. Levels within levels, man! Levels within levels…).
The narrator of the story finds this uncomfortable at first, but although they don’t admit it in so many words, you can read between the lines and see that their participation in the ceremony is the point at which the story pivots from “I hate this place” to “I’d hate to see this place disappear.”
Do they get to the point of acceptance? Well, you’ll have to read the story yourself to find out.
SFWA just announced that the voting form for the 2021 Nebula Awards is open for business, which means it’s that time of year again: fiction awards season. As usual, I’m here with the stories I’ve had published in 2020 that are eligible for next years Nebulas, Hugos, Otherwise, and so on.
What have I got for you this year? Here are my three favourites from 2020, plus a note about the eligibility of works published in this year’s issues of sub-Q Magazine, which closed up shop in August of 2020.
Of course, you don’t have to be voting for the 2021 Nebula Awards — or any others — to read these. My main goal with sharing the stories is to help them find readers who will enjoy them!
If you don’t want to read about my process, here are just the details!
“How They Name the Ships” is a 750 word sci-fi story with my take on the space opera trope of AI ship names, but it’s really about identity, the power names have, and how to stay true to yourself when the society you live in won’t accept who you are. It was published in Frozen Wavelets in December, and can be read online here.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” is a 3,000 word science fiction story about restorative justice on a future Mars. It was published in No Police = Know Future from Experimenter Press in December of 2020, which can be purchased here.
“Five Things I Hate about Phobos” is a 950-word science fiction story about love, entropy, and wabisabi (also on Mars). It was published in Nature in December of 2020 and can be read online here.
“At the Edge of a Human Path” is a 5,000 word fantasy story about shape-shifting foxes, politics, and power in ancient Japan. It appeared in the 87 Bedford Historic Fantasy Anthology in May of 2020, and can be read online here.
“Against the Dying of the Light” is a 1,000 word sci fi story about dementia and caregiving. It appeared in Flash Fiction Online in May of 2020, and can be read online here.
“Scenes from the End of a World” is a 1,000 word sci fi story about finding a fresh start amidst a disaster. It appeared in All Worlds Wayfarer‘s June 2020 issue, which can be purchased here.
sub-Q Magazine was an online magazine of interactive fiction which published its last issue in August of 2020. The pieces in it from this year can be played online here (the first 9 entries), and while the magazine as a whole isn’t eligible for any categories in the 2021 Nebula Awards, it is eligible for the Best Semiprozine category in the Hugos.
New: “How They Name the Ships”
The Somsei Republic name their Ships after important historical figures (usually male). The Ucchou Federation gives Ships use-names like any other citizen, and let them select their own personal names. The philosophical alien Kfuul and the brutal Kháos Empire follow their own rules for ship names, as always. Even the repulsive, symbiotic Brakm have a specific way of naming the Ships they have scavenged.
Aala has scratched out a living for themself as a petty thief and pickpocket in the glittering, turbulent spray cast up by the endless waterfalls of Marineris City, where profit is king and men like Vasilis are its loyal, vicious servants. Kirsi, on the other hand, comes from Maricourt, where community, equity and compassion hold sway.
The most Aala ever hoped for in Marineris was to slip through the cracks, to avoid Vasilis’s wrath and out of the local law enforcement’s damp and dreadful holding cells. But all that’s all behind them, now, as they travel to Maricourt with Kirsi–who, for some reason, doesn’t think they’re scum and wants to spend actual time with them.
Maricourt and Kirsi between them give Aala more hope than they dare to admit, but theft is the only way they know how to survive. Will a change in surroundings lead to a happy ending, or will a slip back into old habits ruin their run in Maricourt before they ever had a chance to start?
If you want to find out, you’ll have to read “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” out now in No Police = Know Future, edited by James Beamon and available here from Experimenter Publishing.
New: “Five Things I Hate about Phobos”
“Five Things I Hate about Phobos” is about love and the potential of loss, and ultimately asks the question of whether our eventual but inevitable demise is a tragedy or something else.
It’s got nonbinary pronouns, romance, wabisabi, and a celebratory lightshow. Also, it’s set on Phobos, Mars’s erratic larger moon, which is doomed to either break apart in the atmosphere or fall to the surface a hundred million years from now.
Image from Tsukiyoka Yoshitoshi’s “100 aspects of the Moon” woodblock series. (PD)
My short story “At the Edge of a Human Path” follows K, a shape-shifting fox living in ancient Japan, as she tries to stop her mother from guiding the Yamato clan toward a culture of war and domination of the kingdoms around them. K finds an unlikely ally in Soga no Yoshitsuki, a Yamato man who suspects her mother, but can the two of them succeed in ousting her?
(87 Bedford Historic Fantasy Anthology, May 26 2020, 5000 words.)
About the story
This story is set in 6th century Yamato Japan (or at least, an approximation of what Yamato Japan was generally presented as being like in medieval Japan), but the core of it actually comes from a medieval French/English folk tale motif called The Loathly Lady.
In Loathly Lady stories, a man (usually a knight) ends up marrying a hag with supernatural powers and a hideous appearance, usually described in excrutiating detail. The stories are generally comedic in nature, especially the one I used as my main model, “The Weddynge Of Sir Gawen And Dame Ragnell,” which sees Gawain tasked with finding out “what women really want” to save King Arthur from having his head removed as the result of Yet Another Stupid Act of Kingly Disregard of Other People’s Property.
Way to go, Arthur.
Charlemagne and Geoffrey of Bouillon are all “Seriously Arthur, can you just stop.” (PD)
Anyway, Gawain spends a year going all over England and getting hundreds of different answers (because, surprise, women are not a monolith!) and ends up with the answer sovereignty after promising to marry the hag, who knows the “correct” answer for reasons. (You can read the original online at TEAMS Middle English Texts, if you like!)
“At the Edge of a Human Path” mashes up the loathly lady motif with one of my favourite shapeshifting yokai: foxes. In Japanese folklore, much like European animal tales, foxes have a reputation for trickers, and in early modern times their reputation was somewhat malicious. But in earlier stories, they could be helpers, guardians, and even the servants of Inari — one of Shinto’s principal gods/spirits.
This story won the Judith Merrill short fiction contest in 2017, but this is its first appearance, so it is eligible for the 2021 Nebula Awards, Hugos, and anything else which determines elegibility based on year of publication. More importantly, though, I hope you enjoy reading it!
“Against the Dying of the Light”
In “Against the Dying of the Light” (Flash Fiction Online, May 1 2020, 1000 words), Alyssa takes her aging mother to a facility researching a cure for dementia. Although she doesn’t find one, she finds something almost as important: how not to burn herself out as she helps her mother navigate her end of life as an individual with her own desires and needs.
About the Story
With a title that’s shamelessly lifted from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and a setup that sounds like it’s ripe for yet another SFnal dystopia about the Evils Of Technology As A Cure For Something ™, you might expect this story to be cynical, depressing, and angry—especially since the first words of the line in the poem are “Rage, rage.”
While I can’t deny “depressing,” I tried very hard to work against the cynicism and the tpyical SFnal tropes and come at this from a place of compassion and realism. I also tried to work very hard against the even more pernicious, real-world trend where people with disabilities—whether that’s dementia or any other kind—are treated as problems to solve or as infants to pacify, rather than as actual people. “Science/magical cure” is a bad trope for a number of reasons, okay?
A futuristic hospital imaging system. (PD from pxfuel)
On a lighter note, selling this story to FFO in particular amused me. Why? Because for a couple of years, I read slush for FFO and one of the things that annoyed me the most were all the stories about Alzheimer’s that tried to be “clever” by starting and ending with the character going through the exact same situation, often word for word.
As you might guess by the quotes around “clever,” I did not think they succeeded, and just found these stories immensely frustrating. I’m not casting judgment here, by the way. These stories may have been cathartic experiences written by people trying to process the loss of a loved one to what is a horrible disease.
From a storytelling perspective, though, they featured characters who would grow and change over the course of a thousand words, some in ways that were excellently written. And then the end would appear, and all of it didn’t matter. Argh!
I wrote this partly as a response to those stories, curious if there was a way that I could compellingly tell a story about a dementia sufferer that didn’t follow that pattern. You can be the judge of my success!
At 1,000 words, “Against the Dying of the Light” is eligible for the short story category in the 2021 Nebula Awards and any other award that bases its categories on length.
Scenes from the End of a World
Issue front cover.
“Scenes from the End of a World” follows JT, a survivor of an impending apocalypse, as they struggle to deal with their feelings of guilt for those left behind. As the generation ship they’re now on board departs its doomed planet, will their encounter with a woman their own age start the healing process, or just make them feel worse?
(All Worlds Wayfarer, June 2020, 1,000 words)
About the story
In the long ago and far away, I was part of an online writing group called Liberty Hall. Rather than just being another writing group, the idea behind Liberty Hall was that you would only have 60 minutes to write and submit a complete piece of flash fiction based on a prompt. It was intense, and although I didn’t always get finished stories out of it, the practice definitely helped hone my flash fiction skills!
Although Liberty Hall hasn’t existed for several years now, earlier this year some friends and I tried a similar exercise for a few weekends. This story is one of the results, growing out of prompts that featured the end of the world and finding someone new.
As this was its first appearance in print, “Scenes from the End of a World” is eligible for best short story in the 2021 Nebula Awards, and other awards as well.
sub-Q Magazine
sub-Q was a magazine of interactive fiction (part story, part game) that ran from August of 2015 to August of 2020. I was fortunate enough to be the editor of it from late 2017 through to its final issue this year, and it was a fun thing — if a time-consuming one.
Although it isn’t around any more, it did have a number of releases of new (interactive) fiction this year, many of which are themselves eligible for the 2021 Nebula Awards game writing category, the Hugo Awards’ newly announced video game award, and the XYZZY Awards (the annual interactive fiction awards).
“Whatever you want me to be” by Laura De Stefani
If you’re new to interactive fiction, or just want something new to play, go check them out the magazine’s back issues here: https://sub-q.com/back-issues/
I’m especially proud of our 2020 issues, when we really got into our stride as a magazine, with games by Ken Liu, Monica Valentinelli, and a serial by Sharang Biswas. Not to mention our cover art (pictured at the right) by artist and game designer Laura de Stefani, who you should go follow on Twitter right now.
Finally, while sub-Q itself isn’t eligible for anything in the 2021 Nebula Awards, it is eligible for the Hugo Best Semiprozine award.
Phew.
That’s a lot of stuff from 2020. Even if you’re not reading for any awards, I hope you’ll take a look at what I’ve written this year, and that you like what you see if you do!
Insignia Stories, a small publisher specializing in stories with an Asian setting or focus, is running the Horror Matsuri blog tour in celebration of the spookiest time of year.
This post is my contribution, a reprint of my flash fiction piece “Blood-stained Letters Found in a Roadside Shrine on the Outskirts of Kyoto,” originally published in Syntax and Salt in 2017.
As a bonus, at the end of the post you can find a link to my free interactive fiction, “Untitled Noppera-bo Game”—a yokai-inspired take on everybody’s favourite game about a chaotic goose.
Blood-stained Letters Found in a Roadside Shrine on the Outskirts of Kyoto
by Stewart C Baker
Dear Madam,
I must apologize for the lengthy break in our correspondence prior to this letter. With the death of Councilman Yamazaki under such bloody circumstances, I felt it best to avoid attracting notice to myself for a while.
However, I have not been idle after Yamazaki’s passing. Indeed, I have learned of an even graver danger to all of us who are not human and who call this place our home. Mere tanuki that I am, I have nonetheless taken upon myself the task of ending this threat—if, that is, you would deign to help me once again.
Have you heard, I wonder, of a certain popular essayist named Ishida? His works have never been friendly to Yamazaki’s efforts on the council, and yet I have found that he as well is fully aware of this hidden world through which we move. Worse, he too is a hunter—though I could not learn whether he hunts out of avarice or if he nurses some unspoken need for vengeance.
This morning, after Ishida had left his home at the usual time, I took human form and let myself in through his kitchen door with ridiculous ease. Secreted away in his under-floor storage area were trophies that made me shudder.
Here, in brief, is what I found:
A yellowing copy of Illustrated Night Parade of One Hundred Monsters, with a strip of white silk marking the beginning of the section labeled “changing beasts” and with crosses through the entries for inugami, tanuki, and bakeneko. A circle has been inked around the entry for fox.
Two badger pelts, rolled up and tied with red twine soaked in honey.
The desiccated corpse of a small dog with elongated paws, dressed in a red-and-blue festival happi.
Five bifurcated cat tails.
One clay jar filled with tanuki testicles, shriveled and dried like beans
This last find, in particular, set terror coursing through me. Was Ishida, I wondered, the hunter who had killed my family in our den, all those years ago? I must confess I sat there in the dimness of his storage area for far too long, paralyzed with memories. It was only a memory of you, Madam—of your warm breath gentle on the nape of my neck days later as I wandered, lost and alone through the forest—that brought me back to myself. That allowed me to renew my dedication to our mission.
I know that, after the prominence of Yamazaki’s death, you too will be reluctant to draw attention to yourself. But is it not you, Madam, who has taught me the importance of striking before we are struck? Always, through the years you have cared for me, you have taught me to shed the terror of my youthful trauma. It is only through your love and benevolence that I have gained the strength to enact vengeance against those who would harm innocent creatures like ourselves.
I implore you, Madam: aid me once again in making the city safer for our kind.
I remain, as ever, your loyal servant,
T.
Dear Madam,
Our friend the essayist left home this morning in the company of a woman who reminded me somewhat of you. She had vulpine features and long, reddish hair, and wore the most resplendent silk kimono I have ever seen. Our friend, as well, was more finely dressed than his usual threadbare kimono, wearing instead a finely-cut Western-style suit of black-and-grey. As they walked away, he laughed and took her by the arm as tenderly as though she was his newly-wedded wife.
Astonished as I was by his sudden change in company and behavior, I did not let it distract me from my purpose. I snuck once more into his kitchen, intent on retrieving the remains in his possession and giving them a proper burial.
But it seems, alas, that our friend has been cleaning house. The under-floor storage area was as deserted as my childhood den; the only thing I found was a single page from the Night Parade, crumpled in a ball in one corner. When I smoothed it out, I found that it was the entry for fox. Our friend must have been in a terrible hurry to remove it from his book, as the poor beast’s picture was torn quite in half—its head was missing entirely.
I swear to you I left no trace on my previous visit, Madam. There is no possible way our friend could know I have been here. No way that he could know I have reached out to you for help.
All the same, I grow uneasy. What would you have me do?
Your servant,
T.
Dear Madam,
I was most distressed to hear that the woman in the last letter matches your sister’s appearance. So distressed, indeed, that I could not wait for morning to investigate: I crept into our mutual friend’s home while he was sleeping and breathed powdered leaves into his eyes to ensure he would not wake.
I will not prevaricate: Your sister is dead. I found her skin stretched out on a rack in our friend’s back room, her tails brushed to a glimmering sheen.
And that is not the worst of it. In checking the under-floor storage area, I discovered the following:
A beautiful silk kimono, folded neatly and tied with its own obi
A letter addressed in your own hand, unopened
Six fox kits with their heads smashed in, as yet unskinned
I am sorry for your loss, Madam, but we have no time to mourn. We must act, lest these atrocities continue.
At the same time, we cannot risk another violent and bloody death like Yamazaki’s. I beg of you, allow me to use my knowledge of Ishida’s habits in working out a subtler plan of attack. I will provide details in my next letter, which I will place in this shrine tomorrow evening just before sunset.
Yours in sympathy and hopes of justice,
T.
Dear Madam,
I will start this letter with a question: Do you remember, five years ago, when you pulled me from my family’s den? A vicious human hunter had murdered the rest of my littermates—along with my parents—and I alone survived.
That, at least, is what you told me, and I had no reason to doubt you. You fed me, cared for me, taught me to survive in the forest and the city both. And if you focused overly much on the killing of hunters, I did not think it strange. It was only a year ago, when we first turned our focus onto Yamazaki, that I began to suspect you were lying.
Yamazaki, more so than any of the other hunters we had hunted, was obsessed with neatness. His trophies were whole, his collection impeccably ordered, and the sites where he enacted his murders were mostly untouched. And yet, my earliest memories consist of wanton slaughter, of blood and gore in every corner in the den I had called home.
But even if I doubted, there was nothing I could prove, and even if they had not killed my parents they were hunters all the same. And then, just after Yamizaki’s death, Ishida drew me in and captured me. I feared the worst, but much to my surprise he did not harm me. Instead, he fed me, cleaned my wounds, and brought to bear upon me all the reasoning he wields so well in his essays.
Do not mistake me: He did not deny his occasional hunts. But he insisted that he hunted only to protect those creatures—human or otherwise—who could not protect themselves from those creatures who would harm them. Creatures like foxes, he told me, who often kill food they cannot eat, just for the joy of it. Who can be seen dancing in the forest after their meals, coated in the blood of the dead, giddy with slaughter. He had been watching a fox for some time now, he said, and could show me the proof of it.
Yes, Madam. Your own sister was the one who convinced me to betray you. We tracked her to the den of a family of weasels, where I witnessed for myself the blood, the chunks of matted fur which lay about the place as though storm-scattered. Thus it was I came to learn that you had killed my family. Thus it was that I learned, at last, how I could enact my revenge.
Do not try to flee after reading these words; I am afraid it is far too late. Already Ishida must be sneaking up behind you, garrote and dagger at the ready.
Goodbye, Madam, and may my poor departed siblings earn some measure of peace from your passing—a passing that I pray will be long and painful, and as bloody as that which met Councilman Yamizaki not so long ago.
T.
Bonus Interactive Fiction!
If you’re in the mood for more early modern Japanese spookiness, check out this short web-based text game I wrote for last year’s EctoComp.
