A Writer's Tale Page 11

  Just because there have been a gadzillion vampire books doesn’t mean you can’t write one, too.

  But if you want to write about vampires, you’d better do some research first by reading Dracula, Salem’s Lot, Interview with the Vampire, etc. The more vampire stories you read before embarking on your own, the better. It’s as if you are making yourself a map of a minefield. You find out where not to step, but you also find out where you can step in safety. You want to reach the point of being able to say, “Hey, I don’t think anyone’s used this angle yet.” So you use it.

  I’ve so far written two adult vampire novels, The Stake and Bite. All I hear about these novels is how different they are, how fresh, how they broke new ground and went against the reader’s expectations. In my opinion, there are always fresh ways of dealing with any subject even something as overdone as vampires. But you can only find the new angles if you’ve read what else is out there.

  Fourth, it is very limiting to read only in the genre in which you write or aspire to write.

  Don’t make the mistake, for instance, of reading only horror. (And don’t make the enormous error of not reading horror in the mistaken notion that, if you haven’t read it, you can’t be accused of copying it.)

  If you want to be a horror writer, read plenty of the current stuff being written in the field, read the classics of horror, but also read in every other area possible. You need to be familiar with the whole scope of literature. For a list of reading material that has been important to me, see my reading lists in this book.

  By reading broadly, you gain a great store of knowledge about literature and about the human experience. You see how the writing was done by others throughout history. Such literature enriches your imagination, shows you the range of possibilities, and can’t help but give your own writing more breadth, depth, richness and weight.

  Rule 7

  “Keep Your Stuff to Yourself.”

  Generally speaking, you’re better off letting nobody know exactly what you’re writing.

  That way, you avoid several dangers.

  When you tell someone about your story, you diminish it in your own eyes. You’re not likely to do it justice. So hearing yourself describe your brainchild, you might conclude that it sounds rather lame.

  Fairly often, writers actually lose interest in writing a certain story or novel after telling someone about it. They decide not to write it at all. Or, if they are well into writing it, they sometimes quit.

  Another danger of sharing a story is that your friend or lover might not seem very enthusiastic about it. That can be a bummer, and might lead to Quitties.

  Or your listener might offer advice on how to make it better. Do you really want that?

  On some occasions, if you tell your story to a writer, you might experience the delight of finding your idea in his or her next novel.

  The same might happen if you tell your story to an editor.

  So it is always best to keep your mouth shut and write the book. Let the curious discover your story only after it is safely housed between the covers of a book and on sale in a store.

  If someone asks what you’re working on (as friends often do), your best defense is vagueness. Don’t give out a blow by blow description. Give your friend a sentence or two.

  Example, The Cellar. “Oh, it’s just about some old house where a bunch of people got killed.” You have politely answered the question, but you haven’t given away the farm or ruined anything.

  Just as you should keep your mouth shut, you should keep your manuscript away from anyone who might be inclined to peruse it.

  Don’t allow friends or loved ones to read what you’ve written. You may be eager for their gushy approval, but suppose they don’t like what you’ve written? Even a lukewarm response from such a person can mean disaster for your relationship. It can also be unhealthy for your writing.

  Let’s not pull punches, here.

  You’re the writer. In most cases, your friend or lover is not a writer. In some cases, he or she may not even be well read. So ask yourself this: “What the hell do they know?”

  Do they know more than you?

  No, they don’t. So why should you ask for their opinion?

  In fact, you should run away from their opinions. Never seek the opinion of anyone.

  It is not even a good idea to ask a professional writer for an opinion of your manuscript.

  You should never do that, even if the writer is a good friend. Especially if he is a good friend.

  Because there is nothing to be gained, and plenty to lose. If your work is wonderful and flawless, no advice from the professional writer will improve on it. If things are wrong with it, however, the writer is not likely to tell you about them because he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings or turn you into an enemy. If he does tell you what’s wrong with it, you’ll probably turn on him with an arsenal of resentment and scorn.

  Also, sending your manuscript to another author creates huge burdens for him. As mentioned above, he won’t dare offer even the most valid of criticisms. (Not if he’s smart.) And if he reads it at all, you might some day accuse him of stealing your material.

  Even if the author ignores all the risks to himself, reads your stuff and dares to give you advice, it may turn out to be bad advice.

  What he tells you might be excellent as it applies to himself, but bad for you. (You need to discover your voice, not his.) A fellow writer might also give you bad advice on purpose, hoping to derail you.

  Trust no one.

  Trust only your own instincts.

  Keep your mouth shut, write your manuscript, show it to nobody. Make a photocopy and send the photocopy to your agent.

  Your agent should be the first person, other than yourself, to find out what you’ve been writing. Otherwise, you’re asking for a legion of troubles.

  Rule 8

  “Persist.”

  I read somewhere, “Persist, even if the world calls it doing evil as it is most likely they will.”

  Persistence will win out.

  Show me a published writer, and I will show you a person who has kept on writing in spite of every obstacle.

  He has found time to write. He hasn’t let rejection stop him. Or poverty. Or writer’s block.

  Or people saying he shouldn’t write about that sort of thing.

  No matter what happens, he keeps turning out the stuff.

  Because he’s a writer.

  It’s what he does.

  So he does it.

  He persists.

  And through the persistence, he succeeds.

  You Might Be A Lousy Writer If…

  1. Your character “produces” his gun, wallet, or other item without benefit of a factory…

  2. You’ve written a story that contains no scenes…

  3. Your short story takes place over a period of weeks, months, years, decades…

  4. Any of your characters experience an “involuntary shudder… ”

  5. You have a character switch the safety off his revolver…

  6. You describe the same thing three or four different ways in the same paragraph, if you needlessly repeat yourself, if you are so enamoured of your own words that you aren’t satisfied unless you’ve given your readers the same information several times without letup or mercy…

  7. You write your stories in the present tense…

  8. You write an entire story in the second person viewpoint…

  9. You allow a character to “hiss” a sentence that hasn’t a single sibilant…

  10. “You write a sentence like this,” he smiled.

  Turning A Incident Into A Short Story:

  An Experiment

  WHEN WRITERS ARE FIRST TRYING TO LEARN THEIR CRAFT OR ART, THEY often have trouble understanding what a story is. Frequently, they’ll mistake an “incident” or “occurrence” for a story. There is a difference.

  But the difference is very difficult to explain and difficult for aspiring writers to
understand.

  Understanding what makes something “a story,” however, is essential for success as a writer. Let me give you a quick test.

  Picture this. A guy walks into a convenience store, sticks a handgun into the face of the clerk, takes money from the cash register then shoots the clerk and runs out the door.

  If you expand that situation into ten or twenty pages, describing all the details and fleshing it out with dialogue, have you written a short story? Nope.

  It’s an incident, not a story. Now, suppose you want to turn it into a story. Maybe you learn about a new fiction anthology that’s in the works. It’ll be called Stick-Up. The theme of the anthology is that every short story has to be based on the idea of a guy committing armed robbery in a convenience store and shooting the clerk. And you want to create a story appropriate to the theme.

  How do you turn any incident into a short story?

  This slams us straight into the question: What is the difference between an incident and a story?

  A story, in my opinion, is an incident with a striking, unexpected element.

  What is striking and unexpected about a guy sticking a gun in the face of a store clerk and shooting him? Not a thing. Not where I come from. Happens all the time. While such an occurrence is terrible and shocking and sad when it happens in real life, it makes for lousy fiction. Because it isn’t a story.

  To become a story, the stick-up needs a “trick” or “gimmick.”

  I’m now going to take you on a little journey into writer-land. We’ll go on a step by step search for a way to turn the stick-up incident into a short story.

  This isn’t planned.

  I’ll explore the situation just as if I have every intention of writing a story for the Stick-Up anthology.

  Okay.

  The incident is a given.

  I now have to start hunting for the gimmick, the trick that’ll make it work.

  Here goes.

  Is there something funny about the criminal? Something strange about the clerk? What about a customer who somehow gets involved?

  Immediately, I like the idea of bringing a customer into the picture. For one thing, I can easily identify with being a customer. I’m not a criminal and I’ve never been a store clerk.

  Several times every week, however, I’m a customer at a store, at the bank, at a restaurant, etc. And I often do worry that I’ll be “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  I bet you do, too.

  And so do your readers.

  If you toss a customer into the crime scene, you’ll immediately grab the attention of your readers. They’ll identify with him or her.

  At this point, I know that I want to focus the story on the customer.

  Should I make the customer a man or woman?

  A woman, probably.

  Though I still don’t know where this story may go, I do know that a female customer will be more interesting than a guy. After all, we’re putting the character into a dangerous situation. It’s usually more fun to do that with a pretty, likeable gal than ‘with a fellow.

  She might be a career woman, a housewife, a student, a cop.

  How about a cop? Right away, I eliminate that idea. Way too trite. Any scenario in which the customer turns out to “really be” some sort of armed and dangerous superwoman should be avoided or at least viewed with great skepticism. Such gimmicks are too predictable. (Of course, even predictable gimmicks can be used if you find a way to give them an unusual twist. Maybe she turns out to be a cop, but… ) Let’s keep looking.

  What if the apparently innocent female customer is secretly a “bad guy?”

  I’ve used that sort of gimmick successfully on several occasions. In fact, that was the main trick of “Desert Pickup,” the first short story I ever sold.

  It can work because, if done well, it goes against the reader’s expectations.

  Which is always your goal.

  Jim Thompson used to tell people that there is only one plot things are not as they seem.

  If the customer seems to be an innocent victim in the wrong place at the wrong time, readers will strongly identify with her.

  They’ll imagine themselves being in such a situation. They’ll be worried about her. They’ll be pulling for her. They’ll be wondering whether she’ll survive the situation. If you pull a switcheroo (such as making her a robber, too) you can take the readers off guard.

  Exactly what you want to do.

  But I’m not completely comfortable with turning her into a “bad guy.” Besides, I don’t want to jump at the first halfway decent idea that pops into my head.

  We’ll keep it in mind.

  Let’s continue exploring possibilities, but remain focused on the female character.

  We’ll call her Susan. She will be our main character, and the potential victim. Somehow, to make her story work, we’ll need to find a way to turn the situation around so that Susan not only survives but prevails over the criminal. We’ll call him Spike.

  But how does she win the day?

  She must do something unexpected.

  While writing this, I’m partly thinking ahead. I’m thinking along the lines of, “What if she helps Spike?” Maybe he is trying to shoot the clerk, but his gun won’t fire. And Susan, standing nearby with a carton of milk or a bag of potato chips in her hands, says to Spike, “Could I give you a hand with that?”

  Certainly unexpected about the last thing you’d expect a customer to say in such a situation.

  And I find it rather amusing.

  In any sort of story, humor can be a very good thing. Everybody enjoys smiling and laughing. And you don’t expect to find humor in such a situation, which makes it even better.

  Aside from being amused and thinking, “This is odd,” the readers will probably be wondering what Susan is up to. She can’t really intend to help Spike put his firearm into working order. After all, he might end up using it on her. She must have a trick up her sleeve.

  At this point, I think most readers will be very eager to find out what happens next.

  They’ll be hooked.

  Spike, of course, is shocked by Susan’s offer to help. And he isn’t about to turn over his weapon to a bystander, a witness, a potential victim. He’d say something like, “What’re you, nuts?”

  We’re off and running.

  But to where?

  Who knows? I don’t.

  I do know this, however: Spike isn’t likely to hand his gun over to Susan.

  So what does happen?

  In other parts of this book, I write that every story has a secret, internal structure. It’s the writer’s job to discover this structure, which is inherent in every story.

  At the heart of this story’s natural structure is the problem with the bad guy’s firearm.

  When he attempts to shoot the clerk, why won’t it fire?

  The answer to this question will almost certainly be the key to the story.

  Right now, I don’t know what’s wrong with his gun.

  But there are a limited number of possibilities in the real world. If he’s using an automatic (i.e., a semi-auto), perhaps he has forgotten to take off the safety or neglected to jack a round into the chamber. Unfortunately, either problem could be fixed in less than a second without Susan’s interference. If he’s using a revolver, the situation is even more limiting for us. Revolvers almost never have safeties and there is no need to jack a round into the chamber. You pull the trigger and that’s it. If a double-action revolver is loaded, it fires. Unless you have a misfire, which is so rare with modern ammo that you don’t want to fool with it. Besides, if you have a misfire, all you really need to do is pull the trigger again and go with a fresh round. Certainly the next cartridge won’t misfire, too.

  I can see only two realistic possibilities for our scenario.

  One, Spike is using an automatic and it gets jammed. This sort of “Thing does happen. A round sometimes doesn’t get fed into the chamber properly, and the g
un won’t fire. In that case, you may have a difficult time prying out the stuck round.

  Two, Spike doesn’t have ammo.

  If I want to save my gimmick, I need to choose between those two alternatives.

  The jam has potential. Maybe Susan could offer to let Spike use her eyebrow tweezers to clear the jam.

  Nah. I don’t care for it. The jam is a little too forced and complicated.

  Whereas the other alternative has a wealth of possibilities.

  He has no ammo!

  Why the hell not?

  Now we really have a story cooking.

  Obviously, Spike thinks he has ammo. Otherwise, why did he try to shoot the clerk?

  If he thinks he has ammo but he doesn’t, where is it?

  I have no idea.

  But I’ve got to figure it out. If I can come up with a good reason for his gun being empty, I’ve probably got a story.

  The ammo might be missing because someone interfered with it.

  Susan?

  How could Susan, without Spike’s knowledge, get her hands on his weapon and unload it?

  Maybe she’s a magician.

  I don’t think so.

  Maybe she’s a pickpocket.

  Better. But it still seems to push the boundaries of credibility a little bit too far.

  While thinking about these matters, another thought has been running through the back of my mind: maybe Spike’s wife unloaded his gun without his knowledge back home before he took off for work.” Why would she unload it? Maybe she knows he’s a robber, and she takes out the ammo so he won’t hurt anyone. Or maybe she hates him and wants him to get killed. Or maybe she’s overprotective of him, unloaded the weapon so that she could clean his fingerprints off the cartridges, but then neglected to reload it after “helping” him. Any such situation might be the basis for a very interesting short story.

  While fooling with those possibilities, however, an idea suddenly exploded into my head.

  What if Susan, the-store customer, is Spike’s wife?

  This could work.

  In fact, I feel sure that it will.

  A little tricky to pull off, but most stories are.