All the way back in 2019, I talked about my goals and mused a bit about how writing fiction and writing nonfiction are two separate skills--and I wasn't working on the former nearly enough. To that end, I decided to pursue more fiction writing during 2020. My ArtStories project--wherein I use others' artwork as the launching point for my story--has begun in earnest…and by that I mean I have four new stories. (If you want to read them, I'd recommend going to the ArtStories link, as that gives you access to the PDF of them, which are better formatted. More on that anon. However, if you want to check them out online, they are "Community Service", "Dirt Path", "Sidewalk", and "Tradition".)
A couple of things that I've learned about this process: Writing fiction is much harder than nonfiction. Well, let me amend that: Writing fiction is much harder than spouting off whatever comes into my head. Some of my nonfiction is time-consuming--the music video essays I did for a bit, or the ones with a lot of links and research--and it can pull hours of a day into the crafting of them. However, there are essays I've written, or are currently writing this very moment, that don't require as much, mentally speaking, as fiction does. I can write a thousand words of nonfiction in less than half an hour, but the short stories--all of which clock in at over 2,000 words--take about twice as much time. Another little lesson is that, even with only four days of work to show for this new focus, I can already see how practicing my fiction--even if I'm not practicing any sort of worthwhile editing on it--is already helping me as a fiction writer. Unlike lifting weights or other physical exercise, I can see results already. This comes, I believe, from the fact that I have to condense all that I know (the theory of writing) and put it into immediate action (the praxis of writing). I don't have time to dither or write my way into the voice of the character. I have to pick it up immediately and run with it. Along those lines is the condensation of motivation. In my novels, I often have characters whose main desires are somewhat nebulous or ill-defined--at least, until the plot happens to them. I don't really try for a page one explanation of what my characters want. Normally, I write fairly subtly, with motivations slowly being exposed over the course of the novel, trying to avoid any sort of overt declaration. In short fiction, however, I have no choice but to keep that concept in mind. While I may have done it to differing degrees of success (depending on the story), I'm now much more cognizant of what it is that my characters desire right from the get-go. Monique wants to protest oppression. Lana wants to get drunk and finish her job. Randen wants to murder someone. With character motivation so clear, it helps me remain focused on what I'm trying to write. Next up: Twists. There's a lot to unpack about what a writer chooses to focus on, what it means to her to have certain events in her story, but I'm not really equipped to deconstruct my own writing. Suffice to say, each of these short stories are "pantsing" efforts--that is, I'm writing them by the seat of my pants, letting the story go wherever it wants. The result is that there is some surprisingly dark material here. Murderers, monsters, questionable inventions…the twists to the story often surprise me, too. (In fact, I think that's why I wanted to remain more positive and hopeful (comparatively) in my latest story, "Tradition", if only because it's a change of pace.) I don't necessarily write in order to have a twist--I'm no M. Night Shamylamalamalan--but they do seem to spring out of the story. I don't know if this will continue--I have no idea what story will come out next--but it's certainly been part of what's going on in the first few. One area that I didn't anticipate is the effort in putting them online. Essays like these are a breeze: I slap up a new post on the blog section of my website and publish it. There's, maybe, five additional minutes of work to get an essay like this up and readable. But the short fiction I'm writing is formatted differently: It doesn't have the additional spaces that an essay has to indicate paragraph breaks, it has tabbed first lines, and it's placed in its own page of the website. I do this because I feel like fiction should still look like it's in a book form: Essays are one thing, stories are another. I want to have a dropped cap first line of my story, and the paragraphs look like real paragraphs. I know that's a strange nit to pick, but that's how I feel it ought to be. The result of that is a rather tedious process of creating a new web page, saving the story as a PDF, uploading all of the right images, and doing whatever else is necessary to get the story published. I don't really want people reading it online, despite giving them the option, and though the PDF is a better preservation of my writerly vision, it's not ideal either, as mobile reading of a PDF is a pain. There's no clear way of fixing this, from what I can see, and it is a bit frustrating. If I come up with an alternative, I'll be sure to implement that. Now, you may have noticed that I decided to talk about my short fiction instead of writing that today. Well, there are personal reasons, including the fact that I'm going to be unable to write anything for the next week or so. End result: I felt like I should jot down some of my early feelings about the experience before I go too deeply into it. I hope that I'll be able to keep going--two or three short stories a week would be ideal, as that would mean that, by the time 2021 came around, I would have over 100 stories--and really see some progress. Then again, if it means that I feel inspired to write in my novels, then the website will likely languish whilst I work on those other projects. Who knows? It's a brave new world for me. I mentioned the idea of DeviantStories back in October, and since then I've decided to switch the name to ArtStories here on the website. Not because of copyright or anything (though I imagine that there might be complications if I ever earned money off of these stories--something that gnaws at me but I'm choosing to ignore), but because I think it's a better name overall and more clearly explains what I'm trying to do.
Anyway, this essay isn't an update on ArtStories as much as it is a quick behind-the-scenes of where my first completed ArtStory came from. If you're curious about the story itself, it's found here, or you can visit the ArtStories section of my website, where there's a PDF for easier reading. I would recommend reading the story before reading the BTS, as there are spoilers…I guess… See, the first sentence of a short story is supposed to be something that hooks the reader, that sets up what's to come. And my first sentence really does that, I think: "When Randen first started his career as an artist-murderer, he never thought that his mother would be the inspiration for what would make him so well known." I mean, I tell you how it's going to end right there. How can we be talking about spoilers if the first sentence already tells you how it's going to be? I mean, the rest of the paragraph points out that he has all of the standard earmarks for being a sociopathic killer, so the ending really shouldn't come as any sort of surprise. Still, as I was writing the story, I had this weird feeling like it was easy to forget that we're reading a story about a murderer. I don't know if that's true--I can't ever read this story as anything but my own; I'll always know how it ends, what the purpose of each moment of the story is for. So the experience of reading through it is always a process of rereading, for me. It will be interesting to see if people forget where it's headed by the end or not. I think it's fair to ask why I would feel compelled to write a murder story when the image behind it is so benign. And I think that's why it worked for me. When I saw "Duckie", there was nothing about it that seemed sinister or intimidating. I mean, that is one happy duck. But what stood out to me was the number written on its chest. PrismoTheSmoke writes that the project came about as artwork to be sold during a Rubber Duck Festival. The artist's design was to show off how different media can make for different effects. For me, seeing a black and white drawing of a duck with a number across its chest, I had to wonder what the other numbered ducks would look like. And, since it's in black and white, I couldn't help but think that it almost looked like the numbers were written in blood. At first, I thought of it as a cop story: Lewy and Hutch, two grizzled detectives, find this numbered rubber duckie as a type of calling card and score counter--it's the two-hundred-eighty-first murder of this kind…and that's when I petered out. First of all, I don't really know how detectives work, aside from what I've seen on TV shows and movies. Also, how incompetent would Lewy and Hutch have to be to let a guy get away with almost three hundred murders? (In fact, part of the reason that Randen picks specific numbers for his forty-odd duckies is because I wanted to use the number from the picture without having to march through massive quantities of death. And, since it was order 281 that inspires Randen, that's why he uses that number, rather than it being sequential.) So I shifted the narrative from the pursuers to the perpetrator. Coming up with Randen (which is simply "Branden" without a b) was easy, as the news is replete with incels of his type. I'm not particular sensitive to people who view violence as the way to deal with life, so there's a callousness toward him that I couldn't help but include. What humanizes him, I think, is his mother. Their conversation--which takes up a fair portion of the story--is one that I think any parent or role model has with a charge who is feeling directionless. I've worked through these sorts of questions with former students before--though I usually try to get a better grasp of what she (or he) is after before dispensing my (probably erroneous) advice--and there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, if anything, Mama Anderton was doing the best thing she could in the situation. It's not her fault that he wanted to graphically murder a coworker and photograph the mutilation. She probably thought he wanted to, like, recreate "The Last Supper" but with rubber duckies, poor woman. I wrote the entire story in a single sitting, which is really the only way that I can write short stories. Coming back to them after being away is very much having let the iron cool and then bringing back the hammer. I've a couple of other ArtStories that I've attempted, but neither of them ended in a single sitting--the story was either too big or too ill-defined for me to finish--so they continue to languish on my hard drive. Maybe they'll come back a bit later, who knows? The last bit of "Where did this come from?" has to be traced to the fact that I'm reading a short story collection by Stephen King. I feel like the best part of the book so far (and I'm two-thirds of the way through) is the title: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. A couple of the stories have taken strange twists, and there's plenty of weird situations--as you might expect from a King story--but nothing has really struck me as 1) scary (I've yet to read a scary book, though I've read quite a bit of horror lately), or 2) that memorable. Nothing against King; short stories aren't my favorite, I guess. So there is a bit of irony that I'm putting "Duck, Duck, Death" onto my website and trying my best to write more short fiction. Well, that's about all there is to the behind-the-scenes. If you've read the story and this much, I want to thank you for devoting enough of your life to reading over four thousand of my words today. That's mighty fine of you, and I do appreciate it. |
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