Short Story Writing Project: Using Articles for Ideas

As I stated in an earlier article, one of the great roots of a story is the question, What if? What if a man started receiving post cards in the mail every day that gave him odd advice? What if that man were a newspaper columnist? What if his wife was trying to kill him? What if the post cards were from his estranged father?

The problem with what if? questions is that you still need a germ of an idea in order to get started. For some people this is no problem. Ideas come easily for some people and not so easily for others. One of the great sources for ideas is articles. The world is filled with articles these days. From newspapers to magazines to blogs, people are constantly writing new articles about every topic you can think of. What you need to do is mine these articles for your fictional ideas.

I subscribe to a number of bloggers, from Scott Adams of Dilbert fame to Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week to Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. Just those three blogs alone can yield any number of ideas for a story. Here are the most recent articles from each of those bloggers:

• Beauty as God – Scott Adams
• Beating the Morning Rush: The 3-Minute “Slow-Carb” Breakfast – Tim Ferris
• 20 Money Hacks: Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Finances -Leo Babauta

I didn’t pick the articles because I thought they were especially appropriate, I simply grabbed the most recent articles. From them, I can come up with a number of what-if questions:

• What if a beautiful high school cheerleader found herself in love with a homely science nerd with no interest in her? What if she started stalking him? What if no one would believe him?
• What if a mother became obsessed with filming her young child? What if she started uploading the videos to YouTube? What if the child became famous?
• What if a married couple living an extravagant lifestyle tried to put themselves on a strict financial regimen? What if one of them adhered to it and the other didn’t? What if one of them started to hide their money from the other one?

These are just ideas I thought up on the spur of the moment. Anyone is welcome to use them, but I would bet that my readers could come up with better ideas. Feel free to leave your own what if? thoughts in the comments.

Team Building: A trip to the dark side

I apologize for the lack of posting this week. I’ve spend most of the week being psychologically assessed, and the process proved to be more painful than I had imagined. Did I see a psychologist or check into rehab? I wish. No, I was being analyzed by my peers, a group of people with no experience or education in the process. I, in turn, was expected to do the same thing to them. Does that sound like Alcoholics Anonymous? No, this was a work function. It was a team building exercise.

The first part of this appalling experience began simply enough. About a month ago I (along with the rest of my department) was told to take the DISC personality assessment. Nobody asked if I thought this was a good idea or if I wanted to do it, I was simply told to log in and take the assessment.

The DISC assessment is a series of questions that involve statements that “most” or “least” describe you. You get a list of four statements. You pick the “most” and the “least” and you ignore the other statements. Additionally, in other parts of the assessment, you rank a series of statements in order from the most descriptive to the least.

A typical set of statements would be something like this:

• I am very helpful towards others
• I don’t like tempting fate
• I don’t give up easily
• People like my company

By going through this process, they determine your “behaviors” and your “values”. The behavior categories are as follows:

• Dominance – Independent thinkers motivated to succeed
• Influence – Social people who like the company of others
• Steadiness – Amiable people who like harmony
• Compliance – People who prefer accuracy, structure and control

These explanations are slightly more simplistic than the ones our facilitator gave, but only slightly. The other portion of the test assessment measured our values, putting them into the following categories:

• Theoretical – Values knowledge and truth
• Utilitarian – Values money and security
• Individualistic – Values power and influence
• Aesthetic – Values beauty and harmony
• Social – Values people and relationships
• Traditional – Values codes and order

I’m not going to reveal the results of my assessment. But I will say that I found the assessment very difficult because there was often little difference between the things I thought least described me and the things I thought most described me. In the end, I felt as if most of the items described me in some way or another, and it was only a matter of degree that separated these things. In some cases, I could have claimed the exact opposite answers and still been just as comfortable with my choices.

The real problem for me was the team building exercises we went through this week, based on these assessments. Many of us were uncomfortable with the results. I’m sure that some people enjoy getting information about themselves, but I felt as if I was being labeled. This was made worse by the fact that I was forced to share these labels with the rest of my group and have them interact with me based on this assessment.

One of the interesting things about their reactions is that they didn’t believe the results of my assessment. They wanted to put me in an entirely different category, and not for what I considered to be positive reasons. Most of their descriptions of me came from the negative aspect of the category rather than the positive. That hurt.

I didn’t feel particularly singled out in this treatment. It seemed like everyone was looking to point fingers and talk about how other people annoy them. They probably had these thoughts before, but now they had some sort of pseudo-psychology on which to hang their criticisms and the excuse that they were trying to work together as a team. After all, we had two whole days of training in this sort of analysis. That qualified us to pass judgment on each other. Right? Heck, were encouraged to point fingers by the end of the third hour.

The problem for me was that, up until this week, I really liked the people I worked with. Unfortunately, I no longer feel as if they like me as much as I like them. One of the reasons I kept this job, despite some pretty good indicators that I should move on, was that I liked working there. I looked forward to coming to work. I’m not looking forward to it now — so much for team building.

Well. If you stuck around until the end of my rant, thank you. With luck, I’ll start to feel more like myself (minus the labels) tomorrow. I’ll try to get back on topic as soon as possible.

My Thoughts on The Oscars and Juno

I love movies, but I’m not a big fan of the Oscars. Their taste in films has always seemed a bit stodgy and mannered for me. I like comedies more than dramas, on most days, and any movie that aspires to be an “epic” tends to bore me, especially by the third hour. These days, even the average movie seems to clock in at about two hours and twenty minutes. That would be fine if every moment of the movie felt important or at least interesting, but for the most part the extra time just feels like filler. Wedding Crashers for example, was a very funny movie, but no comedy should last two hours. Wedding Crashers could have been edited down to an hour and a half without batting an eye.

That is why I was so happy to see Diablo Cody win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Her movie Juno was pretty close to the perfect modern comedy. The dialog was crisp and funny. The lead character, Juno, had real flaws that were balanced out by genuinely admirable and lovable qualities. Juno was surrounded by people who cared for her, but who had realistic (and funny) views about her. The stakes felt real, but never dire, and the ending didn’t require some major, forced moment of realization. The victories were small but they had consequence.

I think it was a great screenplay. That said, I also give credit to the directing and the acting as well. I’m sure that every moment in the script didn’t make it to the screen. Juno could have been a two hour movie, instead of a brisk 98 minutes. Luckily, the people involved were wise enough to know what to cut and what to keep.

Short Story Writing Project: Writing about real life events

Several years ago I happened to end up in the same writing workshop as a woman with whom I had gone to elementary school. For the workshop, she submitted a short story that was taken from her childhood. Because we had gone to school together, I knew almost all of the characters in her story. She hadn’t changed the names or any of the details that I was familiar with. While the actual events did not involve me, I knew the personalities of the people involved and could picture every character exactly as the had existed rather than as fictional participants in the story. This made it difficult for me to judge the merits of her short story, because I was bringing in so many elements from my own life — elements no average reader would pick up on.

In my writing, I often base moments in stories on situations in my life, but because I have never chosen to write about an actual person from my life, the events quickly become fictionalized and part of the fabric of the character’s life rather than my own. While there is a bit of me in every character I create, I don’t write about myself. I did attempt once to recreate a real life evening in fiction, but I quickly grew frustrated. It was too difficult for me to capture the essence what happened. I couldn’t recreate the situation accurately enough to satisfy me.

I don’t mean to discount the value of writing about real life people and events. I merely want to point out some of the frustrations involved. Some things to think about when writing about real life events are:

• Will the events make for a good story?
• How closely should you mirror real life?
• Who might end up reading your story?
• What perspective should you use?
• Would this work better with fictional characters?
• Should you change the names to protect the guilty (and yourself)?

I would love to hear about other people’s experiences with stories based on real life. Please leave your own perspectives in a comment.

Short Story Writing Project: To make a long story short

Don’t start writing a short story with a page count in mind.

Today’s tip may seem obvious to some people, but judging by the number of times I have seen it come up in writer’s groups and writing classes, I think it bears mentioning. A short story should be as long as it needs to be. Your story may take 1,000 words to tell or it may take 5,000 words. Either way, it will take as long as it takes. You may have an expectation of how long a story will be, just because you know what you plan to write, but don’t set out to make the story that length — just write the story.

There may be situations in which length is a factor. If you are in a writing class, for example, and your teacher tells you to write a 10 to 12 page story, you may be stuck with that limitation. I would question that instructor if I were in the class, but if the instructor was adamant; I would do my best to make it work. The first thing I would do, however, is write the story my way, taking as long as I needed. I would worry about editing it to their requirements only after I had first edited it to my satisfaction.

I once took part in a writing workshop in which one of the participants submitted a seven page story that had eight characters and five different settings. It was a whirlwind of events with little or no explanation or reflection. It was, in short, a cluttered mess. In defending her story, the writer said that she had kept it short, “because people keep telling me my stories are too long.” The problem was that this wasn’t a story that could be told in seven pages. At twice the length it would probably have still been too short to include all of the things that were going on. She didn’t really write a seven page story, she wrote a thirty page story in seven pages, and it didn’t work.

The opposite problem can occur as well, though it is generally not as serious an issue. If you had a perfectly good eight page story that you needed to “pad” to ten pages in order to meet a requirement, you might find yourself putting in or leaving in a few details that you would otherwise want to eliminate. My advice in that situation is to look for the most meaningful way to expand your story. You might even manage to improve it. If you don’t, you can always go back to your preferred version once the assignment is finished.

Short Story Writing Project: Beware of the Twilight Zone Ending

Today I wanted to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to short stories — The Twilight Zone Ending. For the few of you out there who may not know, The Twilight Zone was a television show that originally aired in the early Sixties and was revived several times over the years with less and less success. The original show is considered a television classic and deservedly so. The mood and dark tone were certainly ahead of their time for television.

One of the staples of The Twilight Zone was the twist ending. One episode that I have remembered over the years was the tale of a group of people trapped in a cylindrical room with high walls but no ceiling. They try repeated to escape, and towards the end one of them makes it out, only to fall onto the snow below and be immobilized. At that moment, it is learned that they are actually dolls in a barrel, part of a Christmas toy drive. That’s the “twist”.

The twist ending wasn’t invented by The Twilight Zone. Writers O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant were both early practitioners of the twist ending. The Twilight Zone, however, thrived on this sort of writing and most of its episodes involved some sort of strange or ironic resolution. In more recent times, Screenwriter and Director M. Night Shyamalan has made twist endings his bread and butter with movies such as The Sixth Sense and The Village.

If done properly, a twist ending can be very effective. It provides the audience with a jolt at the end that gives them a reason to actually think about the story. The problem with the twist ending, however, is that it involves purposefully withholding key information from the audience in the hopes that the “twist” will make it worth it. This creates several potential issues:

• The ending can feel unearned or unimportant. Misleading your audience can cause them to question their investment in their experience. For example, the Twilight Zone episode I refer to had a great deal of personal conflict and interaction that seems to be rendered null and void by the ending.
• The ending can be illogical or cause people to question key story elements. For example, in Shyamalan’s The Village, I immediately wondered how these people managed to never encounter an airplane, a hot air balloon, a blimp or any other signs of the real world when they were really quite close to it. This was papered over with a rather glib explanation (from Shyamalan himself in the movie) that the entire preserve was a “no fly zone” due to a government bribe. The paper-thin explanation actually made the ending seem more illogical rather than less.
• The ending turns into the focus point of the story, causing people to concentrate only on the elements of your story that apply to the ending and forgetting any other character development or themes that may have been present.
• If your audience finds out about the twist before they read the story, the ending will no longer be interesting to them. You can’t rely on the rest of the world to keep your secrets.

For these reasons, I don’t write short stories with twist endings and I tend to avoid reading short stories that I know have twist endings. When I read a story, I don’t want to feel fooled or tricked. I want to feel as if the journey was at least as important as the destination.

How about the rest of you? Does anyone want to defend the Twilight Zone ending? Please give your thoughts in the comments.

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