New Short Story Incoming!

Back in September I talked about how I was starting to realize that the more I wrote of my novel, the less sense it made. Then in October I talked about how I came to decide that I would start it over for the second time.

I can tell you that I've finished the first draft and have moved on to the second, and it's turned out pretty well so far. I have yet to get any feedback from anyone, but I'm confident it will be positive.

The novel which was previously tentatively titled "The Slightest Moment" and sometimes referred to here as the Megan and Danny Novel is now a short story called "Asshole Liar", which sounds a lot more interesting already.
Here's the synopsis:
A short story about a man in the middle of cheating on his fiancee, thinking back on what made him the way he is, and knowing that soon he'll have to pay for what he's done.

I wrote the story partially as a project for a writing class, in which I was to mimic the style of a contemporary author, so those of you who enjoy the style of Chuck Palahniuk should find it enjoyable.
I will be posting that short story on this blog/site so that everyone can read it for free once I'm confident that it's ready to be released to the public, and I'll make sure to let you know as soon as that is.

Maybe I'll have it out in time for the holidays?
Remember to follow me on Twitter if you're into that sort of thing!
-Ryan

Starting Anew ... Again

Wow, yeah. I hate to do this again so soon, but you should have seen this coming.

Yup, I started over. Again. What started off as a crappy novella, and was then restarted to become a badass novel, turned into a bland mediocre novel.
So now I'm restarting it to be a short story.
As was made obvious by my last post I wasn't happy with where my novel was going. I wasn't completely sure what to do until I let my amazing, smart, and insightful fiancée read the draft.

Boy am I glad I had her read it. She came back at me with the brutal honesty that a wannabe author needs to hear from the people that care. Two of the characters didn't make sense (and one came off as a bitch), the main character's motives didn't make any sense, and the plot was thin as a wafer (which I knew from the beginning, but I hoped depth would occur naturally -- it didn't).
So, like the last time this happened, I've gone back and started over with no regrets; I knew what had to be done.
I've thought of an angle that will make the story way more my style, way more fun to write, and I swear that if it doesn't work out this third time then I'll give up on it for good. However after already starting the rewrite I'm really feeling that the third time is the charm.

Yes, I liked the direction that the second draft was going, and I liked that I was trying my hand at a new style, but it feels so good going back to a style (and the short story format) that I'm familiar with.

I swear this is the last time I restart this story.
-Ryan

What's the Point?

I recently stumbled upon many lists and articles about how to write better stories, characters, etc. and they made me question my own novel.

More specifically, what's the point?

I've noticed that while writing my novel, as much fun as it has been, I've not been completely sure of what the point of it is. Yes I know who it revolves around and what happens, but I don't know what its focus is.

Even more alarming is that it's becoming very obvious that the novel that I'm having so much fun writing is not one that I could ever see myself picking up and reading for fun. It's simply not my style or preferred genre, yet I have thoroughly loved writing it.

Then comes the fact that, with the revisions I've been making in my rewrite, the original plot's conclusion makes less and less sense with every page I type.

Let's put it this way; the story is about persons X, Y, and Z. Person Y is the only of the three to carry the Y chromosome. Persons X, Y, and Z form a love triangle throughout the book, and person Y ends up with person X in the original draft. Except the more I write out their characters, it doesn't make any sense that persons X and Y would end up together.

I had no idea how to deal with this for the longest time, then I suddenly had an epiphany whilst watching a football game that person Y should end up with person Z, given certain events. I quickly ran the sequence of how that would happen and what the result would be in my head to find that it made perfect sense! It wouldn't even require me to change around certain later scenes too much, and in fact would make them even more dramatically interesting!

This slight change even completely shifts the focus of the novel, and more importantly, gives it one that's much more my style. All I would have to do is rewrite a few parts and continue on with the new plan!

Ryan's Brain enters the scene.

Ryan's Brain: Wait, but can I really make the entire thing work with just a few changes? With the new shift in focus, shouldn't there also be a brand new rewrite so that the new focus stays persistent throughout the entire novel? Maybe I should even shift the perspective the entire story is told in ... but then that would be undoing all the progress I've made in practicing with the current perspective I've chosen as well as the character development that goes hand-in-hand with the exact way I've written the story currently and---

Ryan's Brain melts onstage.

Yes. This complicates things quite a bit. While this little idea theoretically fixes all the issues I've been having, it opens the novel up to a barrel full of new problems. The fact of the matter is that I see no other choices than to either start everything over from scratch again (with a story that I still consider as practice and not representative of my best ideas), continue onward with the current style and see where it takes me (it is practice, after all), or drop the entire thing and move on to some other project that is more my style (and I have lists full of those ideas).

I just don't see a hybrid mash-up of original story and new ideas working.

Give me some advice by commenting on this post, or just tell me which option to take.

Don't forget to follow me on twitter.

-Ryan

Last Proper Summer Ending

Well this is the end to my last summer vacation ever.
But it's also the beginning of my last school year ever, and since I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy, I choose to think of it that way.

Last summer I gave a brief summary of the books I had read over the summer, of which there was only one. This summer I am pleased to say that I passed my personal record of books read for pleasure in a short timespan (in this case, Summer) to four and a third ... and some other random pages.
But that doesn't really accurately portray how much more I actually read, considering the first three books were massive novels which together made up The Millennium Trilogy. Each of those novels had above 600 pages or so (depending on the cover and edition) and were an absolutely massive undertaking for me to read.

Easily three of the best books I've ever read.
(image from here)

I had always thought that I was more of a writer than a reader; that I just didn't like reading. Well it turns out instead I had just never found much that I actually loved reading until now (I raced through the second book of the trilogy very quickly).
I followed up The Millennium Trilogy with the latest book by Chuck Palahniuk: Damned, which was an excellent change of pace from the seriousness and drama of the trilogy. It's about a fat thirteen-year-old girl who has died and gone to hell. It was a quick and easy read which I started and finished in a weekend (yet another personal milestone).
Then I moved on to  reading a book that was very important to me at one time, but after getting a third of the way through it I stopped (you can read more about that in my previous post).
Finally I moved on to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but it's not as interesting as it sounds and the novelty wears off quite quickly, and I've since abandoned reading that as well.
It can also be noted that I actually picked up and read the first few chapters of Fifty Shades of Grey somewhere in between all of that, but once all the "does he actually like me?" tension wore off and it turned into erotica I lost interest (though I admit it was quite good up to that point).

So where do I go from here? Four finished books and three unfinished seems like quite the ratio, but the fact of the matter is that I'm still figuring exactly what it is that I like to read, since I'm somewhat new to this. My goal is to next read the classic novel by George Orwell: 1984, which I look forward to very much as I've wanted to read it for quite some time now.

And of course on the side I continue to write. As those who follow me on Twitter saw, I achieved a milestone in my novel a few days ago (which relates to this old post), I've been fiddling with some flash fiction, and I've been making slow but steady steps towards publication of a certain something.

So my "last summer vacation" turned out to be a pretty good one, overall.
-Ryan

Proof of Insanity

(The following post expands greatly upon this previous post about being uncertain about my future. I felt like I was holding back the true extent of my neurosis on the topic and so this time around, thanks to a friend's advice, I'm just letting it all out.)


HAIKU TIME:
Writing a novel.
For practice, I assure you
Yet it wears me out


Let me tell you a story about a story. Two years ago I whipped out a blank notebook in class and started writing what I had anticipated to be a tragedy tentatively titled "Megan and Danny" after the main two characters. The notebook was missing a few pages so I only had about 50 or so to write on, and I was too foolish to use the front and back of each (so I had to condense). What resulted was a notebook filled from beginning to end with a detailed skeleton of a story.

Last year I started moving the story from the notebook to my laptop, while expanding upon areas I felt needed to be fleshed out. I gave the characters more characteristics and the scenes more detail. I wanted to present a finished version of that draft to my Fiction Writing class for feedback, so I finished the draft in a hurry and changed the ending from a tragic one to a hopeful one.

The overwhelming majority of the class seemed to be trying their best to let me down easy. They offered vague suggestions and complaints. I heard the dreaded phrase "It has potential", which is code for "it was a waste of my time". Also, someone told me it was a waste of their time.
One person seemed genuinely interested in the sexual tension; exclaiming that they wanted to read more when things got a little heated.
I got the message: this is far from finished.
I couldn't just drop the story; it was the first I'd ever written with a real driving passion. I spent about a month planning what the next draft should be like and then started over with a brand new document.

It's so much better, but it's still just practice.
The plot is unoriginal, which is a shame because I promise you that I have dozens of original ideas written down that haven't been done before (to my knowledge), so I've been focusing on beefing up the characters and events to make them the center focus of the story. At this rate the story will finish at double the length of the previous draft.

It's changing so much for the better.
Thematically it's still about how people change as they grow up, how time affects all of us in some way, and how some of us refuse to accept that. The scary thing is that there's a good chance that the theme is the only thing staying completely intact. Names are changing, character lists are expanding, inside jokes are being included, my memories are sneaking in, plots are thickening, alliances are being drawn, drama is brewing, love is blooming, and betrayal (and maybe even death) is looming.

I don't even know what genre it is anymore.
Whatever it is, it's fun. It's been exhilarating to create these characters and then put them through these events. (also some of the characters and events are based on real people and things that have happened, which makes it more fun because it's like keeping a journal of my favorite people and memories in a creative and productive format.) Yet it's been consuming my mind on a day-to-day basis. I'm obsessing over details I'm not including, I've been considering drastic plot changes that alter the entire tone and focus of the story, and all the while I've been more afraid than ever before that I'll never amount to anything.

In high school my hormones decided I would suffer from light depression for no good reason whatsoever, and now life is telling me that, while the meaningless depression is over, the stress I create for myself is present more than ever. Also my psychological tendency to doubt my significance on this planet has been heightened and partnered up with a legitimate fear of the future as my last year of college looms on the horizon.
I second guess everything.
Why am I writing a story I have so little faith in?
Why aren't I writing one of my more original ideas?
Why does it take me so long to finish a single page?
Why do I get so hung up on details that don't matter?
What if nobody likes my writing style?
What if nobody likes my ideas?
What if this is the best it ever gets?
What if I get distracted by life and never write again?
What if everyone tells me that my stories are terrible and I never write again?
What if I get into a car accident, lose my motor functions and never write again?
What if I step off the curb at the exact moment that a dragonfly passes by, causing me to lose balance and fall into oncoming traffic, killing me instantly and causing me to never write again?
What if the world ends tomorrow and I never get a chance to write again?


I guess I'll just have to write more and faster, which I admit will likely contribute to more stress.
-Ryan

Starting Anew

Remember this post about the long story I was writing?
Well to keep you up-to-date, I finished it at just under twenty thousand words.
Remember this post about the nice things people said about my short story?
Well to bring you up-to-speed, I went through that same workshop process for the almost twenty thousand word story.

Which meant a lot more of these.

It's hard to explain exactly what I mean, but I guess the best way to say it is that the problems that people had with it this time had more to do with the fundamentals of the story itself. The issues people had with the story, even if they liked it overall, weren't the kind of issues that could be solved with an addition or deletion of a sentence or two like they were in my short story.The response, while still a good mix of positive and negative opinions, had a very different tone to it.
As this became clear to me while listening to the students in my class discuss their opinions of the story, I didn't hesitate to decide that the best solution would be to rewrite the entire story from the beginning. So while the classroom was still telling me what they liked or thought could fix the draft of the story in front of them, I was already planning out a brand new version of the story in my head. In the span of a week I went through several ideas that would drastically affect the original concept for the story.

Seasons just seemed like a cool motif. (source of photo)

Let me explain what I mean about the concept:
The story was to cycle through various different character's perspectives, one at a time, from a third-person perspective. The story was separated into five different parts/chapters, each of which took place in the season following that of the chapter before (winter, spring, summer, fall, winter), but the story did not span a single year, instead it spanned fourteen years (originally over sixty years). The distance in time between the chapters was to increase somewhat exponentially. I also wanted to emphasize certain aspects of a lifetime, such as that you don't bring all of your friends along with you through your entire life, which meant that several characters key to the first chapter or two were completely missing in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters.

What on Earth was I thinking?
I was so wrapped up in what I thought was the "poetic" structure of the story, that I didn't focus on the characters or the story itself. The result was that the writing was boring and the characters were mostly unlikable. I quickly began brainstorming remedies, including changing the perspective of the story, forgoing the seasonal chapter format and starting the story years before the original beginning, and, of course, figuring out ways to make the characters likable.

"This time I'll try not to waste dozens of
hours screwing up." (source of photo)

I went from breaking my personal word count record by several thousand, to scrapping it all and starting over at zero. And honestly it doesn't bother me at all. For one thing I've completely scrapped then rewrote an entire story before, so this isn't the first time, and for another thing I know it's for the best and that the new direction in which I'm going feels much better than the original concept. There were a few moments that I considered the story to be a lost cause that I should forget about and put behind me, but then I reminded myself how important this particular story is to me. Not just that it's my first full-length story, but that it's something unlike anything I've written before, and I feel some sort of attachment to the characters and plot that I can't just walk away from. This is a story that means something to me.

I'm debating making the process of rewriting this story more public, as in I would reference specific parts of the story directly in the blog to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, since I imagine it's hard to follow me at times when you know nothing about the story. I could even do some side-by-side comparisons of the original and new version.

By the way:

NEW CONTENT ADDED:

• I uploaded a new comic strip of "Stupid Phrases" called "What's Up?" to the Humor tab.
• I uploaded a new poem called "Bad Advice" to the Poems tab.

Now, if only I had a good quality story to upload...
-Ryan

Finding My Genre

Think of your favorite author. Now think about what kind of books they write.
I venture to say that the majority of popular authors have a specific genre, or narrow set of relatable genres, that they primarily stick to writing. Even if they don't stick to the same genre they probably stick to the same tone or style because it's what they love to write most or it's what they're good at.
I'm at an age where, without the pressure of monetary gain or fans to please, I don't even know what my genre, style, or tone is.

Figuring out which direction to go can be hard.

When I first started writing as a serious enthusiast (around age twelve) I most enjoyed writing Stephen King-style horror short stories because that was all I could grasp having not read much and understanding that Stephen King was a popular author that I had heard of. I assumed it was the smartest person to mirror, but I also knew that I had no idea how to write anything longer than what was, in retrospect, flash fiction.

Now I've written a postmodernist meta-fiction short story with an ironic sense of humor, a romantic love-epic, and have plans to write a science-fiction trilogy, a dystopian future novel, and a drama or two. Not to mention that I have random little ideas to base short stories on weekly, some serious and some humorous. Besides the obvious fact that I have no idea what my style is or will be yet, if I become published for one or all of these ideas, how will people see me? I don't want to settle on one genre, and while that may change over time, right now I have too many fun ideas for all sorts of stories.

For now I guess I'll take things one step at a time.
-Ryan

Learning Lessons Otherwise Dismissed

DISCLAIMER: The entire following post was typed solely on my Nook Color's touch-screen keyboard. It was a slow and buggy process but it beats sitting around doing nothing while I am without my laptop at my parent's house.
----------

Well it seems I've been made the fool.

It wasn't very long ago that I went on a slight rant on Facebook about Gustav Freytag's famous plot pyramid which we are all taught in the youngest years of school. You know, the one that looks like this:

As good and true as that certainly seemed, to me in a time of creative infancy I decided that Freytag's model for story progression and structure was too limited. Of course technically any model for anything is meant to be more correctly analytical than it is meant to be limited in scope, and of course Freytag wasn't trying to create any one definite rule for composing a story; he was simply trying to analyze the trends of literature of the time. I did not realize this at the time. I instead interpreted it as the former rather than the latter. I concluded that we as a culture of storytellers should forsake the rules for the sake of genuine creativity and thinking outside the box, and thus I created this new model for storytelling:

Yes, how naive I was. You see at the time I was fascinated with the idea of telling a story documentary-style, meaning there may be no rising action, climax, or falling action, but instead a documentation of a series of fictional events.
That sounds all well and good in theory, but I now realize that even when I'm not trying to create a story with a climax and rising or falling action, there may in fact be no other interesting way to do it, and perhaps no other way at all.
What I mean is that without these elements, there is no plot at all. Sure in theory I could write a whole story detailing a single day in the life of Mr. Somebody, but not only would it be incredibly boring to read and write, but it would be incredibly hard to think of events to move the story along without including some sort of plot or conflict; even the average day has these things in it (that and it would be hard to find inspiration for what happens next in a story where nothing happens).

So how did I finally learn this seemingly simple lesson? Well I realized it as I was typing out the climax to my lifelong tragic love epic, which shall now be simply referred to as a love story due to reasons too lengthy to appropriately describe in a post written on a touch-screen keyboard (as if that's keeping me from rambling anyway).

So, to finally conclude; I learned a very simple lesson first-hand even though I was supposedly taught it over a decade ago.

Sometimes that's what happens.
-Ryan

My Stance on Publishing

With the end of my first longer-than-a-short-story story in sight, the topic of publishing has come up in my mind more frequently than before. It's definitely something I should think about, and it's about the right time to do so. The issue is that I need to first understand what I actually think about the whole idea.
The way I see it, I have three options:

1. Seek publication from some sort of publishing house
2. Self-publish on e-readers (Kindle, Nook, etc.)
3. Upload to my website for free

 The way I see it if I do go the route of option #1 I'm not going to try very hard before moving on to option #2. Not because I'm one of those stubborn authors who believes that if their work isn't loved immediately then the publishers are evil and don't know what they're missing, but because as much as I am serious about writing I don't feel all that serious about going through too much trouble to try to profit from it.
"But Ryan, isn't it every aspiring author's dream to get published by a major publisher and make a living off of writing forever?"
Yes, and that would be very nice, but it's not why I write. I don't write because I want to profit from it, I write because I love to invent, plan, and create stories that interest me. Publication and economic gain is an afterthought, kind of like "well if I happen to be sitting on a pile of money, why not take some?" rather than "gee I had better find a pile of money". This is also justified by the fact that I am a college student with hopes of getting a degree and job in a field unrelated to my love of writing, so it's not like I'm depending on my writing to stay above the poverty line.

Now if only I could think of a title for this story.
-Ryan

Experimentation

Summer is coming to a close and as usual I've not finished anything I wanted to finish.

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected"

Wait, nevermind; I finished a book. It was Fight Club, and it was awesome.

Anyway one of the things I want to finish before summer is up is the second draft/typed draft of my unfinished Lifelong Tragic Love Epic which, if you recall, I made a small realization about and is basically the only thing I've ever mentioned working on writing all summer, and progress has been slow.

Wait, nevermind; I mentioned that one short story I said I would finish by the end of last month if someone simply posted a reply to that post. Well guess what?  Nobody did. I'm going to assume this is due to the Eyewitness Effect (or whatever it's called, I took that Psych class two years ago) and that nobody posted a response simply because they expected someone else to, and not that nobody posted because they were just too lazy or don't give a  hoot about my stories. So yeah, let's pretend it's the first one.

Anyway I've been thinking about experimenting with writing recently, specifically by penning some short stories, flash fiction, messing around with artistic points-of-view and how it can be used to enhance the quality of stories, trying out some alternate settings, tones, and themes etc.
As you can see by the list, this is going to basically be a lifelong thing. But the point is I want to try some of the quicker things first, such as flash fiction, since I have dozens of simple scenarios or stories that I want to tell before I lose interest in them (and I don't think they can be stretched out into novel-length stories at all).

What does this mean for you? This (hopefully) means you'll start being able to read more than just the poems on my website. I plan to release this miniature content relatively frequently (by my standards, at least) so I can start getting some feedback for my experimentation.

Now I would love to go back and look over this post for errors in grammar, continuity and flow (did I need to bring up summer? I don't think that was relevant at all) but I've got to be going now as I must pick up a certain special someone from work and then prepare for a weekend-long vacation to a secluded, undisclosed location up north with that special someone's family. I really just wanted to blog this before then so I can come back from my mini-vacation to see all your wonderful views and posts (if there are, in fact, any at all).

[end motivational and/or philosophical-sounding statement]
-Ryan

Ten Thousand Words

Yesterday I achieved a personal milestone (is that the correct phrasing? I don't do this very often).

I deserve one of these filled with macaroni and cheese.

As I was writing my latest short story (which I have decided to describe from now on as a "Lifelong Tragic Love Epic" because that sounds cool) I glanced down at the bottom left corner of Microsoft Word to see that I had added a digit to the "Word Count" counter. I am in only the third section/chapter out of a planned five, but I've surpassed ten thousand words!




The statistics of this unfinished Lifelong Tragic Love Epic:

Pages: 16
Words: 10,133
Characters (no spaces): 44,027
Characters (with spaces): 53,858
Paragraphs: 304
Lines: 721

To put this into perspective, my longest story before this was a whopping 4,721 words total.

Speaking of that 4,721 word story, post below if you want me to comb through it once more quickly and then upload it to my website by the end of the month. I don't think I've currently got any stories on my site so it would be a great way to show you exactly whether or not I am as good as I think I am (although it was first written during my 8th year of school and was simply covered in a new coat of metaphorical paint several times over the next 4-5 years, so it doesn't exactly showcase my current skill level).

Writing has never felt so rewarding.
-Ryan

Short Story vs. Novel

I have many ideas for potential stories, but I have recently run into the problem of trying to decide which ideas will be short stories and which will be more novel-length stories.
This is difficult for several reasons, first is that I've never written a novel-length story before. Second is that it's difficult to figure out which ideas are even capable of being long, and which cannot be lengthened without becoming boring or redundant. Third is that it seems some ideas aren't even worthy of being long.

Here are two real examples of simple ideas I have in the works.

1. A person finds a way to never fatigue/gains the ability to never wear out.
2. A person begins having recurring dreams of killing someone close to them, the dreams may or may not eventually begin occurring while awake. The person must figure out how to end the visions/dreams.

They are both very simple ideas that both seriously need to be "fleshed out" in order to do anything at all with either of them. The first should be pretty easy to run with, after all the possibilities of what to do with such an ability are endless; from seeing how it affects mundane day-to-day activities, to how it helps in the event of some disaster.
The second idea I can see myself running into trouble with. It certainly sounds interesting enough to make novel-length, but I don't know if it's possible (for me) to do. It's a very specific problem, and the main character with the problem may therefore not be dealing with it all the time, so what keeps the story interesting while they aren't having the visions/dreams? Clearly this idea will take a lot more thinking out in order to make longer than a short story.
Then again, there's no shame in writing short stories. Maybe I shouldn't try to do something I'm not comfortable with simply out of fear of short stories being less popular or taken less serious.

Besides, short stories make better movies.
-Ryan

The Physical Rough Draft

Recently I just finished writing a story in a college-ruled 1-subject notebook. What makes this so special is that I took up the entire notebook with the story, whereas usually my stories would only last a few hand-written pages because I've had trouble making them much longer. Now I admit that although the notebook advertises 70 pages on the front, it was a slightly used notebook in which I counted exactly 43 pages ... but still; this is a personal accomplishment nonetheless!

Something else that makes this paper-written draft special is just that: it's written on paper. The first short story I ever wrote (the one which I wrote for a class as a last-minute assignment but sparked my interest in being a writer) was a page long and typed on my parent's home computer. I haven't penned a whole rough draft of anything since before computers were a practical tool for doing so (remember way back when you'd type it out and the program would crash, causing you to loose all your unsaved data? that's the last time I wrote on paper). When the computer became a reliable way to write out a rough draft (and of course after I learned to type) I never looked back. Maybe I would hand-write the first page or so of an idea down if I was away from a computer or in class, but that was it.

So what caused me to go back to the age-old style?
Nothing special. I was bored in class and had a story stuck in my head. The only difference was that it stuck with me so much that I couldn't pull away the day after that, or the day after, etc. ... I wrote a 43 page (college-ruled) story almost entirely during class time (don't worry, as my recent test scores have proven I managed to pay attention at the same time). The reason being that I've never really been able to find much time to write when I'm at home. Even in high school I was always too distracted by homework or video games to write a single story. Somehow it turned out that I was the most inspired to write when I technically had absolutely no "free time". Even during spring break I could only be bothered to write on one of the last days despite my incredible interest in the story.

Speaking of my interest: I had more interest in this story than any story I've ever written (or thought out) and the only reason I can think of is that this story is somehow more meaningful than anything I've ever written.
This one could influence people's lives.
Without giving anything away: it's not eerie or supernatural or fantasy like most of what I've written or thought of; it's basically a love story that spans a lifetime, and it's honestly probably the best story I've ever written by far. Normally I would be nervous to say that before anyone else has read it, and because as a writer I feel I should be modest about my work and not have high-hopes, but I really believe it.

So now the next steps are to type it up, flesh out the bits I may have rushed, give it a title, and who knows ... maybe I can get it published.

The best part? I know exactly what story I'm going to write next, and I'm just as excited for that one as I am for this one.

This is me finally taking my talent and love of writing seriously.
-Ryan

Filling in the Holes

Writing fiction can be a real pain in the butt. I have no problem thinking of interesting overall plots, I've got about a dozen ideas I've written down that are just itching to be brought to completion by way of the story, what's difficult is filling in the empty spaces.
For example, say I have an idea where a character named Fred is suddenly distraught over something and searches out his friend Stan for help. Maybe this is a pivotal part of the plot, maybe Stan learns something about himself through helping Fred, or maybe this is the turning point for Stan and he rejects Fred as a friend and becomes a psychopath (Stephen King style, of course). In this example we know who is involved, we know the initial situation between the two (they are most likely good friends if they come to each other for help with such matters) and we know what we want the desired end result is. What we do not know is something that seemed completely insignificant until it came up in the middle of writing the scene: what is Fred distraught over?

So obviously as a writer I try to explore the simplest and most realistic options available; work, school, money, or some personal romantic relationship. But how can I make it work? How does (A) combined with (B) equal (C)?

There is a story I was working on all throughout high school in which I encountered this very problem. It was about how a particular man dealt with his girlfriend of several years breaking up with him just when things seemed to be going best. What I realized halfway through the story was that I knew she had to be the one to change her mind and want him back, but also needed a very good reason for breaking up with him in the first place. Seems like an impossible situation right? It's like trying to figure out an elaborate reason that a person is murdered but the murderer is regretful later on that's still simple enough to understand, and "misunderstanding" is a cliched and, quite frankly, bologna reason. Luckily in that instance I had a friend go through a similar event, in fact it was scary just how similar the situation was; the only difference was the amount of time they had been dating. She broke it off and then took him back a week later. And throughout the whole week they were apart he and I spent time trying to figure out what happened, what he did wrong or what changed her mind. Once she came back to him he informed me of his uncle's theory:
"She was scared of how she felt"
And there it was! It didn't matter if this was true for my friend's particular situation, but I had just been hand-served a perfectly fitting piece of the puzzle! What if she loves him so much that she's scared of losing him, and reacts offensively before she fears that he does? BRILLIANT!

Unfortunately the reason I blog about this now is because I have run into just that same situation. Life is complicated and figuring out reasons for things happening is difficult when you can't just ask a living person involved in it to explain it for you. I have an idea or two floating around in my head, but I just don't think they fit just as perfectly as they need to. I've texted four creative minds I know for suggestions, but I am restrained from asking the people who matter most because to get their advice is to give away part of the plot, and these are the people I want to experience the story as it is meant to be experienced: lifelike and with no hints to the future's events.
If none of my four creative minds report back with anything of use, I'm on my own.

This is one of the thrills of being a writer.
-Ryan