The Writer as God: Yes, No, Maybe So

During my usual reading and walking routine yesterday evening, I came across a rather pleasant and uplifting comment in a magazine. The author stated in an article on science fiction that '...Creation is fun! You are in complete control of the world and its inhabitants... and anything goes.'

I promptly closed the magazine and looked up to the dying sunset, knowing that nothing could possibly be further from the truth, aside from the ‘Creation is fun!’ part (I would say it is more 'ecstasy' than 'fun').

This might be truer for some writers than others, but in my experience of having excavated the corner of an idea, my work has only just begun. The symbols spring out at me, I watch the lines of what I'm seeing embroider something much larger, and soon, I get excited because what was once a simple stone has become a temple with treasures and secrets within, all being guarded by horrors and traps unknown. Unearthing is fun, but by no means do I have control over what I'm seeing. 

As for the world's inhabitants, I've wanted to stop, often kill, every character I've ever seen to keep them from the hell that awaits them around every turn, but they don't listen. Even when I'm trying to help them, give them signs, and point at the direction they need, they do what they want, usually to screw over other people for their own benefit.

The strongest and strangest part of fiction is the truth in it. I once uncovered a man driving home from work, day-dreaming of the expression on his lovely wife’s face when he would tell her he finally received the raise they had been praying for, the raise he’d suffered week after week of grueling office labor to attain; the raise they needed to pay for their increasingly daunting monthly mortgage payments. I’d be lying if I told you he stopped just short of the eight-year-old boy riding his black Huffy with the yellow flames riding down the frame–Lil’ Outlaw bunched across the side in big blocky red letters. No, for a fiction writer, I’m not in the business of lying. The things we see are often horrible, but they’re pieces of true reality. How are we any different from the people trying to cope with their mundane life problems within the confines of plot? Is not life a plot in its own, only to end tragically with the death of our beloved hero, premature or otherwise?

In that case, whatever God you believe in might have his divine plan–his epic plot–but how many of us do precisely what our Lord or otherwise asks? My characters do precisely what they would do if they were birthed and raised to be the people they are, and that's rarely in compliance with the world they're in. To muse upon a question that has plagued this and many other generations of mankind: why would a loving God allow suffering to exist? Suffering is true human nature. To deny that would be an outright lie. Lastly, if observing true human nature has proven anything, it's that suffering is damn entertaining to watch.

The Crucial Element: Why if you Want to Write Seriously, you NEED to be Writing Short Stories or Flash Fiction.

When you hear ‘short story’ you might think something like, ‘cute’ or ‘dated’ or ‘obsolete’. You might think, “Short stories are a waste of time”. As the chapters of your novels become longer, and the halls and corridors of your worlds become deeper, it’s easy to realize that you aren’t just writing your story: you’re lost in it.

I’m going to propose a scenario and you’re free to email me about this if you want. Have you ever been writing on an idea, prose, or project every day and come to a section where you’re reading the same sentence you last wrote over and over and over again? You may have written it twenty-minutes earlier, it could have been two weeks or even two years prior, but you can’t seem to thread the needle and pick up where you left off.

If that has happened to you most people will tell you to work through it, write it out, spend some time really getting involved with what happens next, or storyboard until you’re blue in the face. Those are all wonderful ideas and they may pull you out of the funk you’ve been caught in, but sometimes this hitch is more persistent than one might think. Some people say this is classic writer’s block, but I think it’s something more like ‘Scene Boredom’.

When you’re unable to construct or fabricate your world for a consistent period of time, often it’s not a deep-seated psychological issue that you just aren’t out of yourself enough to understand. It’s that some scenes tend to drag, or you’ve wandered off the path and aren’t sure how to proceed. It’s completely natural in writing and happens to the best.

Part of writing is consistency. We all take breaks: can’t find time to write, go on vacation, or have devastating ends to our relationships from time to time that bring the process to a grinding halt. It’s when you’re actually writing every day, or writing during your special two or three hours of personal time on the weekends, and just can’t seem to find the right action, the right word, the correct suspension of disbelief that you were able to convey to the reader just fine last time you were at the computer. It’s not something you did or didn’t do, but you’re stuck.

Sometimes the best thing to do is something completely different. A short story is not just a random task that aspiring authors did in the seventies in order to get their names out in magazines, and it’s not something you need to do with the idea that you’ll get rich quick doing it. A short story may not even need to see the light of day, and may never leave the folder you’ve stashed deep down in your ‘Stories’ folder.

Short stories are not only an objective, they are a challenge. It’s a game that a writer can play and see how she fairs. It’s important to remember that most short stories are roughly between 3,000 and 5,000 words, have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and involve a character change–depending on where you are or who’s making the rules. For a real challenge, see if you can crank out a beautiful portrait of a world that you and everyone else would love to see in 3,000 words. That’s not easy, and yeah it might be the best piece of work you ever made, but you know deep down that it will never sell or hold up with a publisher. It’s not something you do for any reason but for yourself.

I mentioned earlier that writing is consistency. I believed in this religiously when I first began writing. I wrote books that I thought were bad at the time that turned out to be just convoluted because I forced a page or two pages, or ten every single day whether I wanted to get through it or not. It’s sometimes the hardest work you’ll ever do but it can be done that way. Unfortunately, you often find yourself looking at a train-wreck that you thought was going to be a visionary statement about humanity and society because you weren’t in it for long enough to smell the roses. You didn’t spend long enough smelling the gun-powder during a giant battle, or taking in the picturesque skyline that the characters could have been witnessing during their brief meeting before the heist.

I find that rushing may be worse than writer’s block because a block can imply that you want to write the scene correctly but don’t know how. Rushing means you’re getting to the next scene even if you don’t know where you’ll land. Some people write very well this way, raw and as soon as the story hits the brain, but I like to let a story stew for a bit: write the idea down of course, but let it bask in its own juices for a day.

Consistency does not mean that you have to write on ONE project every day until it’s done. Sometimes it’s best to, sometimes you’re so in the zone that you’re brother-in-law’s funeral isn’t going to tear you away from the computer, no matter how much the rest of the family will hate you because of it. When you hit a hiccup in the road, just remember that you can spend time on a different road by starting a whole new road, or stepping onto a road in a place you visit now and then just to see what’s happening. You are on the throne of the creator: get crazy.

The beauty of short stories is that there’s no long-term commitment. When you get on this road, you know it’s a short walk. You can feel accomplished that you finished your writing for the day, but you didn’t get stuck worrying about how to get your characters out of the cave with the giant bat swooping through the darkness. Keeping your creative mind consistent is your goal, not to sell big or finish a project and enjoy a cigarette for the first time in three years. It’s a form of writing meditation. You don’t even need to finish a short story in a timely fashion; it’s whenever you feel like visiting and for however long you feel the need to stay.

Some people may say that journaling is just as useful, and it may be. The challenge in doing a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end that involves a major character change in 3,000 to 5,000 words, is that it’s another mountain to conquer. I’ve heard that the art of short story telling is dying, and that if you don’t use it you’ll lose it. So it’s startling to find that many writers are no longer seeing the necessity to continue this tradition of storytelling.

The skill of it is explaining a scene involving all your classic elements of plot–you’re using everything you’ve got like it’s the best novel you’ve ever written. But it has to be appropriate to the rules or it becomes a novella. There’s nothing wrong with a novella, but it’s an entirely different animal and you’ve missed the point of the challenge.

So in order to write good short stories, you’ll need to spend time reading some good short stories. You’ll find quite a few that are much longer than the limited rules, particularly the Lovecraftian and Edgar Alan Poe styles. These can be used as inspiration, but not as templates for how you should write your short story.

Let’s look at construction. Every word is important, and while this task is to work through some form of complication and show some progress for the day, you want to introduce the story from as close to a beginning as possible. A good example of how this is done is to look at your favorite television show or serialized story, and spend some time analyzing the structure of the episode layout. Most episodes on TV that are part of a larger plot or story follow that plot pretty closely, but you’re looking for the episode that DOESN’T follow the overall story-line. It’s almost like a need for the creators to let off steam by doing something different with the characters that wasn’t expected, but you know those characters and they’re about to be called to do something different.

There are episodes in almost every television show that go like this, from Joss Whedon’s Firefly, to Breaking Bad. I will use Breaking Bad as an example. In Season Five, Episode Five, Dead Freight: *Spoiler Alert if you haven’t seen the series* Walt and Jessie are put in the position where they must rob a train, and actually do so by the end of the episode. It was a plot that was completely away from the overall setting of the story with its own unique beginning, middle, and end, and major character change for everyone involved in the last few moments of the episode. In this, to me, it may be the best episode of the series because they executed a perfect short story in around forty-five minutes.

A problem is presented when Walt and Jessie’s usual method of obtaining methylamine comes to a halt, an off-kilter solution is presented–this is your beginning–the plan begins to formulate, and then comes the day of the heist. The middle comes into focus as Walt and crew begin to execute their plans while running into a few bumps along the way. The end drives into view as the train starts and they aren’t finished. The hero has not attained the boone, but they finish just as the train is pulled into motion and everyone comes away millions richer in substance. It was an incredible episode for storytelling and the use of this here and gone side-plot template made it possible to enjoy the episode even if you weren’t a fan of the series. (The Firefly episode was Episode 8: Out of Gas, where all the crew abandons the ship, leaving Mal dying as scavengers work to steal their vessel.)

The point is that we get a picture of these characters, in their prime or at their worst, and the story brings them to devastating measures in order to pull through and get back on track with the overall plot. Does that sound familiar? It should because it’s a metaphor for the stuck writer, the road-blocked mind. Sometimes the best solution is something completely different. In that case, you might not need a short story, but a chapter dedicated in this form of sub-plot. However, how can you execute a good sub-plot unless you’ve been practicing with short stories? And trust me when I say that once you begin thinking in short stories, you’ll appreciate episodes and short story sub-plots a whole lot more.

Stephen King may be one of my favorite short story authors, his short fiction breaking the length rules in most cases but providing us with juicy morsels of bite-sized horror to chew on. A favorite tradition of mine is to spend a dark, rainy evening reading horror short stories with a single light for comfort and a cup of peppermint tea for companionship. Something about this atmosphere brings the stories to life. Some of his best are: from Night Shift: ‘Battleground’, from Skeleton Crew: ‘Word Processor of the Gods’, from Nightmares and Dreamscapes: ‘The Chattering Teeth’, and Everything’s Eventual: ‘All that you Love will be Carried Away’.

The interesting part about reading horror short stories and horror fiction in general, is that the fears presented are usually based on society’s current fears as well as the author’s current fears. You can see in King’s writing in particular that he was interested in the nature of the supernatural when he first began, delved into paranormal and alien stories as he matured, and now his characters’ biggest fears revolve around cancer and facing old age.

Sometimes a short story is a good way to get something off your chest or to spend some time examining that bit of weird that you would otherwise set aside as too bizarre to be considered in your writing. If you’ll look at writing as cooking in the kitchen, you’ll usually have one to four major projects going at any given time. The ideas you store while you are cooking are the products you have in the pantry with which to cook. Many things you’ll set aside because you want the right items in the food you’re cooking. Sometimes you want to throw something extra in that you know will make the food taste better, an element or a special character that comes along. There are so many ideas, however, that most of them don’t get used and you forget about the ones that may have made a pretty cool story if you had the time to start a different project.

Many of us have a lot of ideas all of the time so it wouldn't be practical to start a dozen stories for each one, but short stories are small projects, too. They just don’t need to take up an entire burner on the stove. If you have many short stories going, you might see how a certain development works in certain situations within each of the stories to see which one fits best. Once you've taken this approach for a while, it will be impossible not to see ideas bursting out of the environment everywhere you go. Everything is a story in its own, it’s just how to incorporate that creepy shopkeeper that rang you up, or how to bring in that really weird homeless person walked into the doctor’s office and started high-fiving everyone. It will fit somewhere, you just have to figure out where.

Another growing trend in the writing world is something known as flash fiction, which I believe accomplishes the same goal, but this is even shorter fiction than short stories. The rules to flash fiction are: a story with a beginning, middle, and end condensed into under 1,000 words.

There are other, smaller versions of story telling, like one-page fiction (a story within a page), twitter fiction (a story in 140 characters), six-word fiction, and haikus to name a few. These, to me, feel more like vocabulary exercises rather than working your story creating engine. You're working your brain to formulate stories condensed into a few words, but not creating any sort of extended prose or plot. That's not to say there's no place for them. Any way you can create a story or idea and feel accomplished with it is always a positive part of being a writer.

As always, there's no wrong way to do these things, but they are crucially important in both aiding in your current stories as well as filling your repertoire of content. You want a happy medium of progress, but want to avoid becoming a mess where you feel like everything you write is gold. Part of the problem with writer's block is that you want everything you write to be gold but it isn't. The answer to this difficult situation is that life is short and there's not always a lot of time to put pen to paper. Use your ideas sparingly, but make sure you use them in a resourceful way.

We can't all be best-selling authors so working your engine when you can is often all you can do. Thanks for reading. I hope I've offered some words of wisdom to those who are working to write and get their ideas out there. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions and I'll do my best to get back to you when I can.

Benjamin Allen.