My Bradbury Year: Week #16 - The Victory of Virtue
A weekly mess of notes, failures, lessons learned, and deadlines missed, as I tackle the Ray Bradbury Challenge to write 52 short stories in a year.
For the week of Story #16, I started out on Monday with no particular idea in mind. I don’t tend to get worried if it takes a day or two for the plan to solidify, whether that ends up being a vague starting place that I can spring from, letting the stream of consciousness flow, or a full-on plot skeleton that only requires the meat. The age-old ‘plotting vs. pantsing’ debate. It has been fun to intentionally choose one or the other approach (or sometimes a stab at each) and to then see how the results compare.
I finished the first draft of #16 with time to do a couple of rewrites before dropping it onto the pile.
1900 words.
Working title is “Virtue.”
Early in the week, I read Raymond Carver’s story “The Bath.” Brilliant. A story that, upon finishing, you know that you’ve been masterfully guided by an invisible hand. The tension builds right to the last couple of lines. To use the parlance of our times—I laughed out loud. It sent me down a path of brainstorming that lead to “Virtue.”
I found myself dwelling on that final stage, when we look back on our lives and inspect them for vice and virtue. When we ask ourselves how we’ll be remembered.
•Btw—you should read “Viewfinder” too. It’s an onion with many layers. Both stories are in Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Throughout the course of the day, I try to be alert for story material—seeds of ideas that feel compelling. I keep a tab open in Notes to add any scraps or snippets as I notice them. It is wild how often random ideas will find each other in my head and, once they click together, a new story takes off.
A 10,000 word story that I wrote last year started with only a title: “The Undergrave.”
Ahead, is #17. It is always an exciting feeling to begin a new week with no limits on what the next story could be. Things get a little hairy when, occasionally, the weekend arrives and not much has happened. But then, that’s what flash fiction is for.
At this stage in my writing, I want to dabble in lots of styles and genres. The stories that always appeal to me most tend to contain big ideas. Speculative fiction. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, as Stephen King has often said. I recently read a handful of tips and prompts for generating ideas that were worth contemplating:
•Write about something that happened to you.
•Consider different points of view from which to tell the same story.
•Create a ticking clock.
•Create an object that can serve as a totem or symbol.
•Create a transitional situation/change in someone’s circumstances—a threshold.
•Add a world event or familiar situation that serves as a way for readers to enter the story—adds veracity.
•Add binary forces/opposites to create conflict
Finally—what I am currently reading: Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon.
Doing all this writing has helped to crystalize something for me. One of those barriers that will have to be addressed to really move forward. I recognize that I am good at writing the types of sentences that I write, but I will need a much bigger toolbox of options when it comes to sentence structure, variability, and content. Developing a skill like that takes focused effort and practice. The book describes concepts about sentence structure that are not boring, but actually exciting and inspiring. Who couldn’t use some of that?
Now, go write something.