Posted on

Three Ways to Make a Story Your Own

“Ideas are a dime a dozen.”

Even the source of the quote itself is difficult to pinpoint. Mary Kay Ash said it once. So did Douglas Horton. And, countless other writers and authors have incorporated the phrase into their own works.

How, then, do writers distinguish themselves? How do we mold common themes or similar plot lines into individual novels or essays that rise to the top of the slush pile or stick in a reader’s mind?

I think of this question each time I sit down to write, or rewrite I should say. When I punch out a first draft of fiction or of an essay, I don’t linger on one sentence or paragraph. It’s in re-reading the draft, when I check to see that the facts or main ideas are there, where I tell myself, “Okay, now make it mine.”

Adding my voice is a critical piece in rewriting, but there are other ways to make a story or an essay unique.

1. Think about the predictability of a story, and then avoid it.
Jody Hedlund wrote on this topic in a guest post on Merrilee Faber’s blog, Not Enough Words.  Hedlund discusses how slowing down our process and refusing to be lazy writers helps descriptions, characters, and even plots move beyond cliché into “greater depths of creativity.”

On Wednesday’s, I use “Today’s word” at Wordsmith.org as a writing prompt. The word of the day is typically anything but common in every day conversation. Still, the stories that unfold in my mind can easily end in exactly the way a reader might predict. And, predictability won’t earn me a second read.

2. Know what details to include and which ones to leave out.
Stephen King wrote an article on imagery (recently reprinted in the Aug 2010 issue of The Writer) in which he suggests a writer be choosy when filling in descriptions:

Imagery does not occur on the writer’s page; it occurs in the reader’s mind. To describe everything is to supply a photograph in words; to indicate the points which seem the most vivid and important to you, the writer, is to allow the reader to flesh out your sketch into a portrait.

King’s article highlights the importance of the reader-writer relationship. Like any relationship, I can’t be 100% responsible for making it work. As a writer, I do my part and provide just enough information to spark an image. Then, as King says, the reader experiences the joy of reading, “the joy of seeing in the mind, feeling the fantasy flower in the way that is unique to each individual reader.”

To use a simple example from my own writing, this sentence:

My bedroom wasn’t finished yet, the fancy wallpaper still had to be hung.

doesn’t spark an image as much as this one:

My bedroom sat empty at one end of the hallway, the walls chalky and unfinished. The floor bare of any furniture. It smelled of new construction, but it was uninhabitable.

3. Give an old idea a modern twist.
A while back, I bought the Best American Short Stories 2009 anthology (edited by Alice Sebold). One particular story stands out in my mind as an example of giving an old idea new life. The story, called “Saggitarius” by Greg Hrbek, is about a couple who’s baby is born half human and half horse.

How well does a myth work as a modern short story, you ask? You’ll have to read the story yourself, but here’s an excerpt:

While they were arguing (again) about the surgery, the baby vaulted over the rail of the playpen, as if it were a hurdle to be cleared. They heard his hooves scrabbling on the rubber mat, but were too late to see him jump…When they reached the sunroom, they saw him bounding out the door. Upper half, human half, twisted in their direction; a look of joy and terror in the infant’s eyes. But the equine part would not stop….”

And, one more:

The diagnosis changes every week. Spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy as the cause of the musculoskeletal deformity; the body hair most likely the result of a condition called congenital hypertrichosis….”

Hrbek plays out an old idea within a modern setting with no fear and without looking back. And, he does it so successfully that, by the end of his story you, the reader, believe somewhere in the woods stands a father holding his Sagittarius son and loving him completely for the first time.

How do you distinguish yourself as a writer?

[tweetmeme]

Posted on

Wed’s Word: Guest Post by Mercy Loomis

Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on a word prompt. Past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces can be found under Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar to the right.

Mercy Loomis

Today, I welcome fellow She Writes member, Mercy Loomis, to Wednesday’s Word.

I met Mercy in person last month at a meet up organized by E. Victoria Flynn. Victoria, Mercy, and I nibbled on sweet treats for several hours that Saturday and talked all things writing.

We laughed at the story material found within the four walls of a coffee shop – a writer’s paradise when it comes to characters.

I also had a taste of Mercy’s writing during our meet up, and I decided to invite her for some “word of the day” flash fiction fun.

Mercy chose the route of a prompt from my personal word bag (in lieu of Wordsmith.org), thus allowing me to play Wordsmith for the day. Oh, how I love control.

The word I chose for her: bitten.

*****

Twice Shy

Trevor tried to pretend he wasn’t winded, but keeping up with Naomi’s long, shapely legs was proving to be more of a challenge than he expected. Not the he minded the view, of course; even though it was dark the trail they were hiking could just keep going up and up forever, as far as he was concerned.

Of course, his own legs would give out long before he got tired of watching. Flex and swing, flex and swing. When she’d picked him up and he saw the short-shorts he’d assumed she wasn’t the outdoorsy type, but either bugs didn’t scare her or she did a lot of Stairmaster. Naomi’s loping strides devoured the trail like…

Something pricked his arm, and Trevor swatted at it with a muffled curse. “Stupid mosquitoes,” he muttered, staring dolefully at the smear on his hand. In the deepening gloom the blood looked almost black. Pausing, he wiped his hand on his jeans and stuck the flashlight in his pocket, the beam pointing up into the leaves and giving the path a weird green glow.

“What are you doing?” Naomi stopped and turned to give him an irritated glance.

“Getting some bug spray.” Trevor dug through his fanny pack for the little bottle. “I must’ve been bitten half a dozen times already.”

Naomi sashayed back to him and took his hand in both of hers. “Aw, what’s a few bug bites? Please, I really hate that stuff. It tastes terrible.”

Trevor blinked, momentarily confused. “Tastes? But why..?” Naomi fluttered her eyelashes at him, and he tossed the bug spray over his shoulder. It landed somewhere in the bushes and was instantly forgotten. “Right. You got it, babe.”

Laughing, Naomi drew him farther up the hill. “C’mon, we’re almost there. You have to see this place.”

Trevor stumbled after her, giddy with the implications of her teasing, but when they finally crested the slope and emerged from under the trees his lascivious thoughts were momentarily silenced by the view. Barely ten feet ahead of them the bluff’s face fell away in a sheer cliff overlooking a glimmering stream that snaked through the wooded valley below. The moon lit up the landscape like a giant spotlight, and even as he stared open-mouthed he saw a barn owl swoop down over the water to disappear beneath the branches.

And another mosquito bit him.

Trevor cursed roundly, slapping one cheek and flinging the dead insect away. “Doll, I don’t understand how you can stand being out here dressed like that. Not that I don’t appreciate it,” he hastened to add, “but they must be eating you alive!”

There was an undertone to Naomi’s chuckle that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, a low growling that went beyond sultry into something else, something animal. “Oh, they wouldn’t do that. Doll.”

Trevor turned to her slowly, trying to shake off a cold shiver that coursed down his spine. “Why is that?”

She grinned. That was when he saw the fangs. “Professional courtesy, of course.”

*****

Mercy Loomis graduated from college one class short of an accidental certificate in Folklore, which explains a lot. She has a BA in Psychology, but don’t hold that against her. Though fascinated by mythology her whole life, she blames her husband and the History Channel for her late-found love of studying history.

Her stories appear most recently in the anthologies Please, Sir from Cleis Press and Taste Test: Rainy Days and Mondays from Torquere Press, as well as in Hungry For Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance, coming from St. Martin’s Press in October 2010. See what she’s up to and find links to her other work at www.mercyloomis.com.

You can also find her at She Writes here.

[tweetmeme]

Posted on

Breaking the Rules: Using Present Tense in Fiction

In my copy of the 1922 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, she says “…a first rule for behavior in society is: ‘Try to do and say those things only which will be agreeable to others.'” So, I wonder if I’ll be ruffling any feathers when I publish this post on writing a novel in present tense?

I know. Throw “present tense” in the midst of a discussion on fiction and you beg for trouble, maybe even set the stage for a form rejection.

But hear me out.

My first writing teacher, Ariel Gore, reminded us one day that a good memoir reads like fiction and great fiction can read like a memoir. The art of the narrative is critical in both genres.

Writers of creative nonfiction often use fiction techniques. And, once in a while, a technique for writing memoir crosses over into fiction. I first considered how the practice of writing memoir can influence a work of fiction in a post I wrote on Stanley Kunitz, Memoir and Fiction. When I flipped open my June issue of The Writer and read an article by Mimi Schwartz on using present tense in memoir, I wondered again about transferable techniques.

I punched out the first draft of my current novel-in-progress during NaNoWriMo two years ago.  In thirty days, I wrote a little over 50,000 words of a story that unfolded in present tense. At the time, I was very much a novice writer and didn’t consider the rule that fiction is usually written in past tense. I didn’t consider anything. I was hunched over a keyboard chasing down a character and her tale before she got away. In the end, I was thrilled at having written a full story, even in its most raw stage.

In between the first draft and a serious rewrite, I read a novel that is written in present tense. I barely made it through the novel; each chapter sounded like a running commentary. So, when I sat down to study and rework chapter one of my WIP, I weighed my options: keep the story as is – in present tense – and risk losing the reader after the first few pages, or rework the story into past tense.

As an emerging writer, I wanted to learn my craft (and earn my way) by following the rules first; I could break them later. So, I changed the tense of the story. Each time I re-read my new version of chapter one, though, something pulled at the back of my throat. My gut twisted. My head was telling me to go one way, but the story insisted I go another.

Isn’t that just how it works sometimes? The story has a mind of it’s own, and I am simply a conductor. I couldn’t ignore the pull to return to present tense.

Here’s where Mimi Schwartz’s article (“The special power of present tense”) comes in. Schwartz mentions a few specific ways that present tense can strengthen memoir.

“For creative nonfiction writers, the act of discovery is what makes the genre so appealing.”

When reading a story written in present tense, the audience experiences the immediacy of the character’s own discoveries, adding to the suspense of the story.

Schwartz also says that using present tense can highlight the main character’s “[changes] over time.” Sure, you can do this with past tense as well, but Schwartz emphasizes her point by sharing her own experience when she used it her memoir Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village:

“…[T]he village and the villagers kept drawing me back, literally and figuratively, into their living rooms and kitchens, as I tried to uncover why these people mattered to me in New Jersey, 70 years later. And the present tense let the reader come along; we walk together in my father’s old world, trying to figure it out.”

Writing fiction in present tense can be a stylistic choice that taps into the readers senses and emotion on a deeper level.

There’s still a part of me that worries I’m biting off more than can chew, being so green and all, but I like a challenge. And I also like to listen to the way the story wants to be told. That means, my choice to stick with present tense must be a stylistic move and not a way of avoiding a major restructuring of a draft. Throughout the whole rewriting process, I must make each word, phrase, and passage count.

What are your experiences with present tense? Have you written a short story or a novel that cried out for it? Or, have you read a novel that used it successfully?

*****

Schwartz, Mimi. “The special power of present tense.” The Writer. June 2010: 26-27. Print.

Post, Emily. Etiquette. United States of America: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1922. p.  Print.

[tweetmeme]