A question from Mary Robinette Kowal, to prompt today’s story
The Prompt
The thing that I want you to think about is is just the answer to a question :
What’s in your character’s pocket?
So is there a thing that they carry with them all the time?
Is there something that they have put in their pocket specifically just in that moment?
Do they not carry anything in their pocket? How can they get away with that?
What’s in their pocket?
Mary Robinette Kowal
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Spare Man, Ghost Talkers,The Glamourist Histories series, and the Lady Astronaut Universe. She is part of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and a four-time Hugo Award winner. Her short fiction appears in Uncanny, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary Robinette, a professional puppeteer, lives in Nashville. Visit at maryrobinettekowal.com or visit her Patreon
Catch Mary Robinette Kowal on the StoryADay podcast here: Part 1| Part 2
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Write a story using this helpful structure from Rachel Swearingen
The Prompt
Expand, Narrow, Explode the Frame
Write a scene in which a character is looking for something or someone that has been lost. Use all the senses to describe the setting. Give us a sense of the body and include the following “moves” in any order:
1. Allow the details of the scene to feel close, contained, even constricting. 2. Describe the thing that has been lost, a brief memory perhaps that has been triggered by its loss. 3. Look down. Zoom in on something very small. 4. Bring in a distant sound. 5. Draw attention to an opening of some sort, a window, a door, a hole in the wall or in a dense wood or in a thick covering of clouds, for example. 6. Can your character see or sense what is beyond that opening? 7. Allow your character to climb down or up or into for to a new vantage point. 8. Is your character alone? Invite a stranger to the scene. What happens now?
Rachel Swearingen
Rachel Swearingen is the author of “How to Walk on Water and other short stories” which received the New American Press Fiction Prize. Find out more at RachelSwearingen.com
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Thanks to StoryADay-er Jeffrey T for recommending this resource!
PostSecret is a site where people confess their secrets online, via postcard. Some are sweet, some are sad and some are downright disturbing. They are all fantastic moments that suggest short stories.
If you’re worried about ‘stealing’ someone’s story, don’t be. You’re inspired by the emotion behind their postcard, or the moment that it evokes. What you write won’t be their story. It’ll be yours.
Don’t quote the actual words on the postcard (that’s plagiarism). Just think about what inspired the person to confess this secret and go from there.
Don’t choose one of the tragic ones unless you like writing tragic stories. I liked this one, this one, and this one.
Don’t be surprised if your story veers away from your first assumptions.
Focus on the moment suggested by the secret. Write only about that. Use as little backstory as possible, for a taut, emotional story.
OK, you’re thinking of embarking on a big creative challenge.
How’s that making you feel? Feeling some resistance? That’s normal. Feeling a cold rush of terror? Not unusual. But I’ll bet you’re feeling something else too: a little thrill at the idea. (C’mon, you’re a writer. Of course you’re tempted.)
Sharing your creative efforts is a risk and taking a risk requires bravery.
And sometimes, taking that risk leads to something completely unexpected.
Let me tell you a story about what happened when I met Chris Baty, the founder of National Novel Writer’s Month, an insane creativity challenge I in-no-way-ripped-off when I started StoryADay.
How I Absolutely Did Not Rip Off NaNoWriMo
In the late 1990s, when the Web was young, I had a writer friend who was a real sucker for collaborative creative challenges: Illustration Friday, Livejournal memes and, eventually, this crazy new thing called National Novel Writer’s Month.
It was the first time I had entertained the idea that writing might be anything but a solitary endeavour.
Over the years, I tried a few of these challenges (100Words.net, NaBloPoMo) and even came close to signing up for NaNoWriMo in 2009. I had read NaNoWriMo founder, Chris Baty’s book “No Plot, No Problem” and loved his ‘creativity for all’ outlook — but by this time I had I had two small kids and my creative life had contracted to the point where I was reduced to drafting critical analyses on Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends (I have a whole thesis on Gordon’s daddy issues, and Percy? Classic victim mentality.)
So I chickened out. Again.
What Do You Do When You Hit Rock Bottom?
The winter dragged on and I sank into a deep slump.
I was grumpy with everyone all the time. I needed a creative outlet but every time I started anything, even my beloved short stories, I failed to finish.
You know that feeling when you’re scared to start because you might let yourself down again?
One memorable day in March 2010 I hit bottom. Driving along a bleak country road in Pennsylvania – the bare tree-limbs reaching out to claw out the last shreds of my creative soul as we sang along to “Cranky, He’s The Dockyard Crane” – I snapped. That’s it, I thought. I have to do something really scary to jolt myself out of this. I’m going to write a story a day for a month. I can do a story a day, right? I’m going to finish each one, and I’m going to tell everyone about it, so they can shame me if I stop writing.
It was terrifying.
So I did it.
See? “Inspired by” NaNoWriMo. Not “Ripped Off From”.
Fast forward to this January.
With two years of StADa under my belt I was ready to stretch my wings. My wonderful husband practically pushed me out the door to the Writer’s Digest Conference in NYC (If you haven’t been to a conference, I can recommend it: being surrounded by professionals and passionate would-be-professionals has a powerful effect on your motivation and self-respect, never mind what the workshops do for your skills).
The keynote speaker was to be NaNoWriMo’s own Chris Baty, which was a bit thrilling, but I wasn’t actually going to, you know, meet him or anything. (Not if I could help it, anyway.)
The first evening was a whirl: so many ideas, so much inspiration, so many notes to take, so much preparation to do for the Agent Pitch Slam (like speed dating, with literary agents). I was up so late preparing my pitch than I hardly slept.
I Blame Sleep Deprivation For What Happened Next.
I stumbled into the wrong session. After ten minutes, I ducked out early to look for the right session. As I wandered past the author area, my heart gave a little lurch. There was a tall, bald man sitting behind a stack of Chris Baty’s books. And I’d just made eye contact with him. It couldn’t be, could it?
The long moment stretched. My internal thermostat went crazy. I think I did that darty-eyed thing small animals do when cornered.
What would I say? Would he be mad at me? And would he even understand me, now that my tongue had swollen up to three times its normal size and my mouth had turned to sandpaper?
The next thing I remember, I was standing in front of the great man (really. He’s very tall) handing him a card and confessing my sins.
He looked at the card.
He looked at me.
“Is it free?” He asked, somewhat unexpectedly.
“Um yes, yes!” I said. “I mean I have some courses and ebooks people can buy if they want, but the challenge? Oh yes, totally free. They don’t even have to sign up at the site. I just think its so important to encourage people to be creative and…”
I was babbling and breathless.
“Huh,” he said, looking up at me (he was sitting down). “This is so GREAT!”
He beamed.
I beamed.
We started ranting about creativity and the importance of people giving themselves the permission to write. We raved about community and the other creative challenges on the web (he gave me generous, concerned advice about running a challenge), and we shared typical-writer-insecurities. We talked about the thrill of writing and the joy of having a hand in other people’s growth as writers. We promised to stay in touch. I may have started to refer to him as “m’new-boyfriend-Chris-Baty” (it’s OK, the wonderful husband understands). I walked around on a cloud for the rest of the weekend.
The last person I saw, as I wheeled my suitcase out into the New York streets, was m’new-boyfriend-Chris-Baty, sitting in the lobby, tapping away on his laptop. He looked up and waved. I had a new ally and it felt wonderful.
Confront Your Fears And Wonderful Things Can Happen
Starting StoryADay was scary.
Walking up to Chris Baty was scary.
Sitting down to write every day is scary.
But pushing yourself to do the scary thing is almost never a bad idea. (Unless that scary thing involves heights. Or venemous snakes. Don’t do them.)
You Can Do This – Today
I cannot stress strongly enough the value of:
Making a commitment to your writing,
Taking a chance on yourself,
Reaching out to a wider community of writers,
Being open to support and encouragement from unexpected sources.
StoryADay May is one way you can do all those things. Sure, the aim is to write a story a day, but I’ve always maintained that you should set your own rules. Some people aimed for 3 stories a week and hit that challenge. Some people aimed for 31 but their lives got complicated and they came out of the month with ‘only’ 12 stories … and were still thrilled.
But you don’t have to wait for May and you don’t have to travel to New York to confront your fears.
After reading the first few lines of “The Door” by E. B. White [1. found in Fifty Great Short Stories, Milton Crane (Ed.)] my immediate feeling was one of outrage: here I am reading a story by the author of a book that has generations of writers in terror of writing something the ‘wrong’ way (The Elements of Style by Strunk & White), and it’s all over the place! White is breaking his own rules with flagrant , jaw-dropping abandon!
Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid, or they were duroid (sani) or flexan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost.
OK, so there aren’t actually many disregarded rules there, apart from possibly some missing quotation marks – but still! What an odd and unbalancing opening that is.
And I loved it. Because the words are doing exactly what the writer intends to convey: they are confusing and disjointed and all out of kilter. They are slightly beyond comprehension. Just likethat we are in the same emotional space as the main character.
You couldn’t do this without a good command of the norms of writing, so perhaps E. B. White is exactly the right person to be writing this story!
Why The Story Works
This was a trying story on a first reading. I was never really sure what was going on, although I have my own ideas. It was like reading a stream-of-consciousness Beat poem.
But it hung together. It worked even though little in the story is explicit.
Some reasons it worked:
It was visceral. The writer takes us right inside the head of someone who is disorientated and out of step with the world. He keeps us off-kilter with his language. We are never explicitly told what is up with the main character (they way we may not know what’s up with ourselves when we are ‘out of sorts’). We do, however, feel what the character is feeling, through this helter-skelter narrative.
We are inside his head, though it is not all first-person. The story switches point of view without fanfare, so sometimes we are in first person and sometimes not (“Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the name of things”).
The author sets up a metaphor at the beginning, that of rats in a scientific experiment, “…trained to jump at a square card with the circle in the middle of it…”. It is a clear and coherent part of the story. He then takes this metaphor and alludes to it throughout the story, using the phrase ‘the one with the circle on it’ in various places to let us know he’s talking about frustrated expectations or unexpected changes — about life changing the rules, just when we’ve got the hang of them — whether or not we know what’s going on in the particular moment (and on a second reading, these moments become more clear).
The story (and the protagonist) travel somewhere. At the end, I’m still not exactly sure what is going on, but I know more than I did at the beginning. The protagonist is moving on.
The ending has a finality to it, a sense of actually being an ending. The author ties everything up in a bow by bringing back some metaphors from earlier in the story, the way a modern stand up comics will bring us back around to a joke from the start of their routine, before taking their bow.
This was an oddly satisfying story.
I think it is made more difficult by reading it at a time (and as part of a culture) very different from the the one in which it was written. Life was changing for the protagonist in ways that reflected the times. Now, 70+ years later, it’s hard to catch all the cultural allusions (without studying more deeply).
The style feels very modern (or possibly “Modern”) in its form and ambition. In fact, I was stunned to find it was originally published in 1939. I think it would still prove a bit too avant garde for many readers.
But it was anything but boring.
Writer’s Tips
If you are uninspired by a story that you are writing, maybe it’s because you are sticking too closely to the rules, to a formula.
Try taking a leaf out of E. B. White’s book and mess with your readers a bit.
Try a different style.
Say less — or more.
Drop the dialogue attributions.
Throw out the quotation marks.
Write run-on sentences — or write in fragments.
Tell the story out of order.
Try to make your language sound less like you and more like the inside of your character’s head. Let the words race, if your character is running; or make them lugubrious if she is weary.
Allow yourself to take some chances.
After all, words are just squiggles on a page, and even the most experimental squiggles can be erased and re-written.
PostSecret
![[Tuesday Reading Room] The Door by E. B. White](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/EB_White_cropped.png)
, Milton Crane (Ed.)] my immediate feeling was one of outrage: here I am reading a story by the author of a book that has generations of writers in terror of writing something the ‘wrong’ way (The Elements of Style by Strunk & White), and it’s all over the place! White is breaking his own rules with flagrant , jaw-dropping abandon!