See It Before You Write It, Then Get Busy Daydreaming

by Robert Lowell Russell

Every writer has his or her own way of starting a story, so with the caveat that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone, here's how I do it (fair warning, I'm a "pantser").

My stories usually start with a single visual scene in my head, and when I have the scene fixed in my mind, I add a second scene. My job then becomes making sense of the two scenes. It may seem easy to get characters to go from point A to point B, but I often have no idea who my characters are at this stage, and there may be no obvious connections between points A and B.

There are probably certain advantages to starting with characters, then building a world around them. But I like building my world first, then plunking the characters into it and letting them fend for themselves. I also think starting with visual scenes makes it easier to "show" rather than "tell."

With Path of Stones **spoiler alert**, I deconstructed Hansel and Gretel. I started by visualizing a trail of white stones running through a fairy tale forest, then added a scene of a man sitting in a bar, staring at one of the stones in his hand. The challenge was then explaining how the man fit into a story about a couple of kids, and how I got from a fairy tale world to a modern day setting. It was an interesting process. The story started at 1.6K words, ballooned to 6K, was pared to 4K, and was finally condensed to 3K. During the rewriting process, I lost the original bar scene, the Empire State Building, Charles Darwin, Annie Oakley, a sexy witch, and bunch of other stuff.

One advantage of the "plotter" style may be that a writer doesn't end up with as many unusable parts when he or she is finished with a story (Though I tend to recycle my best story fragments. Sexy witches = writing gold!). But I like getting messy, and I like getting weird. My two starting scenes usually serve as corner pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, and with those scenes in my head, I daydream about my story, twisting and turning the middle pieces, deciding what fits and what doesn't. This lets me "work" even when I'm not sitting with an outline in front of a computer, and I've learned to trust my instincts when I write.

However, if you're going to write this way, you need to be able to track a lot of things in your head simultaneously, and make sure you have solid critics reviewing what you write. Our brains work to fill in the gaps of what we perceive, so you need more than one set of eyes to spot the inevitable gaps.

Some final words of advice: bang it out, polish it, fire it off, then cross your fingers. And if you're not having fun, you're probably doing it wrong.

Robert Lowell Russell once aspired to become a history professor, but found working with the real world too constraining. His works in progress, a series of short stories and a novel, incorporate elements of his previous research in Native American history and culture.

For links to more of Rob's stories (or to see him dressed like a ninja) visit his blog.

The Poetry in Fairy Tales

by Lea C. Deschenes

It’s unusual for a poet to be writing about speculative fiction, but not as odd as you’d first think. My love of both forms (or indeed, of all writing) comes from their ability to open worlds, both new and familiar; to stir from our settled patterns into a whirl of possibilities; to give curiosity free rein to ask what if?; and to take on ideas so large they span the universe.

Fairy tales were my first case of reader’s True Love. I had a tattered volume of Grimm’s old enough not to have been sanitized to “child-friendly” mush and from the day my toddler hands got a hold of it, I read it like a holy text. To this day, I will contend that Snow White’s queen must dance in red hot iron shoes until dead dead dead or it’s not the real story (however many “real” versions of the story there are, that one is mine). I will never see Disney’s The Little Mermaid because I can’t bear to think of the mermaid’s knife-walking, voiceless martyrdom ending transformed into an all-singing, all-dancing Happily Ever After!, even though the character’s complete self-sacrifice for her mostly oblivious prince bugs every feminist bone in my body.

Fairy tales are ruthless, red in tooth and claw. As a child it seemed to me that they said everything that my suburban hometown’s polite veneer wanted to deny: Underdogs often make good. It’s good to be clever and better to be kind. Most of all, Bad Things Happen. They will happen to you. You’d better keep your wits about you and learn how to deal with that…

To this day, I can’t pass up a good fairy tale reworking, whether it’s Russia’s Koschei the Deathless, Japan’s Kitsune or a whole bag full of Grimm’s-flavored goodies. And somewhere along the way, speculative fiction has created its own bastions of myth and fable to be told and retold to fit the context of the day: rogue adventurers, schools for wizards and witches, genius detectives, spacemen and their cold equations, aliens, shapeshifters, hackers…ad infinitum, ad astra.

There’s a common saying, “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.” There’s poetry in that: the swiping, combining and recombining of tropes and life and bits of timeless metaphors to make something unique to an author’s voice, time and place. It’s poetry when their stories seem larger and wider than plot mechanics and words laid out in neat rows on a page. It’s poetry when an idea as old as human civilization connects itself to a reader and creates a spark.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but if Wallace Stevens can find thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, Neil Gaiman can find new ways of looking at The Jungle Book and African trickster stories, filing off the serial numbers so well that you’ll forget its connection to the original. If Anne Sexton could take on the Grimm Brothers, Ovid and patriarchy in Transformations, Octavia Butler could handle vampires and I can write a poem in which the dancer decides to take off her red shoes.

If Jack can kill his giant, so can you.

Lea C. Deschenes is a poet living in Worcester, MA. She once found a five-leaf clover during a solar eclipse. Her book, The Constant Velocity of Trains, is available from Write Bloody Publishing at Amazon.com, Powells.com and Writebloody.com.

To learn more about Lea and her work, please click on her website.