In the last couple weeks, I took a break from Codename: Fairyland to write a new short story. So I thought I’d talk a little about what that process looked like.
It was a Wednesday morning and I was brushing my teeth when zap! a bolt of inspiration hit. It wasn’t very groundbreaking. Really, the idea was based off a common phobia. But the story idea was that common phobia plus one more step into the weird. I had a good giggle about it, then went about my day.
The reason I didn’t rush to the computer to start writing is simply because that’s not my process. At that point, I didn’t have a story; I had a situation. While situations or scenes are necessary, they are not a story. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself and risk losing the story to frustration.
So I back-burnered the idea. Every few days, I would bring it to the forefront, kind of poke at it or turn it this way and that to examine it. But the idea was like an cool rock: not very dynamic, the same on its surface as all the way through, and probably not interesting to other people.
Then, about a week or so after I got the initial idea, another zap! of inspiration struck as I was driving home from work. Suddenly, I had the main character’s name and the first few paragraphs of story, along with the idea for the full story. When I got home, I wrote the first page and a half.
Over the next few days, I wrote the story roughly a page at a time. I realized as I was writing the story that I was focusing on the foreground story (see my post from a couple weeks ago about foreground/background story). Rather than overthink it or start over with a rewrite, I finished the story as it was.
The end of the story came as a surprise to me. As I was writing the scene, I had an idea for what would happen next. But then, I wrote a good line and the story said, “This is it. We’re done.” I sat back and stared at the blinking cursor on the screen for a minute or two. Then, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Okay.”
I let it rest for a day, then came back to it. Reading it, I confirmed that a lot of the background detail that I’d wanted to include got glossed over in my interest in telling the foreground story. I made handwritten notes on the first page of the printed story, went through the story again, and added in the background details, checking them off as I added them.
Once I was done with that rewriting pass, I let it rest for another couple days, then came back to it. I did a quick read through, only changing a word or two here or there. Then, I asked my wife to read it. She reads pretty broadly, so even though horror is not her genre of choice, she’s not unfamiliar with it.
“Well, what did you think?” I asked when she finished.
“Creepy.” she said.
As good a first reaction as I could have hoped for.
What’s great about having that one trusted reader in your life that’s willing to read all your stuff is that you can bounce ideas around, tell them what you were going for, ask if you were successful at your goals for the story, and all that jazz. She and I had that conversation and I changed a couple things based on that. But I didn’t need to change a lot, which made me happy.
Then, I reread the story one final time. This time, I read it aloud. There’s just something about engaging the parts of my brain that reading aloud does that I’ve always found very helpful with the editing process. I cut more than a few extraneous words and reworked a couple sentences that were hard to read. Satisfied, I declared it done.
All told the story is <1400 words. The only real difference that the length made to my process was that I didn’t do any notebook work for it prior to sitting down to write it, mostly because it’s not a very complex idea or story. Which is fine. It’s a fun, gruesome little story. Not splatterpunk, but it made me grimace a couple times while writing it.
I love stories. Of course, I love the finished story. But I’m also falling back in love with how I get ideas, develop the story, and do the work of writing and editing. It’s a good place to be.
