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Writing
Die! Die! My Darling!
When you’re a writer, they’ll tell you that you’ve got to kill your darlings. Those four paragraphs about the hero’s car? Ditch it. That three page description of the heroine’s breats? Into the shitcan!
This can be very tough to hear sometimes, but if you’re smart you’ll take your medicine and cut out all that succulent fat. And as an example, here’s the (former) opening page and a half of my latest story, “Where There’s Smoke”.
Shreveport was founded by lazy people.
Well, that’s not quite fair. The men who looked at a small trading post in northwest Louisiana and said, “Here we shall make our names,” who in the year after the Alamo laid out streets with names like Crockett and Travis, who took a muddy road running due west from the banks of the Red River and named it Texas, these were men of industry, of vision.
But the people who settled here, who beat their way through the wilderness from Tennessee or Mississippi hoping for a new life, who then stopped at the first sign of civilization and said, “You know, this is far enough”, they were the lazy ones.
Lazy or not, in the years after the Civil War the riverboat trade grew and grew, and a bustling waterfront sprang up to meet it. Soon Shreveport stretched inland, producing such refinements as an opera house, a public garden, and a flourishing red-light district.
Then the railroad came through, and the riverfront became the business district, big brick warehouses transformed into offices and restaurants. Years passed, business moved to the new ten-story skyscrapers on Market street, and the area now called Shreve Square became the home of bars and lunchrooms, and Negro speakeasiers where Huddie Ledbetter and Robert Johnson sang and played guitar. A brief revival as an entertainment district only put off the inevitable, as the old buildings slowly wore away, hunching down on their crumbling mortar. A tornado tore through a few years later, reducing many of the old soldiers to heaps of rubble.
Then riverboat gambling came to town. Suddenly Shreve Square was hot hot hot, with new bars, new restaurants, even new drunks passed out under the Red River bridge.
I *sob* love that stuff! But EVERyone I showed it to said that it was the wrong opening. Now I have to condense it down to three quick paragraphs and wrap it with some actual, you know, action and dialog.
Still, it cries out – Weep for me!
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Short Stories, Writing
Alice
07.19.07 | Permalink | 3 CommentsHere’s a story that was posted last year at the late, lamented Flashing in the Gutters. I am pretty happy with the way it turned out, although in retrospect I think the opening is weak.
Update: I decided to edit the opening paragraph, and I like it a lot better now. We will never speak of this again.
Alice
By Graham Powell
The last time I saw her, it cost me my job. But that was a long time ago.
I was fumbling with my mailbox key when I noticed her, sitting on one of the old chairs there in the foyer. She must have been there all day. She slowly stood, smoothing the wrinkles from her cheap dress. Her eyes were puffy and makeup had run down her face when she’d cried.
“Steve…,” she said.
We climbed the four flights to my apartment.
I fixed up a pot of tea and we sat drank it in the living room, her in her rumpled dress, me in my work clothes reeking of sweat. We sat there silently for a while, just sitting and drinking, until I set my cup aside and said, “Why?”
At first she didn’t move, just stared down at the worn spots in the carpet. Then she rubbed off the makeup and showed me why here eyes were puffy.
I went into the bedroom and pulled open the dresser drawer. My baton was at the back, under the sweatshirts.
The make a big deal out of taking away your badge and your gun, but I took my nightstick with me when I left, and they never missed it. Up close, it works as well as a Glock. Though it takes a bit longer.
I carried it back into the other room. Alice was crying again, dun-colored tears dripping from her chin. “Who?” I said.
She told me.
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Tennis, Writing
El Finito!
06.29.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI finished a story! Finally! This may not seem to be a big deal to many of you, but I haven’t finished anything since the first draft of a story (still unrevised) a year ago, and only two stories in the last two years. But I recently joined a writer’s group, and I promised I would have a story for last night’s meeting.
It was harder than I remembered. I futzed around for the better part of a week before getting down to brass tacks. I finished it up at work yesterday – an hour at lunch and an hour after I knocked off for the day. Final tally – about 2,000 words yesterday alone. Some of them are pretty good, too, especially the ending, which came out exactly as I wanted.
The story was inspired by Paul Guyot’s armored car challenge, issued on his blog a couple of years ago. I mapped out the idea and started work on it but put it aside when I found I wasn’t able to meet the deadline. Then just the other day I saw that Gerald So’s story in the same contest had been published, and remembered how much I liked what I’d done on mine.
And the writing group liked it. Which was cool, because they’re all pretty good writers themselves. Last night, for example, a woman named Kira handed out chapter 3 of her novel-in-progress. I had read chapter 2 at the previous meeting, and it wasn’t bad, just sort of middling. But reading her new stuff I started to get excited because it was really, really good. I could barely wait until everyone else had finished reading before I launched in about how well done it was and the (minor) ways it could be improved.
I haven’t even mentioned Chris’ story, which was based on old science fiction stories like Flash Gordon, but gave it a silly tone, which was very funny. So now I’m excited to be back writing, and I hope it continues.
Going to the Mats. It’s Wimbledon time again, and I thought I’d send along a very interesting interview with a tennis star from the ’80s, Mats Wilander. On court he had a rather boring persona (almost Sampras-esque), but it turns out he’s really a pretty interesting guy.
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Wisdom, Writing
The Wisdom Of Dilbert
Scott Adams answers some reader questions on his blog. I found this most interesting:
Q. How do you ensure that the material you publish stays fresh and funny enough to be continually published?
A. I write what interests and amuses me and hope for the best.
Good advice for any writer. Obviously I am not constrained by the necessity to make a living from what I write, but I suspect that very few writers make money with stuff they aren’t engaged with.
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Writing
Gutter Mouth
03.06.06 | Permalink | 3 CommentsThat Ohio badass (oxymoron?) known only as Tribe (real name: Jeremy Tribble) has created an excellent new site called Flashing In The Gutters, a flash-fiction story site in blog format. Now I’m not big on flash fiction, but inspiration struck, and now you can read my story “Alice“.
Of course, no more than five minutes after my story hit the ether, John Rickards had a story up, bumping mine from the top spot. My first thought was, “That bastard!” My second was, “Hey, maybe his legions of fans will read my story, too!” My third thought was, “Shouldn’t those be flying monkeys?”
A number of things conspired to influence this story. F’rinstance, last night the wife and I were watching The Long Kiss Goodnight, with Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. Actually, it’s my favorite performance by Jackson. Anyway they spent most of the time in rural New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, at one point mentioning Stroudsburg. I had a good friend in college from those parts. If you’re reading, Alice, hello! How are you doing?
Then this morning on the way to work I heard some song or other that reminded me of her, and I thought to myself, “Hmmm, ‘Alice’ would make a great title for a story.” Ten minutes later I had the plot. I wrote it at lunch and sent it off, and Tribe had it posted by my coffee break.
It hits some of the same themes as my story “Donna’s Daughter” (too lazy to link, hit the Stories page) – a self-destructive woman and a man who knows better but helps her out anyway. And has before, and will again. I dated a lot of needy women when I was younger – mostly because I was pretty needy myself – and I think this arose from that.
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