All posts by Aaubin

Time: Short Story

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The best short stories have been the shortest. Even the short stories that take pages and pages to tell feel short in my memory, and in the way I can encapsulate their meaning to myself later when the work is not in front of me.


The usual advice is to start a short story as close to the ending as possible. It’s similar to a scene in a novel and though a short story may have multiple scenes, it should begin as close to the eureka moment of the epiphany as possible. Or, depending on genre, the uh-oh moment.


Neil Gaiman’s postcard story fills the same space in my mind as Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” – though one of these took a decade and a TV show to understand. If you’re having issues with O’Connor’s short story, watch Netflix’s Longmire series. Also read the books, they’re great, but watch the show. Just, the whole thing. The explanation happens during the investigation into a murder of a main character but that’s all I’ll say about it.


Ted Chiang’s short stories, including the short that became the movie The Arrival, may take entire evenings to read. When I think back to any particular one, though, what I remember most is the revelation.


As with any consideration of time and structure choice – whether you should be writing a novel, short story, or poem – remember that all of these has a epiphany. You don’t get to pick the epiphany, the reader does that, and it won’t be the same one for everybody. But some epiphanies can happen in an instant, and some need a running start to get there.

Talking to Yourself: Mo Haydr

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I first stumbled on Mo Haydr’s works when I was a poor, broke grad student haunting the local library in Leeds. My favorite sections were horror and crime, and Haydr’s work settled comfortably in both. One of the first books I read was Pig Island which made me, as a reader, pretty mad. I could respect what she was saying with the plot, but I could also respect that I had checked out a library book and could just shove it back in the return bin without remorse.


Years later, I read Wolf. It took the underlying young woman protagonist arc that was first mapped in Pig Island and said, well, yes, but what if the other characters did something a little differently? It was a good book on its own, but a fantastic counterpart to Pig Island. Even if I weren’t already a fan, as a writer I could really get behind the conversation taking place between the two works.


How freeing! To be able to have both timelines, the present and of course, the darkest timeline. Or perhaps, in creating a response timeline you may find you were already in the darkest timeline. In writing complete worlds, we aren’t bound to characters talking to each other. The entire structure of our universes unfold in new and different ways with a single, “But what if I did it a little differently this time.” Perhaps you learn that you have grown optimistic in aging or perhaps the person you become takes the patina of age as whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses might be.


You can’t respond to yourself unless you’ve said something in the first place.

Rhythm: The Stop

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Gilmore Girls’ actress, Alexis Bledsoe, once talked about doing tongue twisters to practice for the high-paced chatter style of Amy Pace’s drama.
I typed that whole sentence off the top of my head. I really enjoyed Gilmore Girls while it ran on TV for a few reasons. My mom and I could watch something that wasn’t Murder She Wrote for the Third Time and it had enough angst to soothe my tortured teenage soul.


Years later, I caught the same affected rhythm in Life, starring Damien Lewis, a couple other great people, and a kickass ending that turned the show from a deep think mystery into an incredible character study.
It isn’t the rapid-fire back and forth that makes you sit up and listen to the characters in either show. It’s the sudden stop. That space is the impactful moment.


Consider Barns Courtney’s “99” if you don’t feel like watching roughly 7 seasons (all-together for Gilmore Girls and Life combined, minus the new Gilmore Girls. This could have been a footnote) of television. It slaps, but the neat parts are where the sound ceases and we continue into the next rollicking phrase.


The rapidfire exchange in prose has a different sudden stop. Either the long winding sentences have a sudden short interjection, or the short staccato style sentences give way suddenly to a long, winding, run-on sentence of effervescent vowels and sibilant consonants.


Consider, also, a helpless passenger in a getaway vehicle on a hilly road. Sometimes the impact is when you hit the ground; sometimes it’s when you launch into the air.

Setting: Geography Determines the Winner

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If ever there is a battle with the word “hill” in it, know that the winner had the high ground. Or the line of sight to the enemy, or otherwise used the rolling downward momentum to destroy.


When I was in eighth grade, we all took US History from a retired green beret – long story – who would periodically tell us stories that we would have to determine were true or not. That part doesn’t matter. The part that does is that his motto was: geography determines the winner.


Who has clean water?
Who has the roads to carry food to the forces?
Who has the high ground to see the enemy?
Who has the fortress with the underground streams?
Who has the fortress with no secret tunnels to get food in a time of siege?
Who has owns the getaway route?
Who locks the door of the murder house?
Who has the better geography?


Because that person is going to be the winner, unless you take very careful steps as the creator. And the winner determines how the story is told.

Practice: Copy Style

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Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works.


One day, he talked to us about writing. One part of understanding travel literature or literature in general is understanding how that literature is created.


He recommended getting a notebook and hand writing a paragraph or two from a famous author, just to feel how the words came out of the pen. Do a page each day for a year and you will develop your own style.


What you’ll actually get is a keen understanding of other people’s styles. Try this instead. Get a notebook and write a paragraph of someone else’s work. Then try your own work in their style. Did you say enough? Did you say too little? How does the punctuation feel? Are you inspired to continue?
By practicing your words in another style you get incrementally closer to finding the one that pours forth and sounds irrevocably like the voice in your head when no others are speaking.


If this one doesn’t sound quite right, turn the page. Try again.


I didn’t keep it up for a year. I hit the normals like Hemingway and Shakespeare, and the not quite normals like Amy Tan, John Steinbeck. For a little while, I was terribly studious of the micro style. The comma placement, the sentence length, the rhetorical questions. It wasn’t until I turn to the macro style – the living setting, the satirical description, the single sentence reveal that upends the universe – that I discovered how to say what I was trying to say.

The comma placement in Steve Martin’s Pleasure of My Company told me less than the slight handful of sentences that revealed the core of the character. The short and devastatingly sensorial re-visitations of a single location in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the earnest and bombastic humor in Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain, the intertwining of physics and magic in Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series gave me permission. I could say what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it.

Rhythm: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

One of the seminal alphabet learning books in the last century was, without a doubt, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I have waited a lifetime to be able to write that sentence.


Every year there’s probably around a couple hundred alphabet books or language basics books published in the world. They won’t change. In the USA at least, the alphabet is pretty set.


Each of these books must be different in order to hit the market and that difference is something value added. For children’s books for tiny humans that are such basic building blocks of tiny-human knowledge, there are certain things that can make them stand out:

  1. Audience participation
  2. A story
  3. Playing with the construction of a children’s book in general

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom has all three. While the book has a story, starring kids being daring, silly, and having just a little more hope than sense, it’s 1 and 3 that make the book a classic. By “construction of a children’s book” I mean interesting page turns, something in the illustrations that make the story re-readable (think Where’s Waldo), or a novel rhythm. Years before I was commanded to learn to read music (long story) Chicka Chicka Boom Boom introduced me to the wonderfully unexpected stops and starts of jazz without the complication of a wind section, or my ongoing rivalry with the trumpets (short story but not the place).


As for 1. Audience participation, the title of the work is meant to be read but the refrain is a delight to shout. Usually with a crowd.


Most of us are introduced to music on a bone-deep level, even if it isn’t via formal study. We can read prose and poetry, in the way we can hear the sounds that also have been sung to, or around us.


To mix up your rhythm, listen to music. Steal with wild, respectful abandon. Listen to your words in a voice that is not your own, even if only in the confines of your own head.

Structure: Skin Game

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Caution: Massive spoilers

I’ve been following Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files since Summer Knight, which I read on my Nintendo DS. I now own the entire series in physical form, most of the collection in audiobook, and a handful of favorites in ebook. I’m a fan is what I’m saying.


Skin Game has a tremendously simple structure which is the linear narrative with a satisfying amount of action A plot and emotional B plot. We longtime fans get a couple of shout-outs to previous events and reveal around the overarching series mystery. That ending, though.


Those of you who live in a linear timeline like myself, can understand the world as a bit of a sin curve or sometimes a rollercoaster without a loop-de-loop. In fiction, we aren’t bound by the gravity of our daily lives. That means the writer gets to stick in a loop-de-loop and, done right, really stick the landing. You’ll get an ending with wow factor. Or you’ll get an ending with WTF factor.


In our linear experience of time, you might see a betrayal or character reveal as coming out of nowhere. Ever have some loved one swear they’ll go to the store for that one item and it’ll be a quick – I swear, super quick – ten minute trip? And two hours later they walk back in empty-handed. This is the linear rollercoaster.


In reality, if we’re paying attention, our loved one says something two days prior about a friend coming back to town. Maybe they’ll get together. We know our loved one is super helpful, right? So our loved one goes to the store, sees their friend, and helps him with all his shopping and they catch up as they wander aisle-by-aisle and then they’re walking out and your loved one gets in the car and drives home so happy that he saw his old bud. What makes the line turn into a loop is foreshadowing prior to the incident, time and events happening before what was foreshadowed is revealed, and then a quick return to our present timeline.


In writing terms, turning your linear timeline into a loop-de-loop requires foreshadowing and the all-time favorite, a well-executed callback.


Skin Game pulls off one of these with two references to time and while the reader might be a little suspicious, enough word count passes that the reveal jumps up at what we expected to be nearly the end of a climactic sequence. See that? We were innocently hurtling back to the ground, the author reveals that crucial piece of information that was previously alluded to, and we launch back into the air. Without that foreshadowing in the beginning, we get the WTF ending.


For the wow ending in Skin Game, the main character references a time jump within the first few chapters. A little while later, a well-loved side character also mentions the time jump which the main character brushes off. At the end, we get to see the events within the missing time which greatly impact a careening ending.

Titles: Annie Proulx’s Short Stories

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Annie Proulx’s short stories make a fantastic use of space in an important way. She completely understands the limitations of the form and uses all available space to work for her, as the writer, and you, as the reader. The titles feed into the story, so that she either gives a hint as to what she wants to you read out of it, or simply kicks off the first part of your mindset before you launch into the meat of the story.


In publishing, works go through a laundry list of titles to ensure that the work is catchy, appealing to the right audience, and dissimilar from either a recent work or a famous one. The short story collection can be titled from a list; the magazine has its own title to appeal to a predetermined audience. In the short story itself, all ink on the page must perform a function.


Pick a short work you’ve titled. Cover the title. Uncover it. I can’t decide. What you can ask yourself is this: Am I repeating myself? Or is the title saying something new that isn’t stated within the work?


Sometimes we want to repeat ourselves. Sometimes we want to clarify. Sometimes we’re just desperate to call it something and be done. That’s okay, too. But you have all this real estate above your name to work for you.

Kick-Off: 100 Day Project

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , ,

I’m participating in the 100 day project this year (2020) and this post serves as my declaration. From April 7 until they say stop, I’m going to write a mosaic novel in the adult epic fantasy space. The 100 day project is usually a visual art study posted on instagram, but I’m aiming to pin down a very deliberate sort of magic that I accidentally cast last year. After ten years of typing book shaped objects, I created a novel for the first time. My goal is to shorten that ten years to one hundred days.


I’ve spent most of the last decade studying YA and MG, so the audience level of this project is quite a bit different. To check in, I will be posting daily. The big bad manifesto post claimed this space for writing lessons I have learned, and this blog will one day remind me of those lessons when I am staring at that infernal blinking cursor.


As we all know, to be a good writer, you must first be a voracious reader. In this age, we take our creative lessons from all works. Actually, it’s what we’ve always done.


To start us out, I highly recommend taking a look at Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author”. That isn’t the formal title, and that isn’t what the piece is about on its face. “Death of the Author” is the concept that once you publish a work, you no longer exist. That work goes out to the reader and is consumed into a space without you. You get no say in how your work is viewed.

**A blog is a little different. Just a note, I have a very active spam catcher. If you leave a comment, I have about 2,500 spam comments to dig through to find it. Please be patient and respectful of this space. I don’t tolerate hate, and you certainly shouldn’t have to put up with it.**


The concept is also “we all consume media differently” or perhaps “everything we see, hear, and every person we meet leaves a thumbprint on our minds that shape the way we read and listen and see, that reshape the way we think about the things we have already read and heard and viewed, and the people we have already met.” It’s a little unwieldy, I’m sure someone has said it shorter.


I’m planning to have one work or author per post and a little thing I noticed or something from that piece or person that shaped how I either consume or create media. And through it all, I’ll be writing.


This is a snapshot. The way I view the media I have consumed is affected by the media I have consumed up until this point, all the people I have already met, and all the thoughts I have had. Tomorrow, I may be a different person. In ten years, I may have a vastly different opinion.


There is nothing in this world that does not change; even the dead decay.