Best of Every Day Fiction

My story, “Home to Perfect,” has been included in the Best of Every Day Fiction Two anthology. The book is now available for order in both hardcover and paperback.

Every Day Fiction posts one flash piece a day and has developed a great community that comments intelligently on the day’s stories. It’s definitely worth dropping into the feed reader. If reading online’s not your thing, here’s your chance to check out what they do.

I’m very proud of “Home to Perfect,” and I’m glad to see its life extended this way. I thought this might be a nice occasion to talk a bit about what goes on when I write a piece of flash fiction.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion online recently about how long it takes to write various types of fiction. Most of what I read about flash fiction suggests that these are quick, easy pieces that you can dash off in a morning. That’s not my experience at all. The only reason I can afford to write flash is that I have a day job.

“Home to Perfect” took me a solid 15 hours to write. I’ll try to break down how those hours were spent. You should read the story (linked at the top of the post) before reading my explanation–I’m not going to worry about spoilers.

I got the idea when I was poking around the Internet one day and found a video on YouTube of a kid pulling off 100 percent FC on expert of “Through the Fire and Flames” on Guitar Hero. At the end of the video, the kid is visibly trembling, cursing in disbelief, totally overwhelmed (I’d link it now, but I can’t find it anymore–if you search for this on YouTube, you get totally overwhelmed by bots and parody videos). I found myself thinking over the next several days about the kid’s awe and how he shared it with an audience on YouTube. I wondered if his parents had any idea what that moment meant to him.

I spent about 3 hours over the next several days developing the idea. I asked myself who Vic (my main character) was, why he cared about 100 percent FC, and what else was going on in his life. I wrote extensive notes on him, his mom, his dad, and his brother Kurt. This was the point at which I realized that I was writing about domestic violence. I could tell you a lot of details about all of these characters that never made it into the story. I believe a story should be an iceberg–what’s visible should be only a small amount of the material that’s in the author’s possession.

At that point, I wrote my first draft, spending about 2 hours on it. (My first draft rate for longer pieces is much faster, but my speed of writing seems to be inversely related to the length of the piece).

I put my first draft down for about a week. When I picked it up again, something was wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what. After much rereading and consideration (which I’m not counting towards the total time spent on the work), I figured out that “Through the Fire and Flames” was the problem. I had no emotional connection to the song, and I hadn’t spent much time playing Guitar Hero. I had, on the other hand, pulled many all-nighters playing Rock Band. There’s a song on Rock Band called “Green Grass and High Tides” that I love deeply and find wickedly difficult (I can beat it on hard, but that’s the best I can do). I changed the story so that Vic is playing Rock Band, and spent about 5 hours writing a new draft. While I wrote this draft, I played “Green Grass and High Tides” on repeat and periodically took breaks to watch videos of people playing this song on Rock Band.

[As an aside, when the story was first posted on Every Day Fiction, fellow writer Deven Atkinson pointed out that the lyrics of “Green Grass and High Tides” are actually very inspiring and appropriate to Vic’s situation. Though I normally pay a lot of attention to song lyrics, I hadn’t in this case. However, the story just didn’t work for me until I saturated it and myself with the mood of this song. I think it’s quite possible that I was subconsciously aware of what the song is saying to Vic.]

At that point, I thought I’d finished the story, so I let my husband read it. As always happens, he made me realize that I was far from finished with the story, pointing out several problems with how it was structured. I spent about 3 hours restructuring and fixing those problems. Then, I spent 2 hours doing a final polish and preparing the story for submission. For me, this consists of reading the whole thing out loud several times, fixing anything that trips me up and fiddling with things until I’m sure I really want to send this out into the world. I run spellcheck. I obsessively study the guidelines for the market to which I’m sending the story.

And that’s a wrap. I’ve wished that I could write faster, but I’m much happier with the version that’s on the Every Day Fiction site than what I would have come up with if I’d stopped after the first or second draft.

Dzanc Books Write-A-Thon

For the next several days, I will be participating in the 2nd annual Write-A-Thon in support of Dzanc Books. Thursday through Sunday, I will receive a writing prompt and will produce short stories in honor of Dzanc. What you can do to help is go to this link, find my name (Erica Naone) in the list, and sponsor me. Any amount will be most appreciated. I’ll track my participation on this blog, and if you’re interested in seeing what your sponsorship helped produce, I will send you the raw drafts at your request.

Dzanc does tons of stuff that’s worth supporting–they put out the online magazine The Collagist, edited by the ever-awesome Matt Bell, as well as the literary journal Monkeybicycle. They publish the annual Best of the Web anthology, and a bunch of interesting short story collections. They also do a lot to support writers. The Dzanc Writer in Residency Program is an educational outreach program aimed at youth literacy, the Dzanc Prize provides financial support to a writer of literary fiction, and the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions are very affordable online writing workshops.

What’s more, the people involved are very nice and very dedicated to sharing their love of great literature. It’s sort of random that I feel connected to a bunch of writers based in Michigan and the work they’re doing in Michigan schools, etc, but such is the nature of the Internet. They’ve been kind to me, they’ve helped me to discover a lot of great fiction, and they’re doing their best to make that same sort of help broadly available.

This is what they say about the Write-a-Thon:

With the economy still not up to speed, traditional means of raising funds – writing grants, corporate sponsorships, etc. – have become less successful.  Here at Dzanc, we like to try and make raising money both as fun, and valuable, an experience as possible.  With this in mind, last year we came up with an alternative and interactive plan which we believed not only furthered our mission but was something those participating in would enjoy. Based on the feedback we received, we were right.
…

Our goal for this event, considering there are over 2000 writers in the Emerging Writers Network, is $20,000, or, an average of $10 raised per person.  To put this in a proper context, that would pay for just under 3 full Dzanc Writer in Residence Programs, or the Dzanc Prize plus approximately 2 full DWIRPs.  We will obviously be thrilled to find out after the fact that we were shortchanging ourselves with that goal. We do hope each and every member of EWN, and those who have become fans of Dzanc, will participate in our inaugural Write-A-Thon.

I’d love to give back a little to them, and I’d love for your help in doing so. It helps to know that even getting Dzanc $10 would be doing my part. But to sweeten the deal, I’ll buy any book from Dzanc’s catalog for one randomly selected person who gives to the Write-A-Thon on my behalf. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to see you through their system, so if you do decide to donate, please comment on this post or drop me an e-mail. I’ll select and announce a winner by Wednesday, December 23, and you’ll get the book as a belated holiday present. 🙂

Thanks so much for your help, and please leave any questions in the comments.

Sometimes Your Novel Breaks

I’ve been doing better with Nanowrimo this year than expected, and for about the last week have maintained a slight lead on word count. This is a nice change from my usual “should I drop out” doom and gloom around the third week of November. However, the lead hasn’t made me immune to novel breakage.

Maybe this eventually goes away with experience, but in all my novel drafts to date–indeed in any story I write–there comes a point when the whole thing breaks. Something happens that feels so outside of what I originally planned that I’m wondering if I can even finish the story. This often manifests for me as some jarring jump in tone or genre.

For example, this year I planned a science fiction romance, and I wanted to keep the tone light. That was great until I sent my hero off to get captured by the bad guys and then wrote a scene in which one of the bad guys gloats to the heroine about how the hero cracked under torture. Torture had not been part of the plan. I went with it, but found myself considering things like, “How has his personality been affected by torture?” I wrote a love scene in which he lost interest in sex because his mind was on what had happened to him.

At this point, I felt I needed to reassess what I was up to. Did my story want to be a different genre? Should I cut this torture thing out and go back? I just felt the story was getting a lot heavier than I’d meant it to be. I can’t say what the end result’s going to be because I’m still only in the mid-30Ks on this novel. However, I can say that if I’d worried too much about all that stuff at the beginning of this paragraph, I wouldn’t be that far.

Instead, I just kept writing. I’ve had drafts totally disintegrate on me, and that’s always a fear, but this didn’t feel that way. In fact, in this case, I think the moment I felt like things went terribly wrong was the exact moment at which my characters really came to life. Not exploring this avenue feels like it would have done a disservice to the story.

I can’t say yet how it will all work out, but I can say that the torture incident and its fallout is a more honest reflection of what I find romantic than what I originally planned, and I’m glad I allowed it into the draft.

As far as I can tell, that moment of breakage occurs in every draft, not just the first. It always seems associated with things coming to life. I currently use this to measure when I’m done revising. If I go through a draft, polish things up a bit, and nothing breaks, then I’m done. If I go through and find myself changing male characters into females or adding long-lost siblings or reworking significant portions of the premise, I know I’ve got at least one more pass before it’s over.

I read an article once by Zadie Smith that really stuck with me–she talked a lot about the process of writing and revising, and I’ve thought a lot about what she said and how it compares with what I do. In that article, she talked about how some writers edit drastically, like move their novel’s setting from England to the U.S. between drafts, or change the time period, or make other big changes that she finds overwhelming and exhausting. When I first read this, I thought, “What crazy person would change the setting mid-stream?” Then my husband pointed out that I do stuff like that all the time. I’ve changed main characters, rewritten stories in a different tense or person, and just ditched entire drafts and redone the story from scratch. For me, the story is wildly malleable, and when it stops shifting all over the map, that’s when I know I’m done with it.

So that moment your novel breaks? That’s just it twitching to tell you it’s still alive.

Nanowrimo Off to a Slow Start

Yesterday, I had a crisis of confidence and didn’t get off the ground with my Nanowrimo novel. By “didn’t get off the ground,” I mean, “spent my allotted writing time surfing for new web series.” Crisis of confidence seems to have been caused by the latest in a string of rejection letters.

I try to have a good attitude about rejection letters. The truth is that the only way to be sure I won’t receive rejection letters is to leave my stuff unwritten or sitting in a drawer, which would be counterproductive to say the least. Writing and submitting stories for publication requires I perform a strange sort of mental misdirection on myself. I have to do my best to edit the story and make it as good and publishable as I can. Then I have to send it out and have no expectations about the result. A lot can go wrong between steps one and two.

What I realized yesterday is that I got steps one and two tangled up somewhere along the way. I’ve been learning a lot about revision and have been sending out stories more ambitiously. I’ve gotten some “good” rejection letters, too, where the editor has let me know my piece almost made it. That’s all great stuff. None of it means, however, that I can start having expectations about what the result will be when I send out a story–that seems to be the road to depression.

This morning, I did manage to start my novel, and had the experience that Nanowrimo always gives me. I got caught up in putting the words on the page. That’s the only remedy I know to the disappointment of rejection. A rejection letter means that my work won’t be published in some particular place. As far as writing itself? Nothing can stop me (except myself…).

Nanowrimo, with its relentless attention to the simple production of words, is a great wakeup call to me every year. It reminds me that I write for the joy of writing. I like getting published, absolutely, but I can’t allow the business side of things to distract me from the reason I do this in the first place.

I’m only 560 words in so far, which means I’m starting out behind–to stay on schedule, a novelist needs 3,334 words by the end of the day on November 2. Still, it’s nice to have things moving a little.

Nanowrimo Begins Tomorrow

It’s been another long hiatus here, but I wanted to take a moment to post that I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. As always, good luck to everyone else participating, and to anyone making the time to write in any form.

For the first time, I spent some time planning my story before the beginning of the month. I’ve always treated this event as more about writing for the joy of it than producing something publishable, but the result has been a bunch of drafts that I’m going to need to burn before I die. In this case, I’m wondering if I may get something I can work with after the month is over.

I have many other things I’ve been wanting to post. With luck, that’ll be on the way in the days to come–procrastinating on my NaNoWriMo goals may result in more frequent blogging…

3-Day Novel Coming Up

Last year, I participated in the 3-Day Novel contest, and this year I’m doing it again, in just a few days, over Labor Day weekend. I’m trying things a bit differently this year. I’ve been outlining in advance, which I don’t normally do for these writing marathons, and I’m curious to see how it will change the experience. My novel will again be urban fantasy–my short fiction is never in that genre, but all my novel ideas seem to be.

Good luck to anyone else participating. Last year, I enjoyed blogging during the event and sharing my progress with the world, and I expect to do so again.

Anyone Want a Subscription to The Sun?

I’m in the Readers Write section of The Sun again, in the July issue (The subject is “Choosing Sides,” and my piece was printed under “Name Withheld.” E-mail me if you’re curious which one it was.). This means that my Sun subscription has been extended for another year.

I’ve been reading The Sun off and on since I was introduced to it at 15 by my high school love. I’ve grown up with it, and it’s the standard by which I judge personal essay writing. The Sun’s Poe Ballantine, one of my favorite writers, is the reason I discovered Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts. I’ve written before about how important that was to me.

I’ve stolen issues of The Sun from my mother, dug through cardboard boxes at the library to find them, picked them up at chain bookstores, and hidden behind them when road-weary and lonely. I once had the privilege of hearing editor and publisher Sy Safransky read in downtown Boston.

To get to the point, I’d like to pass this subscription on to someone. I’m grateful for the extension they’ve given me, but I’d like to use it to get someone else into this magazine. Leave a comment by midnight Eastern Time on Monday, June 22, if you’d like me to send you a one-year gift subscription. At that point, I’ll draw a name out of a hat and choose a winner. I’m afraid I can only afford the U.S. rate for this, so my apologies if any of you are from elsewhere. Of course, I reserve the right to handle things according to my own discretion.

Thanks for reading the blog, and, with luck, you may soon be reading The Sun!

A Zombie Romance

My story, “Alone With Him,” is up today on Everyday Weirdness. Be warned that it contains some gore.

I wrote this story after thinking about how there are tons of paranormal romances about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and so on, and none about zombies. Granted, there are some pretty major difficulties in creating a zombie romance (Let’s see–they’re rotting, they have no brain, they eat brains. Yeah.). This is my best effort. It’s obviously a dark and twisted “romance.”

Six

Six Sentences has kindly posted a very short piece of mine, “6 Impossible Things Before Breakfast.”

I subscribe to 6S in my feed reader, and always find it to be a fascinating mix. Some posts give an intimate, personal glimpse into the writer’s life (or seem to). Others are flash fiction.

I’ve been experimenting with doing more personal writing recently. I often write short pieces like this as warmups, and then tinker with them in odd moments until I’m satisfied with them.

How to Complete a Draft

When I first learned to complete drafts, my method was to keep my pen moving. I would literally set a timer, and the rule was that I had to write continuously until it went off, even if what I wrote was stupid. When I got stuck, I would describe the chair the character was sitting in or other random details of the setting until I got going again with the story. By doing that faithfully every day for even as little at 10 minutes, a draft eventually gets completed. I did my first novel draft that way, and it was an incredible experience.

This was a good method, but my experience at this point is that all tricks “expire” eventually, and I have to hunt for new tricks all the time.

Another trick I’ve tried is to slow way, way down. When I get going, I can easily write 2,400 words of (admittedly bad) fiction draft in an hour. I sometimes make the mistake of expecting that level of output. When I’m stuck, I cut my expected output in half and try hitting that goal. If I’m still stuck, I repeat the process until the goal is absurdly attainable. I’ve had times where my goal was literally to get out 100 words in an hour. And I’m not talking about 100 words that I plan to keep. Just 100 words to keep the momentum at least at a trickle. Then I play math games. One hundred words is about 17 words every ten minutes. I focus on that. Anyone can write 17 words in ten minutes, I tell myself. That’s just a sentence. There’s always a way to keep moving if you want to keep moving.

Lately, my method is that I ask myself what in the story I feel able to write. Maybe it’s one sentence at the beginning. Maybe it’s one sentence at the end. Maybe it’s a snatch of dialogue I heard in my head when I first came up with the idea. I was scared to try writing out of order at first because I worried that my drafts would come out too chaotic. Eventually, I figured out that first drafts are always chaotic, and the goal is just to get something on the paper.

Writing is about creating something from nothing, and I think the first trick is to lay down raw material.

Once I’m done writing the parts I’m clear on, I sketch in connective tissue to the extent possible, then let the draft rest as long as I can until I’m ready to edit.

For nonfiction, my writing process tends to be more compressed because I’m dealing with harder deadlines. The current fiction process I described above is actually something I learned from doing nonfiction. When I’m stuck on an article now, I start at the end. Or I start by writing some of the more formulaic sections. For example, for website news articles, it’s common to include quotes from outside sources commenting on the main topic. I find that’s an easy place to start, since it’s a pretty self-contained section. Once I have that laid down, I’m usually a couple hundred words into the article, and the blank page is looking a lot less blank. Maybe I follow that by describing the technology I’m covering. I often do the lede last, since I tend to struggle over it, and it’ll often stop me dead if I try to start there.

I think I’ve said similar things before. My key point is that writing works best when I stay loose. I always have to invent new tricks. It’s an arms race. I have to keep my writing tricks a step ahead of the forces of procrastination and self-doubt that threaten them.

I’d love to hear other people’s tricks, too, if anyone cares to share.