The title is a Ghostbusters reference. If you don't get it,
shame on you.
For the last ten days I've been writing a story for The Writers Arena. The idea for this site is that two writers, one representing
the Arena (I think just the four site admins?) and one challenger (in this
instance, ME) receive a prompt and have ten days to write a story for that
prompt. The readers get to vote on their favorite. Then there are two judges
who each pick a winner, and the readers vote makes the tie-breaker. This week I
think I'm facing off against Joseph Devon, who wrote my favorite Writer's Arena
piece so far, "Self-Reflection". I stumbled on to this back in
October when I came down with a serious case of procrastination from working on
my novel (which is up to 85,000 words, go me). There are new stories almost
every week, and they are all very creative and fun to read. My story prompt
was:
"Water is life. For thousands of years civilization has
clustered along seashores, followed rivers, and huddled around lakes. Water
dominates the surface of our planet. It provides us with food and transportation,
and of course it quenches our thirst…
Go down to the water, find what dark things may lurk there,
and tell us their tale."
So I have to write a story about some kind of body of water.
Awesome. Spending the last 17 years in the land-locked Midwest is finally going
to pay off! But seriously, this was really hard. I’ve seen the ocean maybe a
dozen times in my life, the only river nearby is a joke, and there just aren’t
any good lakes around. Water is not my forte.
So what did I do? I procrastinated and hoped an idea would
come to me. I stuck Fellowship of the Ring in the blu-ray player, and closed my
laptop. Fortunately for me, I picked the right movie. There is a scene near the
end of the film where the fellowship (sans-Gandalf) is riding on boats down a
river, and they come to a pair of absolutely massive statues as the river
passes through a gorge.
So now all I needed was a story. One thing about my writing is that it is heavily influenced by whatever I happen to be reading at the moment. It makes my writing kind of eclectic, but also versatile. I recently finished reading John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, which is a militaryscience fiction/zombie apocalypse mashup (and it’s fucking awesome). And so my
mind immediately jumped to some kind of military story.
So I came up with a pretty good outline for a story and got
to writing. I finished the story at about 3000 words, and it sucked. Hard.
I re-read it to try and figure out what sucked about it.
Most of it was actually pretty good, it was just a terrible ending. Not bad
writing, just a bad ending. Like, worse than The Sopranos ending. So I saved it
as ‘draft 1’ in case I couldn’t come up with anything better by the deadline,
and started thinking of a better ending. It wasn’t working well. For three days
I couldn’t come up with an even slightly better alternative. Sunday night came
and I only had two days to finish, and I had to work 12-hour shifts at my
day-job, so I was pretty much out of time. I sat in front of my computer, and
came up with nothing.
Tuesday came, the deadline was mere hours away, and all I
had done was polished up a garbage ending so that it was a nice, shiny garbage
ending. In desperation, I turned to the internet, hoping to find some
inspiration to save my story. I turned on a podcast I had recently discovered,
Mur Lafferty’s “I Should Be Writing,” and the very first thing she said was
exactly what I needed.
She said she took a workshop that said if you are stuck on
an ending, just write out ten endings. Five will come quickly, three will be
harder, and by the last two, they are going to be very difficult to write. One
of those last two should probably be your ending.
So I opened up my word processor and started just writing
(summaries) of endings. I got the one I had down, and another slightly better
one, and then I was stuck. There really wasn’t anywhere else the story could go. Except, I realized, that was
exactly the problem. My main character didn’t have any choice in how the ending
played out. She was pretty much an active spectator. Nothing she did for the
last thousand words effected the ending at all.
And so I thought about my main character. Was she going to
just sit and let events roll out, or was she going to take charge? Well,
obviously she would take charge. She’s an army officer, after all. And would
she choose to go with the flow and let things play out the way they were? Fuck
no she wouldn’t. She would fight it. And that is exactly what she does. She
fights the inevitable until the inevitable backs the fuck down, and in the
process single-handedly saved my ending.
The point I’m trying to get across is that your character
needs to have a choice. Without being able to effect the story, your character
is really just a prop, and nobody wants to read a story about a prop.
If you want to see how this ended up, go read my story at The Writer’s Arena, and then read Joseph’s, because it’s surely awesome, and
then vote for your favorite. Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it.
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