Short Fiction

The 2010 Big Read Adult Writing Contest
Based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
By Mark Twain
The deadline is looming for the 2010 Big Read Adult Writing Contest. In fact, it’s this coming Wednesday, February 10. If you can get your entries in the mail by Wednesday, you could win! Second and Third place winners in each ...category will win gift cards to local bookstores. First place winners in each category will be published in the Post-Dispatch. What are the categories? There is a Theme Writing Category: Write an essay of between 250 and 1,000 words in response to the question: “How do you think the American Childhood has & hasn’t changed since the 1840s?” There is also a Story Writing Category, in which you can enter an original short story in the writing style of Mark Twain. So, spend some quality time with your jumping frog, wax your mustache, and get to writing!
Want more info? Go to
http://www.bigread.net/big_read_big_write.html

In my recent Fiction Writing blog I discussed how poetry is and should be written like a story. I do mean style or word choice when I take this position, but rather the elements of opening, middle, and end and the painting of a picture that can stand on its own like a well written story. The closest fiction that a poem can be identified with is flash fiction. Flash fiction is a very very short story and the best description I have heard is imagine that you pass in front of an open window and hear a conversation. The entire story is from when you first heard the conversation until you walked too far away to hear it anymore.

A poem is the same conceptually speaking, It is a brief moment of time or a brief bridge crossing time and thought presented in picturesque words to describe the theme or thought. It draws on the emotions, the memories, and the imagination of the reader or listener. It is within this seed that the germ of the idea of the poet resides and is planted into the audiences mind to grow and change how that person thinks or sees their world.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the blogs, stories, poems, and articles I write.

It is amazing how things can change—some you can predict even when you try to keep things going as planned and others take you by surprise. Last week I posted a blog entry about my new short story I was going to write. The short story was going to be a Space Western. Well, it is going to be a Space Western. But it is not going to be a short story. Instead, it is going to be what I feared it would be—a novel. Many of my readers probably saw that coming an astronomical unit away.

The surprise change that took me by surprise is the main character. I originally designed Herne to be based on my Welsh part of my ancestry. However, several thoughts have caused this to change. As I was planning to design the “universe” in which the story was set I was thinking about the American Old West. My nation was created through the sweat and tears of many races: there were White cowboys and settlers, Black cowboys (a great number of cowboys were Black—a fact that is often forgotten) and settlers, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Hispanic cowboys and settlers.

As this was on my mind, I had a conversation with a friend about a Mexican comedian she had seen. Part of his routine was about science fiction. He joked, according to her, about Star Wars being an example of the future—“filled with Whites, some Blacks, but where were the Hispanics,” he asked. This statement, as a seed on plowed earth, began to take root. I thought about all of the science fiction I have watched and read. Hispanic characters are rare. So, I have now designed Herne to be of Hispanic descent.

I will soon be starting a new blog dedicated to Herne’s Law, so please watch for it.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information about the novels and blogs that I write.

When does an outlaw become a hero? When the law is written and upheld by those who serve themselves and not the people it is written for. In my Coffee with David blog, I discussed my exploration into the Space Western. This blog is dedicated to the first short story that I have been working on in that subgenre. I have the story idea and have begun to plot it. The only thing I am missing right now is the title. This is unusual for me as I normally come up with the title first and the story pours from that fountain.

Here is the rough story idea: Herne travels to a planet where a friend has settled after the Great War in a peaceful valley raising livestock and a family. Herne is in need of rest from his travels and he is on the run from bounty hunters from his own world—who are out to chase down the Voyageurs (a bread of renegade scouts/rangers). When he arrives at the town nearest his friend’s homestead, Herne can smell trouble. He finds the homestead raided and burned, his friend killed with his wife, their livestock gone, their children missing—perhaps wandering the wilderness on their own, if they managed to escape at all —and enough evidence to point to the warriors of the planet’s indigenous race being responsible for the slaughter. Herne realizes that what he sees is not a true picture and sets off to find his friend’s children and determined to make the real murderers face justice, even if that is a plasma bolt from his gun.

I plan to have this story ready for submission in the spring. If, as the concept looks large, it doesn’t work as a short story—it may turn into a novel.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the blogs, stories, poems, and articles I write.

Growing up as a writer—through the classes I took in high school and college, articles and books, I do not remember ever running across a truth about short fiction writing. In defense of all of those professors and the authors of those books and articles, the subject matter was short story writing and thus must have seemed obvious. After all, if the story is shorter, the plots are less cumbersome and the writing must be tighter than in a novel, it should have appeared to be obvious that the mindset of the author is also different.

I have spent most of my life writing long fiction, only writing short stories for classes during my student days. My mind develops complex (i.e. novel length) plots as second nature. Creating short story plots, keeping the framework so tight is difficult with a novelist mindset. I have wanted to take the story to a point that the style of fiction writing will not support. As a result, my short story writing has been stumbling along like a man who has left a bar after far too many drinks. Sometimes, as with the drunken man, I get lucky and bring the story home. More often, it is on the side of the road sleeping amongst the dumpsters.

As I have been exploring a new sub-genre (see my Coffee With David posting titled “An Argument for the Space Cowboy”) I have been pealing away at the layers of how to write short stories in that genre. The epiphany that should have come more than 20 years ago finally mounted the peak of my stubborn muse and raised a flag declaring “change your mindset.” A short story is a quick story. Get in, get out AND DON’T LOSE the quality of the story.

With this mindset change, I will be conquering new stories and rewriting unpublished ones—taking them to “I will not be a novel anonymous”—and hopefully have more success in this style of writing.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the blogs, stories, poems, and articles I write.