Short Fiction

Many of the people who know me personally call me “the busiest person they know.” Statements like this began an inner quest to understand my drives behind what I do and why I write. I reexamined my priorities and my life long goals. Over the last three months I have not posted anything new on my blogs. Despite my desire to share my writing with others the simple fact is that my number 1 priority is to be a consistently published novelist and a consistently published poet.

When I examined the time I have to actually write per week, I was dismayed to see how little time I have—despite sleeping only 4 to 6 hours a day. Then I looked at my writing production over the last year, including blogs and saw just how over blogged I am. My goal, as I stated above, is to be a consistently published novelist and poet. Yet, most of my writing time was being spent writing blogs and articles for the internet. I was blogging nine different topics a week. That is at least nine hours a week. This may not sound like much to many of my readers. However, with everything I have to juggle in my life, nine hours is often the only amount of time I have in a week to write. Meanwhile I am working on 8 novels and 4 poetry collections. Something had to give.

As such, I am changing my schedule of blogging all together. I will keep my Coffee with David blog, going on a consistent weekly basis. My others will be as I have time or a pressing matter to share.

Thank you for reading and checking this blog from time to time. Please continue to follow me on Coffee With David as I share the “behind the scenes life” of this writer who is determined to reach his goals in life: That goal is to publish 300 novels and 80 poetry collections over the next forty years. I know how insane that may sound, but that is my goal should God let me live that long.

What is it like to be alone? This question takes on different answers depending on the situation of loneliness. Some can feel alone in a crowd—isolated, withdrawn or even threatened. Many enjoy the peace and quiet of being alone, shut up in a room or in the outdoors far from civilization. Others will feel afraid of being in a home or building alone, cut off from anyone. Imagine for a moment that you are alone on the moon; the nearest civilization is on a planet that you see on the horizon. The only sound is the sound of your own breath in your helmet as you walk across the barren land or a distant voice on a radio.

This is the setting for Moon Water, a hard science fiction and a space western story about a man who is trapped on the moon without help and without water. Current scientific evidence shows that the moon has water. Imagine that this knowledge is the only thing keeping you going as you roam the dusty land—but also the foreboding that the water needs to be mined, processed, and purified before it can ever quench your thrust.

Moon Water is a man versus nature story. The history and the fiction written of the old west in the United States is filled with people isolated and running out of water, only to have died not far from a watering hole. There are stories like this in every dessert around the world. Just as the case in these stories, so to is the struggle of man on the new frontier searching for his only hope of survival.

The goal is to have this story ready for submission by May.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for articles, blogs, poetry, and stories I write.

If an author is too long winded in his number of words he generally is too wordy in his imagery. The patterns of light and dark, the colors that the author chooses to show the reader in any story helps define the setting, the characters, and the tone of the story. In novels, the description of a scene can be played out as if a painter is carefully brushing in his colors to blend them naturally and make the portrait whole and complete. The author of the novel cannot waste room on over creating the scene, or he will lose his reader quickly. However, he does have the time and pages to develop it enough that the reader can enjoy the details. In the short story, the author has no such luxury.

By its nature, the short story is much shorter and the use of description must be only as needed. This is not to say that description should not be used in a short story. On the contrary, this is to say that the author has an economy of words—only so many marbles can be used to fill a jar and still be able to screw on the cap. He must be careful with his choice and use of description and dialogue. In order to conserve the amount of words, he can do a number of things:

1. He can use archetypes. If the character is sitting in a chair, the author can easily say he is sitting in a chair. He does not need to go into detail about the chair—the type of wood or metal, if it is an overstuffed leather chair or if it is a barely padded office chair. This does not need to be described unless it is crucial to the plot, the character, or sets the tone of the setting.

2. Use the element of time to create description. Fashion, furniture, technology, transportation has all changed through out the centuries of man’s existence. If you are writing a story set in 1910 or 3010 and want to describe a cruise ship, you do not need to do much to describe the ship. You do not need to go too deep in your description of a lady’s dress or a man’s suit. Your reader should have an image in their mind of what you are describing. It may not fit your exact picture, but unless it is critical that the reader see it exactly as you do it is not important.

3. Conserve your words when creating the setting. You do not need to describe how cramped or cluttered or wide and free something is to use space to describe the image you are creating. Allow the setting to describe the image instead. For example, let us propose that you are writing a short story set in the old west. If you wrote: “The prairie grass was thick and wet. The horse’s hooves squished into the mud as Jack rode between the hills with no town in sight.” You do give a description that can set the tone of for the story. Re-read these sentences for a moment. There were 28 words in those two sentences, that is 28 words that the author cannot use elsewhere in his story.

As an alternative: “Jack rode through the open prairie, the only sound was of hoofs sinking in wet mud.” Notice, the setting space is identical. It is a wet open prairie and Jack is riding a horse. The reader may presume he is a cowboy, but that may be in error and the author can show that soon enough. Read the sentence again. It is 19 words, instead of 28 and creates the same feel and setting as the first one.

The author of a short story only has a certain amount of space in which he can write. While every story should be edited down, dropping unnecessary words, the idea of word conservation should guide the writer in his use of imagery.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more articles, blogs, poetry, and stories that I write.

Regardless if you free write or if a writer take time to write extensive plots for their stories, there are five questions that must be kept in mind as the story is written. These five questions are the basic kernel of all short stories and long fiction, providing the strands of the story web that the author wishes to construct.

1. Who are the story’s protagonist and antagonist?
The protagonist and the antagonist are essential to the writing of any story and give it the beating heart bringing it to life. In a short story, there is not much time to establish the characters background or reason to join in conflict. To reduce the time and words needed to explain this conflict is to make these characters define the other by who they are not. By setting them as mirror images of each other, the author gives them both depth by making each a shadow of the other.

2. Where does the story begin?
Where the story begins is key to drawing the reader into the story world, capturing them and holding on to the reader until the end. In short fiction, the journey from beginning to end may be only 5000 words. Yet, the first 50 words is enough to lose the reader to another story. Does that require the author to start with conflict, or a conversation, or some death defying scene? No. The story should start and grow organically.

3. What are the complications?
A simple story of travelling from point a to point b on a long unbroken path would be boring. Think of the Odyssey: would the story have been such an adventure if Odysseus simply sailed home with no adventures? This can be applied to any story. The breaks in the journey, the hurdles that must be overcome, and the pain from the failures make the success or final defeat all that more emotional for the reader.

4. What is the climax?
There comes a time in any journey when the characters must face each other in a final conflict—winner takes all. Without the climax, what would be the point of the story from the readers’ point of view? The author needs to have an idea of what that climax is going to be. In some cases, this climax is the seed of the story that the author developed around it.

5. What is the resolution?
The author may not have the resolution in mind when they start writing, but the resolution must be fitting and natural to the story. Resolutions can be contrived and may get a laugh in the short term, but will more often be scorned. The resolution may have many twists or turns, but the reader should believe the resolution and the finale of the story.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for the articles, blogs, poetry, and stories that I write.

In novel and novella length stories, the author has time to develop a character and their background over many pages and chapters. In a short story, this process is strapped to a rocket engine. Because of this, many new writers may be tempted to create cookie cutter characters. Before you fall into this trap, take a moment and consider another media—the episodic television show. To be specific, consider the shows that you do not like or those that failed because the characters seemed paper thin. These are the shows where the characters were nothing more than their role, and in this is their path to destruction as a character.

Regardless if the media is a short story or a longer work, the reader wants a character that they can believe in and relate to. To give the reader what they are looking for, character must be four dimensional. The author needs to step past the elements that might make the character three dimensional—someone who looks like a person that could be passed on the street and identified in a picture—and take it to the dimension of time.

Consider again for a moment that you are walking on a busy sidewalk. You stop and see someone who is distinctive passes by. You may never see them again, but they left an impression in your mind for about five minutes. That is your three dimensional character in a story. He or she may leave a short term impression in your reader until they pick up another story. Isn’t that good enough? No. Very important questions have been left unanswered by the author and thus the character is short lived in the readers’ memory.

The questions that are missed all orbit the fourth dimension--the concept of time. How to resolve this as an author is to ask yourself:
1. Who was this character before they came to the story? Give them a background. This background may only be hinted at in your actual story, but its existence acts like a shadow to the character giving it depth.
2. Why is the character here? Why do they exist instead of an alternative? Why were they placed where they were when the story started? Where is the character going if they did not have the events in the story interfere in their life? There is a reason for everything—understand the reason for the events leading up to the beginning so that it can be spliced into the opening of the story and the reader will want to know this character and what has happened to knock them off their “normally scheduled life.” To show that the story was not somehow destiny—at least perceived by the character as such—show that there was an alternative destination.
3. What does the character want and did that change during the story? Even the least ambitious of people have a goal—even if that goal is for their routine not to change so they can sleep the day away. The desire to achieve the goal drives them in the story. When the goal changes to something more significant the author is able to show the character transformed for the better or the worse—and the story has depth.

The difference is in the delivery of the answers. Step back a moment to the busy sidewalk mentioned above. The view of the distinctive person is a metaphor for a character in a short story. You will only see him for a brief moment before he disappears into the city’s crowd. Stop and ask yourself the questions above and try to answer them before the character disappears. If you are able to imagine responses and present them believably to yourself before the person disappears—you are obtaining the ability to do so on paper. This quick paced question and answer is the kernel of defining a character in a short story and will make your characters live past the sip of coffee a reader might take before going on to the next story.

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