With the sun already well past its peak in the sky, Albert knew he only had a few hours to finish his project and get back into the safehouse before dark. Autumn’s colors inspired him like no other time of the year did. Green in summer and spring and gray in winter could never quite compete with the myriad colors vying for your attention during autumn. Reds and yellows and oranges, crystal clear blue in the sky, green on evergreens singing counterpoint to the deciduous trees; nature was a magnificent symphony of hues and brisk, clear mornings during summer’s wane. His paintbrush caressed his improvised canvas, globbing on thick mounds of paint, building texture and harmony into his tiny window on how he wished things could be again. At moments like this, he could almost imagine that all the carnage and death of the last 15 months had never happened, that the world was safe and the nighttime didn’t mean doom. But those thoughts could wait. Now he needed only focus on capturing the tapestry of tint before him. Color’s absence in the safehouse was sorely felt. He needed to bring it back with him, even if it was just a little bit.
Posts published in “Writing”
Dear Metropolitan Transit Authority,
I understand that you are currently very busy in Albany trying to fleece New Yorkers for every last nickel and dime in our pockets while cutting service and overall making our lives hell. This is an admirable goal and one of which I am fond. Lining your own pockets through graft and corruption at the expense of hard working people in and around New York City should be your number one concern. Assuming that New York could ever have a public transportation system that was both useful and efficient is far too much. Surely that Herculean task can only be accomplished in such fantastical countries as Germany, France, and Japan. For this you are forgiven.
My specific complaint is regarding a lingering odor in the downtown 23rd St station for the F and V trains. If you walk through the turnstiles and make a right, about 1/3 of the way to the end there is a 15 foot stretch along the tracks where air comes down from the street that smells like shit. And I don’t mean that it just smells bad. It does that, but what I mean is that it actually smells like fucking shit. (Note, I am not referring to the scent raised by copulating with feces, rather I use the word fucking in its pejorative sense to express the intensity of my negative feelings about the smell.) Sometimes the odor resembles horse shit, while at others it’s more reminiscent of toxic human shit. Regardless of its current parfum du jour, it’s quite unpleasant. I do understand that this city is filled with surprising pockets of wretched stench sometimes so overbearing as to cause my eyes to water, but to have to endure the stomach churning stink of excrement every day in the subway after work on my way home is just plain unbearable.
Please rectify this situation.
Sincerely, a distraught rider,
Joe Dillingham.
PS – I don’t forgive you.
This is totally awesome. I definitely know some stories and films with these twists, though I’m not sure “unreliable narrator” is a twist. Unless we’re considering Fight Club or something. Then I guess it works. I particularly like “Indian Legend Ignored”, “Land Assaulted By Ghost Boats”, and “Ancient Druids Lose Interest”. Nothing quite like cynical writers poking fun at themselves.
The whole thing here:
So, I like totally forgot something I wanted to talk about in the previous post. That is, I wanted to discuss my decision to write a short story or to share the beginning of a novel. I can hear your brains saying, “WHAT!?” But let’s talk about this.
In the previous post I quoted Hunter’s creative requirements, but let me put it here again in case you missed it last time.
If you’re a fiction writer, send us 20-25 pages (a short story, the start of a novel, or several short stories that total 20-25 pages). Sending more than 25 pages won’t help your cause.
I have three choices here. First is to write a short story that is between 20 and 25 pages. This seems, to me, to be the least attractive option, mainly because a lot of tweaking and pulling and shoving has to go into something to try and make it between 20 and 25 pages. What if the piece feels good and ready at 18 pages? Do you try and add two pages? What if it’s just barely scraping by at 28? Do you try and take away three pages? With the former example, you could always just add a 5 or 6 page short story and have your total come out to a perfectly acceptable 23 or 24 pages. Then you have the option of letting the work stand as is fits best, without needlessly padding. That is a fairly attractive option. Or maybe you submit four 5 page stories? That’s good too. You can show your breadth. I feel like I’ve got about 47 of those due by the end of the year, so maybe some of those will go toward this purpose.
But what about the latter example, the 28 page story that you would have to seriously cripple to make fit within 20-25? You could always argue that you should be able to remove 3 pages from just about anything and help make it better. But then you’ll find another area that needs to be expanded upon, so there are your three pages back in action again. What to do? Well, you could expand upon the idea even further until it becomes the beginning of a novel or a novella. Then you don’t need to worry about crafting your resolution into a short space. Instead you have the opportunity to focus on doing the best writing you can, which is the whole point, right? Of course you pedantic bastards out there can argue that editing a piece to meet certain constraints is part of the writing process. That’s true, but for the purposes of this application it is better to provide samples of your voice and talent, than your abilities as a copy-editor. That can come later. For now it’s about the writing.
This all got me thinking. What happens in the first 20 to 25 pages of a novel or novella? And you know what I realized? I have no fucking idea at all. That’s not for lack of reading either. I just could not tell you beyond the broadest sense—characters are introduced, settings, maybe a plot thread—what happens. I don’t mean in terms of actual plot, like Dude goes to eat pie and falls down, but in a dramatic structure sense. I suppose we can think of it in the same way as we think of films, that being that the first 20 to 25 pages of a novel or novella is the beginning or whole of the first act, depending on the length of the work. Let’s go back to my film school text book on screenwriting for a definition and description of what happens in the first act.
Act I, the Setup, joins the story at a critical moment. The main character and the premise are introduced. Approximately one-third of the way into Act I, a catalytic event kick-starts the plot or another source of momentum for the story….The First Act ends with a turning point that takes us into the Second Act.
Let’s say that a novel is 250 pages long. Sure. That’s a fine metric. If the first Act is 1/4 of the novel, that’s about 62 pages—way more than 25. Still, the three act structure is a highly restrictive mode, best used only as a guideline for what to start with and how to get your plot moving along. Most novels, and many films, don’t even come close to fitting.
Then what is the best way to understand what happens in the first 20 to 25 pages of a novel? It’s to read the first 20 to 25 pages of well written novels. Duh. My next step is to go back and read the first 20 to 25 pages of a bunch of the books on my book shelf and make note of what happens in each. I will be posting those notes here (probably) as I go along, and for discussion, not that anyone discusses anything here. For me to discuss.
Does anyone have suggestions of books they think have amazing beginnings? I can’t promise that I’ll read them, but I’d love suggestions nevertheless. Here’s an incomplete list of the books on my shelves. See anything there you feel strongly about? Do you like to party? Help a ninja out.