The story that would not end . . .

And sadly, no, it’s not one of those sweeping epics that keeps on going because I love it so much and want the characters to experience more. It’s a short story. It has a beginning where the characters define themselves by their actions. It has a middle where the central issue/conflict/trouble is revealed and builds in intensity. It should have an end. It deserves to have an end; it’s a good story. It has the beginning of an end, and the middle of an end. It needs to have the end of an end.

It also has all the means to an end. All the characters are on the page and moving. One of the characters is a drunken madman. The other character is his wife. A third character is sleeping in another room. A potential murder weapon is sitting on the table. An open door leads away to safety. The reveal has, more or less, been revealed, but neither of the characters knows what to do about it. The wife has no reason to use the murder weapon. The drunken madman has a reason, but no sparking incident to make him want to use it. And the third, well, the third is a toddler and sleeping; she’s no help.

Is this failure a failure of the story, a failure of the author, or a failure of . . . well, I like things in threes but the inability to come up with a third is certainly the failure of the blogger.

Perhaps any failure of a story can be attributed to the author for getting himself and his characters into this mess in the first place. Did I plan a story that has no outcome? Is it a case where the reveal is what it is, and there’s really nothing that can be said about it after it happens? A failure in planning and plotting, that is. In such cases, the story is sometimes too linear: “Bob drives to the store. Bob arrives at the store. The end.” Or if not too linear, perhaps all the divergent threads have nothing to talk about once they get together at the end, like meeting a college friend after years apart, only to find our lives are either too different or too similar to have any basis for conversation. You sit for an hour over coffee exchanging three-word sentences only to end promising to do it again next time you’re both in town. But you know you won’t.

All of that is much easier and more diverting than addressing what is likely the real problem: my inability to visualize how real people would react in the situation I’ve put them in. What would I do if I were the drunken madman? Any memories of being a drunken madman are quite fuzzy; I can only go by what the police reports say (and the ex-girlfriends still won’t talk to me, so they’re no help). What would I do if I were the wife witnessing a reveal that would surely shock her? She’s in no immediate danger unless drunken madman decides using the murder weapon would be a good idea; she has no reason to leave. A spark that makes him use it would force her to react. Any path that diverges into this woods is equally unsatisfying, and taking the one less traveled will not make the difference. Robert Frost was obviously not a writer (kidding!).

The story behind the story “Milqueshake”

Nulli Para Ora contacted me through the Musa Authors Facebook page a few weeks ago with an idea: provide a writer with a choice of three pictures, one of which the author chooses, then writes—whatever—about it. I’m a sucker for a good writing prompt, and the result was the 500-word flash piece “Milqueshake.”

STOP RIGHT HERE! Go to Nulli’s blog and read it. Don’t worry, it’s probably stupid o’clock in the morning here in Uganda, so I’m asleep and won’t mind the wait. Her blog is here: http://nulliparaora.com/?p=975

[Dreams of magical fairy-tale islands]

Okay, what’d you think? Er, maybe you don’t have to answer that.

I chose the picture I did because it looked like a story in media res; in the act of happening. But what exactly was happening? The shadow of two people kissing. The shadow proved the story was occurring outside. From the hairstyles, I guessed the one standing was a woman. Something about their postures made me think they were older. The woman’s hairstyle reinforced this. It looked as though there was something on the table between them, which could easily be a rack of napkins, straws, mustard and ketchup. Okay then, it was an outside restaurant.

Then I was stumped. I joked with Nulli that I would keep the story under 25,000 words, but replied that I would keep it to 500. I tried to picture what was going on when that picture was taken. The first thing I heard was an air conditioning unit, and tried to put myself in the heads of the two people who heard it. It probably annoyed them. Or, for the sake of the story, it annoyed the woman. What would she say about it? The story started to take form there, and somehow had to go from being annoyed to kissing in 500 words.

The woman in the story, named Mittie now but something else at the time, found no end of things to complain about. Her husband, named Caspar now but something else at the time, tries to soothe his ne’er-be-happy wife by explaining everything she complains about. He was a real milquetoast.

Milquetoast? Hmmm, how can I use this? The word “milquetoast,” since it’s an older reference now, comes from Caspar Milquetoast, the ne’er-be-bold main character of H.T. Webster’s one-panel comic strip “The Timid Soul.” Milquetoast came to mean anyone who was bland and easily pushed around. One of my favorite Milquetoast cartoons is here: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/personal/milquetoast.gif. Hence, the main character of my story became Caspar.

I looked to see what Milquetoat’s wife might have been named, until I realized that Caspar’s actions were very similar to the non-fantasy life of Walter Mitty, the protagonist of the James Thurber classic short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Since Walter’s wife was never named in the original story, Caspar’s wife here became Mittie.

Now, back to the issue of the kissing shadow. How did this picture come to be taken if Mittie is a sour old bitty? Enter a twist ending, a la O Henry with the common man misery of Kurt Vonnegut. How can I make the reality other than it appears? Well, the answer is in the story.

April Nano; no, it's not a teeny tiny April

I'm taking the month of April to do a "Nano," as we sometimes say. What, you are asking, is a Nano?

When I first joined Absolute Write, I heard people talking about their Nano project, and I thought they were talking about a little book, just like how we have nanotechnology, nanometers, etc. Well, they were really talking about about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, which is November every year. During November, participants commit to writing 50,000 words, which is, I guess, a nano-novel (well, at least a centi- or milli-novel). I tried one year and failed miserably, by the way. During other months, however, sometimes people give themselves personal challenges for that month. For April this year, I committed to writing 1000 words per day, or 30,000 in my work in progress (WIP) Nyasaland.

I've heard someone say that there is no such thing as writer's block. (I'd like to know what he thinks it is, then.) The Nano experience has caused me to somewhat believe him, as much as I think this guy's a stuffed shirt. I used to think I had to "have it in me" to write anything. Well, this is how Nyasaland got stuck at 38K words for MONTHS, and how the NaNoWriMo project sat for two years before I dusted it off to become my current shopper to agents, Resingled. For these projects, my computer would sit cold and lonely, a guilting voice in my head saying "they ain't gonna write themselves, you know."

What I'm finding is that sometimes I need to write through the writer's block. Pick a spot in the story and say "I'm going to get my characters to have dinner with a friend." Who cares if it's good? Get writing. Editing might not be the most fun thing, but it's the necessary outcome of writing, and the necessary prerequisite for publishing.

Now, this doesn't mean something's wrong if this doesn't work for you. Sometimes it doesn't work for me. But it works more often than I think it should, works better when it works than I think it should. One of the great things about writing is that if something doesn't work, stop doing it and do something else. When the new thing stops working, stop doing it and do something else. Find what works and make it work for you.