All right, peeps, here’s the first draft of my story. As before, not much editing has been done, so please be forgiving. As you’re reading, please keep the following questions in mind:

• Does any part of it look or sound unnatural to you? Speech, action, whatever?
• Are the characters sufficiently developed? Do they feel “fuzzy” to you?
• Does it make sense? Is there a cohesive narrative, and did you feel you understood what was happening throughout the story?
• Is it predictable? I know this isn’t the most original plot out there, but is it too trite? Did you feel you knew what was going to happen the whole time?
• I have taken some care to add description of the main character’s behavior into the story, in an attempt to make you as the reader feel more a part of him; in his skin, so to speak. Is it too much? Am I drowning the story in banality? Are there too many unnecessary details?
• And finally, did it pass the entertainment test? Were you interested to find out what happened? Did you get bored at any point in the story? Was the pacing too fast? Too slow? Did you, in fact, like it?

When you’re done, if you’re so inclined, please do shoot me an e-mail with your impressions. I’d greatly appreciate it.

So without further ado: A Little Knowledge.

After a week spent living, breathing, eating and sleeping my story, I’ve finally completed a draft. I feel pretty happy right now, but that’s because I haven’t gotten any comments back on it yet. I sent it off to my three editors extraordinaire about an hour and a half ago, and am now waiting on pins and needles for them to get back to me.

This is the first serious prose I’ve ever really written, so I am a bit anxious. I have always known—not to be immodest—that I have the inclination and some small talent for writing. Now is when I find out if I can back up that big talk, if I can tread water with the rest of them. Wish me luck!

PS – No, I’m not going to post the draft. I did, to some extent, write about the draft now just to be mean to you non-editor people. Neener.

will be spent in workshops. That is, we’ll be spending that time reading and discussing our fellow students’ stories. Kind of a scary—but exhilarating—prospect. All other things being equal, I expect that fully half of the student stories we read will stink; and which, moreover, will be irretrievably stinky. And yes, I concede that mine could be one of them. Anyway, for the class, every time we read a story, we’re to compose a letter to the author describing our impressions of the story, and containing our suggestions for improvements—which, the instructor admonished us, are to be specific and helpful, and which, moreover, will have to be copied to the instructor, who will use them to help decide the author’s grade (if they’re taking the class for one). One student suggested that we do it like a sandwich; that is, begin and end with some praise for the story, and leave the bad stuff for the middle. The instructor quite liked that idea, and so that’s how we’re doing it.

But here’s my problem. When you’ve got a terrible story—and we’ve got one this week—how do you find something good to sandwich the bad? I’ve spent all weekend agonizing about this, and am no closer to a solution. When I talked to a friend about my predicament this past weekend, he said I should say something like “You have a very unique voice,” and leave it at that. Ha! He also suggested that I should, in my letter, draw a piece of bread at the top, put in my criticisms, and then draw another piece of bread at the bottom. An amusing idea, to be sure, but not one, alas, that will be any good to me.

Sigh. The things I have to deal with.

my writing class, but this one is my favorite: Steven Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. It takes a very back-to-basics approach that seems both very intuitive and completely revelatory. I’m finding reading it to be a very inspirational experience. And here’s my first revelation:

“But”—you may say—”I don’t even know my story yet.” My answer is: “Of course you don’t know your story yet.” You are the very first person to tell this story ever, anywhere in the whole world, and you cannot know a story until it has been told. First you tell it; then you know it. It is not the other way around. That may sound illogical, but to the narrating mind, it is logic itself. Stories make themselves known, they reveal themselves—even to their tellers—only by being told. You may ask how on earth you can tell a story before you know it. You do that by letting the emerging story tell itself through you. As you tell it, you let the story give you your cues about where it is going to go next. At first, you must feel your way, letting it be your guide. You may eventually be able to plan the whole scope of the work down to its smallest details, as J.K. Rowling is staid to have done with all her Harry Potter books. But in the very first phrase of its creation, any story must be teased out from the shadows of your imagination and unconscious.

<Ted “Theodore” Logan>Whooaaa</Ted “Theodore” Logan>. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you could start with just a glimmer of an idea. I thought you had to have the whole thing outlined out before you even started. You mean I can just…start writing? Excellent.

And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. The first week of class, the instructor assigned us the opening scenes of our stories. I was, to say the least, alarmed. I thought I’d get the chance to ease into it, not be required to jump into the freezing ocean all at once. I had no ideas, no stories I wanted to tell, and I started to panic a little. So I decided to get my mind off it, because, even untrained as I am, I know that panic would bring me no closer to a solution.

I was reading Charlie Huston’s Already Dead at the time, and so I picked it up; I had, in fact, just begun it. Now, Huston, along with Lee Child, is just the sort of writer I’d like to emulate. Clean, immersive writing, great dialogue, addictive plots. And maybe I was unconsciously keeping that in mind when I read that night, because I read a scene near the beginning of that book where the main character is sleeping and gets woken up by a phone call. And boom, I had my idea.

And it was enough to get me through the opening scenes. I had a couple of vague ideas about what would happen after the first two scenes—but not, you understand, the whole story—and I started writing. But then I hit a wall. I wrote myself into a sort of corner. If I went with my original vague idea, the beginning of the story wouldn’t work anymore. It wouldn’t make sense. I had to start seriously thinking about the story, the plot, the structure (the meanings and differences of which terms, by the way, I had not known until I read further in the Koch book):

The way—the only way—to “find” your story is to tell it. Nobody in the whole world has ever before told the story you are about to tell. You yourself have never told it to anyone, not even to yourself. You may have lots of intuitions about what the story is going to be, and you may even have a sort of summary overview of it. These are good and useful things to have; they are fine places to start. They are not enough. Until you actually tell the story, the whole story, it will be nothing but smoke. Moreover, you probably will not tell the story exactly right the first time you try. You’ll make wrong turns, use the wrong key, or use the right key in the wrong door. After all, you have nobody to guide you. If you are like most people, you will have to tell this story more than once—maybe even several times—before you really get it down.

Okay. So I kept writing, tweaking here and there—at that stage I was pretty happy with what I’d actually written; it was just the backstory I had to figure out, to assign motivation to one of the characters—and thinking hard. Then I found it, the thing that would fix my problem, and I had another crutch. Something to get me through the next couple of scenes and into my other vague idea. For a little while, I had clear sailing.

And somewhere in the middle of that writing, the stuff that I had sort of a plan for, everything clicked. I saw the shape of the whole thing, maybe the major turning points, and—this is very important—the final scene. And now I know where I’m going, and, pretty much, how I’m going to get there. The details are still a little sketchy, but that’s okay. The sort of exploratory writing I’ve been doing so far, letting the story do the work, has been working pretty well up till now. May as well stick with it.

read my blog will know that I recently signed up for a creative writing class, and that the first meeting was last Tuesday. That night, the instructor asked us to write the opening scenes of the short story we’ll be working on throughout the class. As promised, I’m going to be blogging my progress on the story, and this is the first post. I’ve completed a draft of the first couple of scenes, and it is posted below. Please note that it is still raw and has only undergone the barest minimum of revision, so read accordingly. Also note that this is the last time I’ll be posting an extensive sample of the actual story until it’s finished; giving away the game in the middle sort of ruins the drama of the final unveiling, don’t you think? Enough yakking already. Here it is (click the “more” link):

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