Mark D. Thomas

You know how when you were in high school, your English teacher would make you read Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (or was that The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne)?  And remember how you hated it when s/he asked you to find the theme of the story, whether it is that love conquers all (or maybe the inequal values of a Puritan society)? The discussions talked about what caused Romeo of the family Montague and Juliet of the family Capulet to ignore the bloody feud of their two families and fall in love, and why they were forced to go to such extreme measures in an effort to be together (and why it all tragically goes wrong for them). Remember that?

That’s what we in the English business call a literary analysis of a story. We look for patterns, we study themes and characters, and perhaps most importantly of all, we look for meaning. What was Shakespeare trying to say by having Romeo and Juliet needlessly commit suicide at the end of the play? What did he mean? And we’d do this for whatever we read. Literary analyses are at the heart of an English career.

Now it does have its uses outside of reading a book. We learn how to do this sort of reading because it helps us read more deeply into things as we grow older and need to understand hidden meanings in our own lives and careers. That’s why we learn to do it in school, because it is a skill that can be applied to many areas of our lives.

But I’m not here today to defend literary analyses. I’m here to talk about a different type of reading, one that gives a totally different perspective on stories and one that is rarely ever taught outside of a writing program, but one that is essential if you are serious about being a writer: reading as a writer.

Reading as a writer isn’t concerned with the “what’s” and “why’s” of a story (nor the “who’s”, “where’s”, or “when’s” for that matter). As writers, what we focus on is the “how’s” of a story. We don’t care what Shakespeare (or Hawthorne) had to say, but rather how he chose to say it. In other words, rather than looking at the literary elements that Shakespeare uses to get his points across, we instead look at the craft he employs to deliver those literary elements.

Broadly, we look at the form of the story. Romeo and Juliet is a play in five acts. Considering the time period, that doesn’t really tell us much, because most of writing then was either poetry or plays. Prose books as we know them just didn’t exist, so choosing to tell the story in play form rather than as a poem tells us that he intended this story for an audience. He wanted the masses to experience it, and since most people then were not educated enough to understand a poem, a play was the next best thing.

If we look at something a little more modern, we can see similar ideas in place. Take Harry Potter for instance. What is the form of the Harry Potter novels? Well, the most obvious pattern is that each book takes place over the course of a single school year. They begin with Harry getting set to go off to school and end with Harry returning home for his summer holidays. Everything that happens to Harry happens within the context of a single school year.

So why might Rowling have made this choice? Consider her intended audience: she wrote these books (initially at least) for a juvenile and YA audience—people to whom the context of a school year makes complete sense. Consider your own childhood, how often do you tell a story of something that happens to you and the story starts with “When I was in 6^th grade…” or “My sophomore year…”? It’s a context that is easy for people to understand that is specifically a child’s context.

As you get older, those stories begin to start, “In my early 30s—I was maybe 31 or 32, or it could have been a bit earlier—perhaps 28 or 29—whatever, it doesn’t matter…”. Not quite as exact, is it? Sure, everything happening to Harry during the school year makes sense from a narrative standpoint, but it is also a calculated choice Rowling made because it is something that kids can easily understand.

Narrowing things down a bit, reading as a writer can teach us much about craft. We don’t care that Harry has to face off against a dragon. What we care about is how Rowling imparts on us the danger that Harry is in. We make note of how she says says “a jet of fire” rather than “the dragon breathed fire” and consider how the choice of words affects our understanding of the scene (Rowling, 2000, p.354). We catalogue every sound, every descriptor, every verb—frankly every word that is written on the page. We read so that we can understand how she gets her point across to us.

Why do we do this? The short answer is to learn. The longer answer is that the more we read and the more that study how other authors write, the more opportunity we give ourselves to refine our own writing style. Maybe we learn new writing techniques that we want to try out (The Unreliable Narrator, anyone?), or perhaps we learn some new words that we didn’t know before. Sometimes it’s just fun to examine the choices an author has made to tell his/her own story and consider how you might have done things differently. The point is that by studying other authors’ craft, we can more easily reflect upon our own and expand it in ways we never considered.

So give it a shot. Next time you sit down to read something, don’t pay attention to what the author has to say; study instead how it is that s/he says it. You never know what you might learn about your own style.

Reference

Rowling, J.K. (2000). Goblet of Fire. New York: Scholastic.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to just get away from it all and spend a long weekend on the Gulf Coast, relaxing in the sun. I’ve been letting my reading slip recently, so I made a vow that I’d try to get through a few books while away for the weekend, and I did just that. One book I was particularly keen to read is called Inexcusable, by Chris Lynch. Full disclosure, in case it’s important to you, Chris Lynch is a friend of mine, as he mentored me while I was working on my MFA a couple years ago, so if you feel like there is some bias here, you might very well be right. But it’s my post, and I can throw my bias around as I please.

So there.

Anyway, I have actually read Inexcusable before, so I suppose I was actually keen to re-read it. The reason I specifically wanted to re-read this book is because of Lynch’s use of the unreliable narrator in it, a construct that we discuss in Week 3 of our class while examining Ryunosuke Atukagawa’s “In a Grove.” Essentially, an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose judgment we readers cannot entirely trust. The full explanation is a lot deeper than that, but let’s leave it at that for our purposes here.

In Inexcusable, something has happened between Keir Sarafian and his wanna-be girlfriend, Gigi Boudakian. Gigi feels that Keir has done something inexcusable, while Keir is adamant that she is just mis-interpreting their situation and his intention. This story is told from Keir’s point-of-view, and he spends most of the 176 pages of the book giving us his “perfectly reasonable” account of recent events to show that he cannot be the person that she is accusing him of being.

At first, Keir is an easy person to like. As he says, he is a “good guy,” and he seems like it. Granted, I become immediately suspicious of somebody when they have to say that they are a good person—only jerks (at best) feel the need to point that out. Still, he does seem to lead a pretty decent life. But as the book progresses, we slowly pick up on the fact that Keir seems to be in denial about his darker side. The boy can only cry wolf so many times before we become skeptical as to his real personality and start to wonder if Keir really did do what Gigi is accusing him of. The climax where his self-deceptions come crumbling down around him is one of the most chilling things I’ve ever read.

Inexcusable is a book that truly centers its suspense on its climax—just like any mystery, once you know how it ends, there’s little need to go back and re-read it. The suspense isn’t there anymore. But the reason I wanted to re-read it was specifically because I knew how it ended up. I knew how the Lynch played with my expectations and reactions, and what I wanted to see was how exactly he did it.

What I didn’t really expect was just how uncomfortable that book is to read when you do know what’s going on. Without Keir’s delusions to color the stuff that he gets involved in, it’s no longer just his final realization that’s hard to read. It is every single thing he does leading up to that moment. There’s no longer that comfortable cushion of plausible deniability to soften the blow of the truly dark things he does. Frankly, it’s very artfully done.

Lynch pulls this off with a two-pronged attack. The first is in Keir’s tone of voice as he talks to us. Even when he is describing some of his most vile actions, he sounds as if he might as well be telling us about his most recent trip to the grocery store. It’s very matter-of-fact, as if there’s nothing that could possibly be wrong with it. The only thing out-of-place is just how often Keir feels the need to remind us of how good of a person he is. And if you don’t believe him, then you can just ask his family and friends. They’d tell you the same thing. That’s a little off-putting, but the rest of his tone is so reasonable, it’s easy to overlook.

The second prong is how each incident is a little worse than the one before, but never really so much more that we start to question things. It’s totally believable that Keir could accidentally injure an opposing football player accidentally, and that person would understand why it was an accident. It’s football; it happens. Next, it’s the “practical joke” that apparently went too far (what, that’s never happened to you before?) followed with the good-natured decorating of the town statue that somehow ended in its destruction. If it started with the vandalism, you might question him, but build slowly to it, and it can seem as if he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With the two approaches together, it helps paint a picture of somebody who can be seen to be a perfectly fine human being, and it just reinforces how powerful an unreliable narrator can be. Lynch gives us a guy whose judgment cannot be trusted and slowly unfolds his untrustworthiness to us through nothing more than Keir’s own observations. In essence, the story here is that Keir isn’t the person he wants us to believe he is.

When done right, this is a powerful approach to telling a story. As a reader, we sort of automatically have to accept what a narrator is telling us as the truth, if only because there’s no other truth to be found. There isn’t another person around who can tell us things from his/her perspective the way there might be if you were interviewing witnesses to a car wreck.

But an unreliable narrator can give you more freedom than a straight narrator can. Sure, you don’t always want your narrator to be unreliable—chances are you rarely want him/her to be unreliable—but if you can pull off an unreliable narrator the way Lynch does in Inexcusable, you can tell one story while seemingly telling another. And when you can play with your audience’s expectations in a way they don’t immediately realize, you have the chance to pull off something very special.

Any sports fans out there? I hope so, because I’m about to write about a sports book. If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you might recall a post I made a while back about my fascination with the short story novel. For reference, that’s a novel that has a single overarching story that is told through a series of individual short stories. It’s a form that I’ve studied, but yet to adequately emulate.

Well, I’m looking at it again, somewhat unexpectedly. A few weeks ago, Ballentine Books released a book by Jack McCallum called Dream Team. Anybody who knows anything about sports has probably guessed that the subject of the book is the 1992 US Men’s Olympic Basketball Team, dubbed “The Dream Team” because it was the first time NBA players were allowed to play in an international competition and starred the greatest collection of basketball talent ever assembled on one team.

I loved the Dream Team, so I was excited when this book finally dropped. Jack McCallum used to be the chief NBA beat writer for Sports Illustrated and covered the Dream Team for SI, and so he had virtually unparalleled access to the team at all times. I hoped for an array of stories I had never heard before to be woven into the tale I already knew about the team that rolled through its competition with an average margin of victory of over forty points per game.

Happily, I got that. But it was the way he told it that interested me, because he did not do what I expected. The natural way to have written this book would be to start at the beginning, telling how the decision came about to allow professionals in the Olympics, proceed through the selection process, talk about how the team did, then discuss it’s legacy. While Dream Team followed that general format, McCallum did not quite tell the tale chronologically.

Rather than adopting a strict narrative, McCallum told the tale through many short stories. He’d pick a topic—often times a specific player at a specific point in time—and tell that story in a few pages before moving onto the next topic. For example, he tells the story of Larry Bird being at the very end of his career and not really being healthy enough to play, but making the team out of respect for his contributions to the sport, follows that up by talking about why Isiah Thomas was left off the team despite being better than most of the players who were chosen, then went on to tell the story of Magic Johnson’s career to that point. Each chapter is its own individual story, and could pretty easily stand on its own as a short bio in a magazine.

Instead, through thirty-six tales, McCallum tells the larger story of the Dream Team as a whole. And just like the fiction novels I’ve read, I loved the format. It’s a neat way to get the story out there without having to commit to a specific narrative. Had McCallum stuck to a more natural narrative, the book might not have worked as well. But because he told it in short stories, he was able to change things up and keep things interesting.

When talking about this style, my recommendations are always Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson and Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman. But Dream Team is a worthy addition to that recommendation list. If you want to write a novel, but are afraid of the commitment to a singular narrative, then it’s worth checking this form out. Give one of these books a try and see what you think

I’m not entirely sure if that title makes sense in the context of what I’m going to say here today, but it sounds good to me.

Now, to the topic at hand, which is an issue that I see a lot in my students’ work, and one that I can never really be sure how to address and help fix. As I am sure you are aware, our class is a creative writing course that focuses on the basics of story structure. To that end, we write prose fiction, as I think that is the most basic form of story telling. It doesn’t require the “fancy writtin’” that we see in poetry and it doesn’t demand a specific form like a screenplay. Sure, there are some basic formatting rules such as how to format dialogue, but in general, we just sit down and write.

But prose fiction is just as particular a form a writing as poetry, or screenplays, or creative nonfiction, or whatever else. It has its own conventions, and it has its own rules for what works and what doesn’t. The problem I see stems from the fact that all the students in this course are enrolled in either the Film or the Digital Cinematography program here at Full Sail, both very visual programs. And as the programs are very visual, so too are the students.

We often hear people complain about movies made from books because stuff gets left out, or gets changed in some fundamental way, and it pisses us off.

“Why is Harry destroying the Elder Wand rather than putting it back in Dumbledore’s grave? That’s dumb!”

“What do you mean Elrond has to show up and give Andruil to Aragorn? Why didn’t he get it back in Rivendell?”

I could go on forever. Often times, the problem lies in the fact that with movies being a visual medium, what works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen. Sometimes things have to be left out or changed because the way something is written is impossible to portray visually (let’s just ignore the fact that my examples above are not prime examples of this and move on). It happens, and we have to deal with it.

But what I see sometimes is the reverse. I have students who have learned much of their storytelling technique through a visual medium and are now struggling to put it down on the page. They see their stories in their heads like a movie, but it doesn’t come out as well as they’d like on the page. Sometimes I see a scene that would probably be pretty badass on screen, but just comes off awkwardly in writing. Sometimes the story reads more like stage direction than action (also sometimes known as telling, rather than showing).

Detail is also something that gets left out. A lot. If I’m filming a scene, I don’t have to worry about detail. It’ll show up on film. But when writing, my readers can’t see the room that I’m “filming.” I have to tell them all about me room so that they can “see” it. It’s not intrinsic knowledge.

The best advice I can give visual storytellers is to read stories and see how other people do it. I can also read their work and point out where I think they need to give us more detail. Sometimes, this is the best advice there is really, but I keep hoping that one of these days I’ll stumble on the magical equation that would clear it up for everybody.

Enlightenment comes to us all someday, right?

So you’ve got an awesome idea for a story in your head, it’s all planned out from beginning-to-end; all you need to do is transfer it from your head to the page in front of you. Simplicity, no?

Well, not always. Sometimes you start getting it out on the page, and suddenly it’s not working the way it did in your head, and you can’t figure out why. We’ve all been there, right? In your head, it’s a great idea, but on the page it is a mess. Have you had this happen to you? I know it’s happened to me plenty of times.

So I wanted to share a neat little writing exercise that I like to try in these situations: changing the point-of-view character. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to change the protagonist of your story; you just need to change who is telling the story.

So, let’s say you are writing a first-person account where your protagonist (Jill) is having a fight with her good friend (Jack). But you are really getting into the meat of the fight and you find something isn’t ringing true. The cuts and jibes seem hollow and directionless because suddenly the purpose of the fight isn’t clear, and you can’t figure out why that is. It’s clear in your head; why isn’t it clear on the page?

Well, try writing that scene from Jack’s perspective—keep it first-person, but now it’s Jack’s head we’re in, not Jill. What could you learn from this? You might be surprised, but you could learn a lot from this. One of the things you might learn is that maybe you don’t know Jack as well as you think you do, and when forced to directly confront and relate with his issues, you realize you don’t know what they are.

Maybe you learn Jack isn’t the person you thought he was.

Maybe you discover that he’s actually the one in the right in this argument, and you are getting stuck because you’ve been on Jill’s side this whole time.

But what if you wrote the story from the perspective of another patron of the restaurant where the argument is taking place? What could you learn then? What sort of details might come out that you missed before?

None of this says that you have to stick with the new perspective. There’s probably a reason you originally chose to write the story from Jill’s perspective, and there’s a good chance it’s the right choice. But writing this scene from different perspectives will give you a different look at the scene, which in turn will allow you to see details and aspects of the scene that you might have missed before—things that will only help make your scene or story better.

So the next time you are stuck on your story, give this a try. You might be surprised at what you learn.

On casual observation of student’s work, it seems that first-person point-of-view is the perspective that comes most easily to the beginning writer. It’s not that it is easier or better than third-person, but that it is more a natural perspective, I think. It’s personal, and we’re used to telling stories about ourselves, so it comes to people more readily than third.

The problem with first-person, though, is that description of the narrator is that much more difficult because we have to rely on self-observations. Telling stories from first-person might be more natural, but how often do we make observations about ourselves. I mean, what’s to observe? We’re all perfect, right?

Well, that’s what we like to think.

Anyway, back to the point—getting to know the narrator in a first-person account can be difficult. In third-person, the narrator can give us all sorts of physical and emotional descriptions of characters, but the first-person narrator has to turn those observations in on him/herself. And that’s not as easy as it seems. Sometimes we take shortcuts such as the narrator observing him/herself in a mirror or something. That can be useful, if not slightly obvious. But still, it is better than the alternative, which is avoiding the description all together. Unfortunately, I see this all too often.

Sometimes, you can get away with this lack of information. Either it works as part of the construct of the story, or it just doesn’t matter too much. But often, lacking those details will hurt your characterization and plotting. Not to be obvious, but I will: the problem with missing these details is that it leaves it entirely up to the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. As I said, sometimes this is fine; most times it is not.

If there is no indication otherwise, a reader will naturally and automatically assign the narrator/main character with whatever attributes he/she knows about the author. Sometimes, all that is known is a name, but an author’s name alone can often give all sorts of wrong information about a main character. For example, I find that I often write in first-person when my protagonist is female (for the record, my male protagonists usually get the third-person treatment). Can you see a potential issue if I write a story in first-person with a female protagonist if I don’t make it immediately clear that she is, in fact, female?

If you said that my readers would likely see this person as a male, then give yourself a cookie, because that is what would happen. But I see this all the time: I’m reading a first-person story I ostensibly think is about a man, only to find out late in the proceedings that he is actually a she (or vice-versa). It may come as a surprise, but changing a character’s gender can dramatically impact both the way a story plays out and the way a reader reacts to it.

So if you find yourself writing a story in first-person, be sure to be aware what details you are revealing about your narrator/protagonist. You might find that the details you see in your head are not showing up on the page. And if they aren’t on the page, then your story is probably suffering.

You know what I hate? Trying to re-establish a groove after it’s been interrupted. A month ago, I was exercising daily, reading plenty of new things, and even working on my novel on a semi-regular basis. Then I went to Scotland for a week, and my life has been one long excuse since then:

“I’m tired.”

“I can’t seem to concentrate.”

“I’ve got too many other things to do.”

“I’ve got to clear off the DVR because it’s full.”

“Video games/TV sounds way more interesting.”

And, of course, the old standby: “I just don’t feel like it.”

The problem is that these excuses can become habit forming. I’m tired because I keep telling myself that I am. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I keep wishing I was still in Scotland, wandering the highlands with delight. I’m sure you’ve been in similar situations at times in your life. So the question becomes:

“How do I break myself out of this rut?”

Unfortunately, there’s no specific answer to this. Some people will say you should write a note to yourself and stick it to your monitor so that you see it every time you sit down at the computer. A variation of this is to put a reminder into your phone and have it beep at you when it’s time to write.

Or you can give yourself rewards for sticking to it. Maybe if you write for an hour, you allow yourself to blow off a few hours playing video games or watching TV. Maybe you give yourself one of your favorite snacks.

You could even enlist the aid of friends to help you get back on track. Maybe they incessantly remind you, or won’t let you get up until you’ve done a certain amount of work. Regardless of your plan, it ultimately involves you tricking yourself into getting back to work. Once you do, it’s not so hard.

For myself, I basically just have to bully myself. I’m naturally a bit lazy, so it’s not hard for me to come up with excuses at the best of time. Fortunately (unfortunately?), I’m also cursed with a conscience that makes me hate myself when I’m putting off something that I should be doing. Eventually, the guilt gets too strong and I get back to it.

And now that I’ve bullied myself into this blog post, I’ll hopefully use this momentum to get myself back into the groove. The alternative is too depressing to me. On the other hand, Scotland is nice this time of year…

What are your favorite methods for getting back to it?

If you read my post from last week, you’d know that I’ve been struggling to read Hunger Games. I was a bit vague on details because I was vague on why I felt such malaise from it. Well, this weekend, I sat down with the mission to complete it, and I did. The good news is that once the story gets moving, it’s a decent book. The bad news is that I have figured out the malaise, and it permeates the entire novel.

The problem surrounds our protagonist, Katniss Everdeen. Thanks to a series of tragedies in her life, Katniss is an emotionally withdrawn young woman, who views the world around her with a certain disconnect. The only person she has any strong feelings for is her younger sister, Prim, whom she loves unconditionally (which is why she doesn’t hesitate to volunteer to take Prim’s place in the Hunger Games). Otherwise, she has a cold detachment to everything and everybody.

On the surface, it is an interesting decision. Take a cold person, and put her in a situation where detachment helps rather than hinders, and lets watch her grow emotionally as the stakes increase. It’s a good idea for a story, and it plays out pretty well here (if predictably). Everything that Katniss does is pretty believable and stays true to her character. Though I struggled with her initially, I ultimately came to really like her as a character and protagonist. She is a very strong choice.

The problems I have, though, stems from the fact that this story is told entirely from Katniss’s point-of-view. A first-person narrative, everything that happens in this story is colored by the lack-of-emotion that governs everything that Katniss does, and it ruins every effect that Suzanne Collins was trying to find. If I were to use an art metaphor, a good story should be multicolored filled with every brilliant hue of the spectrum; Katniss’s personality makes Hunger Games a shade of grey.

It isn’t that the story becomes boring (far from it), but more that it sucks any of the feeling from the story. We are supposed to feel outrage and fear over the Hunger Games: outrage because how can any society force young people (some barely more than children) to fight to the death purely for amusement? And fear because we are supposed to connect with Katniss and want her (and, to a lesser extent, Peeta—the other entrant from District 12) to survive and come out the other side a better person than she went in, possibly changing the system along the way. But while Katniss hates the system, the stoic way in which she accepts her destiny and probable oncoming death robs us, the readers, from any emotional connection we might want to make with her.

The same impassivity hangs over everything else too. An “us-vs-them” dynamic is setup between the “Careers” (children raised in the rich districts and trained specifically to fight in the Hunger Games) and everybody else, but because Katniss is a loner, we never get to actually spend any time with them and learn to hate them. We’re supposed to just accept that Cato is a jerk who’s had it out for her from the moment they met because she says so and not for any specific reason we’ve seen. Sure, he has his moments of brutality, but there aren’t many of them, and they aren’t directed at her specifically, so why are we supposed to just accept her intuition?

I could harp on some other things, such as the obvious Deus Ex Machina ploy of sponsors being able to get Katniss exactly what she needs exactly when she needs it, or her constant awareness that everything she does is being broadcast on TV and her constant playing along to it. But frankly, those are things I could have lived with if there was any emotion in the story.

For me, Hunger Games would work much better as a third-person narrative. It could be kept close to Katniss, but then there’d be more opportunity to divulge details that Katniss might not be able to notice (people talking behind her back, directed anger, etc.). First-person is a terrific perspective for really connecting with the protagonist on an emotional level, but Katniss is so anti-emotion that those benefits are lost. Even the few times she does show emotion don’t resonate because of how disconnected she is from everybody else.

But pull away from her a little bit, and the opportunity opens up to relate to us the horror of the Hunger Games, the outright oppression from those in charge in the Capitol to those in the Districts, and the unbelievable danger Katniss is in both during and after the Games. It would give us more of an opportunity to connect to this person who is otherwise unconnectable.

Long story short—Katniss Everdeen is a fascinating protagonist, but she is not the person I’d choose to tell her story.

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but there’s apparently a Hunger Games movie coming out this weekend. I know everybody around me can’t wait to go check it out. In terms of hype, it looks like it might be the spiritual successor to Harry Potter and Twilight. It’s a testament to the commercial viability of children’s and young adult literature, actually. That’s a topic for another time, but it’s something to think about for all you burgeoning writers out there.

Whenever a movie comes out that is based upon a book, I try to read the book before I watch the movie. If I don’t, I find my impressions and opinions tainted by the interpretations of the director and actors. To this day, my internal vision of the early Harry Potter books is entirely based on the movies as I saw The Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets movies before I read any of the books. And as much as I like Harry Potter, I feel like I am missing out a bit because I don’t have my “own” vision of it to work from.

So with me likely seeing Hunger Games sometime in the first week of release, I have tried to sit down with the book a few times in the past few days. And every time I do, all I can think of is a lesson I learned early on in my writing days: the opening to your story needs to be just as strong, if not stronger, then everything else in the story. This is just as important for short stories as it is for novels, and the same rule applies for essays, memoirs, poetry, or any other form of writing. Your beginning has to hook the reader.

So why is this important? Consider this—how quickly do you decide whether you are enjoying a movie or a book? If you stop and analyze your reading/watching patterns, you will likely realize that by the time you are done with the first page or scene, you have a general feel for the story and how you are going to approach it. That doesn’t mean your opinion can’t be changed of the course of it, but rather that your approach will be dictated. If you enjoy the opening scene, you open up and are more willing to enjoy the whole experience. If you don’t, the rest of the story has to work that much harder to bring you over. And worse, if you don’t enjoy it enough, you may not even bother finishing it.

I’ve been thinking this because, as I said two paragraphs ago, I’ve been trying to read Hunger Games ahead of the movie’s release this weekend. Here’s the problem—I can’t get past the first chapter. It’s set in a dystopian future after the collapse of the United States and looks to ultimately be about a heroic rebellion against an oppressive state. I tend to enjoy those sorts of stories, and I love good young adult literature, so it seems I should enjoy Hunger Games.

But so far, I have found the writing to be bland and lifeless. The setting doesn’t “pop” and the characters are dull and emotionless. I have been told that it gets better as it goes along, and maybe it does, but I have so far been uninspired to continue on with it. I just don’t feel a grand, fantasy adventure coming out of it (which is the point of fantasy, right?). With the movie coming out in just a few days, I am resigned to this point to seeing the movie before I finish the novel. I just can’t see myself working up the gumption to read it by the end of the week, so much like Harry Potter, my experience will be tainted should I ever decide to read it.

So when you sit down to write your next great story, take a good hard look at the way it starts. Obviously different readers have different tastes, but you need to work your hardest to make sure that the opening to your story sets the right tone and brings your audience in. Otherwise, you might lose them and they’ll never read it, regardless of how good it becomes.

The short story is a form that I have had a love-hate relationship with since I started writing seriously. It is a form that I comfortably work in—I “get” short story—but I think my general affinity for the form is part of the reason that I struggle with writing a novel. By the very nature of their respective lengths, approaching a short story takes a different mindset to approaching a novel.

But that’s a story for another time. It isn’t important to our purposes here today (I keep telling myself that because I like to live in denial).

What I want to talk about is a form that I was reminded of this past weekend and one that I work with here and there when I put my novel aside in frustration: the short story novel. See, over the weekend, I decided to watch Diamond Daydreams, an anime that I have not watched in quite a few years. And though it is visual, it has the same structure as a short story novel.

Rather than one specific narrative, Diamond Daydreams tells the individual stories of six different young women living in Hokkaido who have each reached a crossroads in their respective lives, one which their decisions will affect the way the rest of their lives play out. Each story gets two episodes to play out, and they are only tangentially related to one another. However, when put together, they all tell an overall story of life in Hokkaido. In other words, a larger story is told through the telling of shorter ones.

I was first introduced to the short story novel a few years ago when I read Seedfolks, by Paul Fleishman. Seedfolks is the story of a neighborhood in one of the rougher parts of Cleveland, OH coming together around the development of an empty lot into a community garden. Each story is only a couple pages long, and are from the point-of-view of a completely different character. Each character has his or her own issues, but in solving them, s/he ends up adding to the garden growing beneath their windows. But like Diamond Daydreams, a bigger story (the multi-ethnic community coming together) is told through a number of smaller ones (each person has a life issue that needs solving).

I then went on to read Winesburg, OH by Sherwood Anderson and Whitechurch by Chris Lynch, which both utilized the form well, too. In the case of Whitechurch, each story was from the perspective of the same character, but like the rest, we learn about the town of Whitechurch and about the life of our three main characters (Oakley, Pauley, and Lilly) through these smaller stories. So the form is the same even if the approach is a bit different.

I think it’s easy to look at a short story as a form that doesn’t need the sort of preparation that a novel needs. But the reality is that the world of a short story needs to be just as real as the world of a novel, otherwise nobody will accept the validity of the story. And if a reader doesn’t accept the validity of your story, your story has failed.

Often, a short story is just a smaller part of a larger one—we are given just enough to be able to perceive the parts we are missing. What a novel like Whitechurch or an anime like Diamond Daydreams does is show us how much is often going on in the periphery of the story we are focusing on. While Karin (Diamond Daydreams) is struggling with the fear of surgery, Kyoko is dealing with the pressure of being a promising, young filmmaker while trying to find the magic again. While Lilly is doing everything she can to escape Whitechurch and make something of her life, Oakley is stuck digging himself deeper in his dead-end hometown.

What’s important when we sit down to write a short story is that we understand everything that is going on around our characters and how much potential there is in just those few pages. Everybody has a story to tell, even that random, unassuming guy in the back of coffee shop sipping his coffee and reading the paper. If he’s important enough to be noticed, then he has a story to tell. Whether you tell that story or not is unimportant—what’s important is that you understand that he is just as real as the protagonist we are spending six thousand words with. And who knows, if you do decide to explore that unassuming guy in the back of the coffee shop, you might just find a novel.