Commerce

December 31, 2016December 1, 2017 / kalanleitch / 2 Comments

A guest-post of some unpublished Flash Fiction, by K. Alan. Sample more of his projects here, or develop a strategy for facing rejection.

Everyone could see that Craig had a legitimate reason to complain. He had a reason, and all of his neighbors certainly had one, too. Craig’s family, especially, had fallen upon notoriously hard times.

When the letter came, it was no different for them than for anyone else. Move now, or be rezoned. The city would progress regardless. A generous offer in today’s market, but declining it would do no good. This neighborhood would be redeveloped. The center of commerce was shifting.

Craig wasn’t sure what that meant—that the center of commerce was shifting—so he asked around among the others. His wife, frying bread, said that it meant the shopping district was moving here from downtown, but his neighbors all interpreted it according to their own metaphors. Johnson, a hardware merchant, said that consumers were placing orders more and more online, so that wealthy people no longer minded where they lived. Mercier, on the other hand, spoke from the perspective of a dentist, and claimed that people were willing to drive further, to keep their appointments away from the rush of the city. It was when he spoke to his most respected neighbor, though, that Craig knew they would need to take action.

Brunel, a retired lawyer, told Craig that he and his neighbors were no longer spending enough to be considered the center of commerce.

This outrage set Craig on a crusade around the district, draping his three complaining children with placards, and crossing their patchy lawn to knock on door after door. At first, he was met with an apathy that he could not understand. What was a home to these people? Could nobody else see that spending money was only one factor in a well-rounded life? Didn’t their own stories matter more? With only Craig chasing justice from his city, while his kids trailed behind him chasing monsters on their cellphones, he knew that he would need to modify his approach. He would need to force real change.

Change came on the day he told a story to Mrs. Peters, the retired widow living in the only two-story on his block. He watched his daughter waging a war using her thumbs, and recounted the time, at age four, that she had insisted Craig build his chicken coop to give their beloved birds further to roam. So moved was Mrs. Peters, by this loving tale from her own neighborhood, that she joined Craig’s cause that very day. The others around them had more difficulty ignoring their respected matron—now struggling with the weight of her own placard—but Craig could see that they would need to be similarly moved in order to back him. He would need to tell them more touching stories.

It was only a formality that he had to make those stories up.

He told Johnson a story of his son, who had supposedly insisted upon personally collecting a hammer Craig needed from the store, only to be followed discreetly in the family car. He told Mercier about a made-up holiday evening, when the fireworks had burned with so much more spectacle around and between the tall buildings of the city. And he told Brunel about the fictitious time that his wife had so badly wanted a family vacation that Craig had quietly drawn on a second mortgage to finance it.

It didn’t matter that these were all deceptions; Brunel was so stirred, that he agreed to represent the neighbors in a class-action suit. In Craig’s mind, he had won.

Of course, the victory required some formalities: a hearing, which would never transpire, and a ruling, which a judge would never take the trouble to give. The city, with all of their tax-fed wealth, were too quick to respond with doubled offers, and Craig’s neighbors too quick to forget how moved they had been by his anecdotes about a family so much like his own. They began to vanish in dozens, to spend their profits elsewhere.

Only Craig insisted on keeping his home, and one house was not enough to trouble the city. And so, today—with his children moved out and his wife quietly resenting his most ambitious crusade—Craig wanders his patchy lawn tending to his daughter’s chickens, in the shadows of the cafés and condominiums that surround him. He is, as that letter had threatened he would be, right in the center of commerce.

And his neighbors have a legitimate reason to complain.

3 Electric Ways TV can Defibrillate your Writer’s Block

December 16, 2016December 1, 2017 / kalanleitch / 2 Comments

CPC Guest Contributor, K. Alan.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with television. I dreamed of the day that I could watch my choice of any TV show, at any time I wished. Now, that day has arrived, and I have discovered that it is a classic Chinese Curse: something for which I should never have wished. The temptation to watch the fiction on that electricity-powered device too often distracts me from the fiction I should be writing.

More recently, however, I have managed to use television, film and Internet video to motivate my writing on those days when nothing will flow. Perhaps as an exercise in proving my mother wrong, here are three strategies for using electronic video to shock your Muse back into pumping creativity.

Defibrillate by novelizing: Whether we admit it or not, nearly everyone remembers moments when we were tickled, traumatized or terrified by something we watched in a film. Find that video, by searching online or breaking out your old-school DVDs, and watch some of the scenes that move you two or three times. By providing narrative to describe those scenes, and working the screenplay’sdialogue into it, you may find that you are describing emotions and settings in ways that can be adapted into your own work.
Of course, there is no shame in novelization, even professionally: in fact, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is entirely committed to this work. For us, though, adapting a scene or two into narrative form is meant to more quickly and more simply “grease the wheels” of your own original fiction.
Defibrillate by franchising: A novel franchise is an original story based on characters and situations invented elsewhere. In fact, fanfiction.net features a range of storytelling (some of which is surprisingly good) usually written under a Creative Commons License that prohibits selling the work. Some of your work might even end up there—somewhere in my own files are original Star Trek and Columbo novels—but our purpose today is, again, simply to help with Writers’ Block.
Franchising can help inspire you! By writing an original scene or two featuring your favorite film or series, you are removing some of the cognitive load associated with characterization, setting, and even planning in general. All that’s left is the writing, and the momentum of that writing might open doorways into your own work. Write a scene as though it was missing from your show. Who knows? Maybe it was!
How would Frasier interact with your characters?

Defibrillate a ‘throwaway chapter’ using crossover: Recently, I submitted my NaNoWriMo project, Death Imitates Art, to the Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. This put me under a tight deadline: so tight, in fact, that I knew one day I just didn’t have time to be stuck on a chapter. When my protagonist, Eloise, was conflicted about her mother’s mental illness, I asked myself a simple question: “How would Doctor Frasier Crane explain it to her?”

Within an hour or two, I had completed a chapter featuring Kelsey Grammer’s famed character interacting with mine and explaining how the illness affected Mara. I knew I could never use this chapter—it would be grossly illegal—but the dialogue that it generated in the other characters became some of the most important signposts of my premise. More importantly, once Frasier was gone, I just kept writing.

Of course, your mother was right, as mothers usually are: too much television, or video… or Internet… is damaging not just to our eyes, but to our creativity. If you can tell the difference, though—if you can see that fine line—then the border between inspiration and obsession might be just the place that cures your Writer’s Block.

Unashamed, then, I thank goodness for my TV.

SaveSave

3 Ideas for Narrative Voice

December 8, 2016February 6, 2017 / kalanleitch / Leave a comment

With a deadline approaching, the best I could do for a guest-post from K. Alan was to reblog my thoughts about effective Narrative Voice. I hope some new readers gain some insight from it, and can comment on some of the most effective narrators you have encountered.

Words from K. Alan

voice Fill in the blank, authors.

This post needs comments!

Since my guest-post on The Muffin, where I seek advice about how to achieve the “Strong Female Voice” that so many agents seem to want, I’ve been pondering that question that authors seem to answer differently each time they are asked: what, exactly, is “Voice” in written fiction? It seems that agents want ‘original voices,’ implying that our writing should speak in some wacky or innovative way that’s never been used. Yet, agents also want accurate grammar, and writing that readers can follow easily. There is some contradiction.

Of course, the most interesting stories, particularly novels, tend to feature a variety of characters, so their voices need to identify them in startling, alluring or humorous ways that are still partly predictable. That is a huge challenge, but one for another discussion: for today, let’s narrow our focus to some different types of narrative…

View original post 500 more words

Harnessing the Absurd

December 2, 2016December 1, 2017 / kalanleitch / 4 Comments

A guest-post by K. Alan:

“When authors refer to their own writing, is it metafictional or just silly?”

I’ve become a bit choosy about my metafiction. I find myself wading through piles of recommended readings that are meant to be metafictional, only to find that the author appears in his own story, or pulls it apart at the end sometimes detracting value from the themes.

Even, my own attempt at writing a metafictional short story, Metavoice, ends in a “cheat;” while my protagonist solves a mystery by listening to what the narrator is saying, I couldn’t bear to leave it at that in my ending.

That is, nonetheless, the essence of metafiction: blurring the lines between the readers’ world, and the worlds that we read. It’s the literary equivalent to the theatre breaking down that infamous “fourth wall,” but without the benefit of having an audience right there in the room. Readers need to feel that they are intersecting with a story that is on the page.

It’s ironic that the best example I can use to illustrate has illustrations. One of the earlier entries in a surge of popular metafiction was Grant Morrison’s now-legendary revival of Animal Man, a formerly silly superhero published by DC Comics in the late 1980s.

In Morrison’s graphic novel (dare I say, ‘comic books’?) the protagonist, Buddy Baker, comes home to find his family brutally murdered, and—perhaps like most of us—can not accept this as reality. Consequently, he becomes sensitive to clues that his world is fiction—the heroes never age, nobody ever stammers, bathroom breaks are rare—so he uses his superpowers to break out of the frames surrounding his artwork, and into the studio of Grant Morrison himself. Buddy objects that Morrison has no right to ‘play God’ with his family, so Morrison alters the story to restore them to life… and they all live arbitrarily ever after, with Buddy no longer concerned about the reasons they are alive.

Of course, more went on in the story than this; like any good superhero comic, it is filled with… well, ‘superheroics.’ Those details, however, don’t matter right now. The point is that this was metafiction with a purpose: the reader is forced to question the value we place on free will, and whether we abandon that value at times when we happen to approve of controlling powers. It’s a startling realization that confronts us about our gods and our governments.

Startling realizations are a good reason to use any technique: even metafiction.

Of course, critics have panned literature like this again and again, and, based on my reading, I can see why. Asimov, by his own admission, wrote himself into Murder at the ABA because he needed something fun to get it finished in time. Even respected works, such as Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale trouble me, because readers of the story undo it completely in the epilogue: they step in to make sure that we stop suspending our disbelief.

On the other hand, Amis’ masterpiece, Time’s Arrow, uses metafiction without us realizing it, resulting in a shared value being shaken to its core. He does not do it because it’s ‘cool’ (even though it is) but to amplify the themes of his work. Read it. Read it now.

I think that’s as effective a definition as any of good metafiction: fiction that blurs the lines between realities in order to amplify the themes of a piece. I’m not convinced, however, that 90% of the “metafiction” out there attempts to achieve this.

That reaction makes me very cautious about attempting it myself. I softened the ending of Metavoice because I realised that I’m still waiting for that truly metafictional inspiration to strike.

If you liked K. Alan’s post, leave a comment and as always, I’d love to hear from you; so talk to me. Tell me your story and look for me on Facebook at SheilaMGood, Pinterest, Bloglovin, Twitter@sheilamgood, Contently, and Instagram. You can follow my reviews on Amazon and Goodreads

SaveSave