Category: Writing

IWSG, August 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

What is your favorite writing craft book? Think of a book that every time you read it you learn something or you are inspired to write or try the new technique. And why?

I don’t know that I have a favorite writing craft book. I’ve read so many over the years that it’s hard to say which one offered which piece of advice. And advice which was useful twenty or thirty years ago is not necessarily advice which is useful now, either because I have fully internalized it, or because I decided it wasn’t right for me at that time.

Leaving aside textbooks and style guides like Strunk and White, my first advice book was Natalie Goldberg‘s Writing Down the Bones. That was probably in 1989 or 1990, so I don’t remember much of it, other than that it (along with pressure from my Russian Studies professors) encouraged me to begin keeping a journal, a practice which I have continued to this day.

The most recent advice book I have read is Chuck Wendig‘s Damn Fine Story, which broke down story structure in a way which I had not seen before. Unfortunately I haven’t done much prose writing since completing this book, so I couldn’t say if it is useful to me, though it was a lot of fun to read.

Over the years I have of course read a great many advice books. Stephen King‘s On Writing, Tobias Buckell‘s It’s All Just a Draft, Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Steering the Craft, and I am sure many others which I am not thinking of at the moment.

I think I learn more about the writing craft from exposure and imitation than from studying. “Reading well”, as Dr. Karen Lord advises, is for me the single most indispensable piece of advice for my craft. The books I love, the authors whose poetry and prose I most admire, are the best available writing inspiration.

But imitation by itself is not enough, despite Hunter S. Thompson‘s practice of typing out books by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, word by word, in order to better understand how they wrote. Reading and re-reading my favorite authors gives me the tools to parrot their style, but doing so does not necessarily allow me to understand why their words work as well as they do. That is where books of writing advice can be vital. Books on the writing craft allow us to decipher why something works and, more importantly, why other things do not.

I don’t want to be the next Roger Zelazny. I want to be the first (or at least current) John Winkelman.

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New Old Story

John Winkelman

Back in 2013 I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the first time. My project was a science fiction murder mystery set in and around a twenty kilometer tall tower located in the Gabon Estuary near Libreville. It was a fun exercise and I learned a lot about writing, but there were many (in hindsight) problematic aspects to the story and I have not done much with it since.

In 2014, as Caffeinated Press was starting up, the editor in chief approached the members of the writing group which had spawned the press and announced an open call for stories for an inaugural anthology. I wrote “Hvalur,” a 9,900 word prequel story to the 2013 NaNoWriMo project, and it was accepted and published in Brewed Awakenings I.

Since then, Caffeinated Press has gone out of business and the rights to the story have reverted to me. Rather than consign “Hvalur” to the long-tail limbo of Amazon.com’s back shelves I decided to put it up here on my website where it can be read for free. Aside from some minor line edits, this is the version which appeared in the anthology.

“Hvalur” is the first of what will eventually be a large collection of my writing which I will release publicly. If I get positive feedback I might even set up a Patreon account.

Click here to read “Hvalur.”

 

Flash Fiction: A Cup of Coffee

John Winkelman

I wrote this scene at the Lost Lake Writer’s Retreat in early October of 2017. I forget the writing prompt. Maybe “Where were you?”

I was standing in line at the cafe with foggy glasses and a too-warm coat. The air was humid and thick with the smell of coffee and hair product, and Torani syrup so potent that I could taste the drinks as people walked past me out the door.

From the corner, over the top of the low conversations came a loud “Where the hell have you been?” I looked around but couldn’t see anything. Everyone in line hunched their shoulders and focused more intently on their phones.

Behind me I heard a low “…shit.” The line moved forward and another cloud of Torani walked out the door.

“I’ve been here for half an hour. Waiting! We said three thirty!”

I took off my glasses so I could see. The dude behind me was a pale, sweaty blur. He shrugged, “The roads were…”

“I don‘t care about the roads! You’re late!”

All around us shoulder hunched and heads ducked and phones were fiddled with, fiercely. I squinted into the corner.

I could feel fierce attention land on me. “What the hell are you looking at?”

“I’m, uh, nothing!” I made a show of putting on my still-foggy glasses, and shrugged.

The line moved forward slowly. When I got my coffee I debated staying to watch the show, or leaving and enjoying the slush and salt spray of Lake Drive. The dude walked past me to the corner, a cup in each hand.

She started again. “Were you seeing Her?”

“I was working.”

“Work is five minutes from here. You’re half an hour late!”

“The roads…”

“I don’t care about the goddamn roads!”

All around us the vicarious dread had turned into morbid curiosity and everyone was staring into the corner.

He tried again. “I’m not seeing…”

“Half an hour! Where…”

“Hey! Indoor voice!” This was the barista. She was a singer in a local ska band and her voice could cut glass.

The dude shrugged helplessly, “We were just…”

“Pack it in, or take it outside!”

The woman snarled, “Fine!”

My glasses had finally cleared. I recognized the dude. He lived at the end of my street. I had seen his girlfriend around sometimes, and heard her more often, usually yelling at him. To be fair, she wasn’t the only woman I had seen at his house lately. I’d called the cops on them once after a particularly energetic argument. That was when I started spending time in the cafe.

I called across the room, “Hey Sean, is she talking about the blonde with the purple highlights or the one with the black mohawk? Or the one that’s still in high school?”

He flinched and glared at me. “What the hell dude? Mind your own business!”

“I came here to get away from you idiots. Keep your drama to yourself.”

His girlfriend blinked at me, then at him, and stood up. She brushed past him hard enough to spill his coffee and walked out the front door of the cafe. He glared at me for another moment, then followed her out the door.

Now everyone was looking at me. The barista smirked and gestured toward the door with her head.

I pulled a twenty from my wallet and dropped it in the tip jar. “Sorry about that.”

Outside the air was cold and clean and smelled like snow.

Flash Fiction: Luck, or Something Like It

John Winkelman

“Luck, or Something Like It” is a flash fiction inspired by the prompt “Luck” from Chuck Wendig over at Terrible Minds. This scene immediately follows my previous story “Looking At Ourselves“.

Professor Smith dusted off his jacket and looked around. The room in which he suddenly found himself was huge, with no walls, and a suggestion of a ceiling far overhead, but that could also have been low cloud cover. The space was quite crowded. The floor was uneven and seemed to be made of stone, and he changed his assessment from “room” to “cave”.

“Smith!” he heard a voice yelling nearby. “Smith! Where are you?”

Smith smiled and waved. Professor Lin shouldered her way through a crowd of young people, who Smith vaguely recognized as his neighbors.

“Lin! Over here!” yelled Smith.

Lin made her way carefully to Smith, glancing down at the floor.

“Did we…” said Lin.

“I think so,” said Smith.

“Then we’re in…” said Lin

“Good question,” said Smith. “Not heaven certainly. I recognize some of my students.”

“And not hell,” said Lin. “I see my doorman, Jerry.”

“Good man, was he?” said Smith.

“One of the very best.” said Lin. “He died a little over a month ago.”

“Ahead of the crowd, as it were. So. Purgatory?”

“Perhaps,” said Lin, and raised a hand “Jerry! Halloo! Over here!”

And elderly man, with a bald head and bushy moustache, wandered over to join the two academics. Lin took one of his hands.

“Jerry! It is so good to see you again!”

“Doctor Lin! Likewise.” The corners of Jerry’s moustache drew up into a smile. “Kind of crowded here, all of a sudden.”

“The meteor hit,” said Smith, and offered a hand. “Smith. A pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise,” said Jerry. “Doctor Lin mentioned you from time to time.”

“Positively, I hope!” said Smith. “Lin tells me you’ve been here for a little while. Where is ‘here’, exactly?”

Jerry snorted. “The Bardo, they tell me. We’re all biding our time before we head back to the world. People popping in and out all over the place.”

Lin frowned. “The Bardo, eh? So we’re between lives?”

“Sounds about right,” said Jerry. “I’m Baptist myself, or I was. This whole reincarnation thing is taking a while to wrap my head around.”

“The Bardo! We’re in luck!” said Smith. “Another go at getting things right.”

Lin frowned. “Maybe not. If we are waiting here for our turn at reincarnation…”

Smith’s face fell. “And the world was just destroyed…”

“See, this is why I was happy being a Baptist,” said Jerry. “We only had to worry about our souls once.”

“And we’re sure this is the Bardo?” said Lin.

“Sure as I’m standing here.” said Jerry. “There’s some folks in yellow robes seem to have it all figured out. I never even heard of the place before my heart attack.”

“Er, what happens if we’re supposed to reincarnate and there are no, er, vessels?”

“Beats me,” said Jerry. “I don’t know who’s really in ch-” He abruptly vanished with a small “pop”.

Lin and Smith stared at the empty space, then at each other.

“Maybe he came back as a microbe?” said Smith.

“I’m not sure it works that way,” said Lin. “Maybe reincarnation isn’t bound to one planet.”

“You’re saying he just went back as an alien something?”

“Perhaps,” said Lin. “Buddhism is bound to one planet. That doesn’t mean that the thing Buddhism points toward is also bound to one planet.”

“Nonsense,” said Smith. “If that is the case, where are all the aliens? All I see are a lot of people.”

“Do you see any animals?” said Lin. “Any birds or insects or anything like that?”

Smith looked around. “No, now that you mention it.”

“Maybe they have their own room. Er, cave. Space?”

“Afterlife.”

“But it’s not really ‘after’,” said Lin.

“Intermission?”

“That works. Let’s walk around.”

Smith smiled and offered his arm. Lin hooked hers through his, and they set off through the crowd. After a while Smith said, “I don’t feel like we’re making progress.”

“And I’m not exactly sure how long we’ve been here. The Book of the Dead says forty days, but who is to say if time works here the way it works—worked—back home.”

“It makes sense that it doesn’t,” said Smith. “Space certainly doesn’t.”

“So we don’t know exactly when we’ll head off to the next place.”

“Interesting phrasing,” said Smith. “If space has come unbound, then perhaps time has too. Maybe we stay on the same planet, but we go back to, well, whenever. The 1800s. Or the time of the dinosaurs.”

“Or two billion years from now, when the planet reforms and life begins anew.”

“And wouldn’t that be strange,” said Smith. “No different from being on an alien planet.”

“So in the end we know where we came from, but not where we are—”

“The Bardo,” said Smith.

“But that doesn’t really explain anything,” said Lin. “As I was saying, we’re not sure where we are, and we certainly don’t know where we’re going.”

“So we just have to trust in a higher power?” said Smith.

“Or a lower one.” said Lin.

“That doesn’t sound encouraging,” said Smith. “Maybe Dante—”

“Not lower as in infernal,” snapped Lin. “Lower as in intrinsic. A more basic function of the universe. Not consciously directed by some external agent.”

“A deeper octave of a fractal?” said Smith.

“Yes!” said Lin, squeezing Smith’s arm. “The little details are reflected in the larger picture.”

“So at some level it is all determinism,” said Smith. He sighed and shook his head.

“At some level, perhaps.” said Lin. “But at this level, it could all be luck. Maybe it’s all down to timing. I died at a slightly different microsecond than you did. I come back as a furry critter new Alpha Centauri, or something, and you come back as a polyp in an ocean near Betelgeuse.”

“And there’s a line vessels in the universe waiting for a line of souls. Interesting idea!”

“Time and good behavior,” said Smith.

“Right place, right time, and the Eightfold Path.”

“Ten is a nice round number,” said Smith. “Am I imagining things, or is the crowd thinning out a bit?”

“Seems to be,” said Lin, “Though it could be Brownian motion distributing everyone more evenly in this space.”

Smith squinted into the distance. “No, people are definitely leaving. Seems to be picking up pace, too.”

“I guess this is goodbye again,” said Lin.

“And no terrible vodka this time,” said Smith.

Lin smiled. Smith vanished with a small pop. Lin closed her eyes as a wave of vertigo washed through her, and reopened them to something completely unexpected.

Flash Fiction: Looking At Ourselves

John Winkelman

“Looking At Ourselves” is a flash fiction inspired by the prompt “New life” from Chuck Wendig over at Terrible Minds.

“That’s the fundamental issue,” said Doctor Smith. “Life is a continuum. Any divisions you make are simply arbitrary.”

“Be that as it may,” said Doctor Lin, “The momentum can be shifted. The life you live before having children is not the same as the life after children, for example.”

“The child’s life certainly changes.”

Lin snorted. “Well said! But from that point forward, whether the child has agency or no, it is all one life.”

“Swapping out universes might make it new,” said Smith. “An utter change in context, however similar the new universe might be.”

“Life as the interaction between the one living and the environment in which it lives,” mused Lin. “That is an interesting proposition. Quantum theory states that at any decision point the universe bifurcates, and the one with the alternate decision recedes into the multiversal distance.”

“I find that thought alienating,” said Smith. “That means the first time we make a decision we irrevocable lose the people who existed with us at the moment of our birth. All we are left with is close approximations.”

“That also raises a question,” said Lin. “Assume—and this I grant is an odd one—assume that somehow the choices at whatever level—quantum, nano, gross, and so forth—were structured in such a way that a population of people would stay in the same quantum reality for an extended period of time. Through sheer happenstance, of course, since how could we possibly do such a thing on purpose? Would we notice when the split finally occurred?”

“Interesting. We can’t perceive the universe at a level where such changes take place. Does that mean that we chart a path through the multiverse, or is it the multiverse which moves on a path through us.”

“The medium really is the message?” said Lin. “McLuhan must be jumping for joy in his grave.”

Smith frowned and stared at the bottle between them. “Through the bifurcations of the universe, no matter the location and cause of the incident of bifurcation, we exist. We have memory and agency.”

“Determinism says…” began Lin.

“Determinism is a fool’s game!” snapped Smith. “If we choose to believe in determinism it is no different than being predestined to believe in free will.”

Lin gave Smith a wounded look. “I was only going to say that determinism dictates that each state of the universe is predicated upon the preceding state.”

“And indeterminism says that, though A and B are fixed, there are myriad paths between the two.”

“Bringing James into the conversation?” said Lin. “I think we need more bourbon than this!”

Smith chuckled. “Apologies. The idea of a locked universe presupposes that we operate on a level where we can perceive the mechanism of the locking.”

“True,” said Lin. “But we do seem to have edged closer to that state every year.”

“And what a time of miracles and monsters that would have been,” said Smith, “When we could see the fundamental mechanisms of change. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, weaponized.”

The two were silent for a time, as the universe around them bifurcated furiously.

Eventually Lin ventured. “Narrative depends on causality, of a sort. In a very literal way, everything has precedent. If the universe is recreated in every instant then we are also recreated in every instant, along with the memories of everything which brought us to this moment.”

“Narrative is a tricky one to reconcile with the many universes. Consider the fact that no two people remember an event in precisely the same way.”

“Facets and viewpoints,” said Lin. “No two of us have charted the same path between A and B, so the angle at which we view the thing itself varies. A sort of cosmological parallax. The things closer to us move more quickly through our awareness.”

“So each of us has our own universe. Intriguing. The universe as self-awareness. With that as criteria the universe must be an endangered species on this planet.”

Professor Lin chuckled around a sip of bourbon. “Along with everything else. Still, no need to be cynical. Students are students in every universe. But it does raise the question of the existence of the universe without an observer.”

“Alan Watts said we are apertures through which the universe is exploring itself.” said Smith. “That puts us at the mercy of the whole. It moves the level at which agency inspires causality to the other end of the scale. Too big to comprehend, instead of too small.”

“I find that thought both disturbing and comforting,” said Lin. “It brings a sense of completeness, but at the cost of a sense of futility.”

“But,” said Smith, “It also frees us to chart our own course at the level at which we live, without worry of disrupting the pattern of the whole. Freedom, within the limits of our awareness.”

“Infinite and bounded, though we were beginning to test those boundaries. And the testing is the work of many lifetimes. It requires a narrative outside the temporal limits of human experience.”

“Well, this human experience, anyway.” said Smith. “But a good story, properly told, can change the course of the world.”

“Within the limits of causality, of course.”

“True. Even a meteor is not without precedent. It’s inevitable, really.”

This brought about a lull in the conversation. The bourbon was gone. Lin pulled from a small satchel a bottle of vodka. Smith eyed it warily.

“Artificially changing the efficacy of the observer will change nothing in the universe.”

“Maybe,” said Lin, “But there are some things which we might not want to observe too closely. How much time do we have?”

“Minutes at most,” said Smith.

“So much for a new life,” said Lin.

“You never know,” said Smith, “But you should probably pour that vodka quickly.”

Lin did so, and the two shared a toast.

“To new life,” said Lin. “May it fare better and longer than the stuff down here.”

“To good health,” said Smith. “May it last as long as your life.”

In the distance sirens sounded, and the light took on a reddish hue as the old friends drained their mugs.

Smith grimaced. “Is this the best you could do?”

“Regrettably, it was,” said Lin over a sudden roaring of wind. “I doubt we’re the only ones doing this.”

All around them, the universe blinked.

 

Wikipedia as a Seed for Flash Fiction

John Winkelman

Lacking for a creative outlet, I recently tried a new writing exercise:

  1. go to the front page of Wikipedia
  2. click “random article”
  3. research/plan for a maximum of one minute
  4. write for fifteen minutes, or 500 words, or one page, or some other arbitrarily small limit

You must use the first random page that comes up, and the subject of that random page must be integral to the story. No picking and choosing.

It actually turned out to be a lot of fun! In one afternoon I wrote short pieces about a coastal town in Kenya, an early 20th century ceramics artist, data compression, and a Dungeons and Dragons version of Hell. All told, a little over an hour of writing. My mind felt limbered up and cleared out. Dusted off, even; like hitting the gym after an extended absence. My favorite part was that it broke me out of my comfort zone. I know next to nothing about Kenya, or ceramics. But that is still more than I knew before I tried this exercise.

In a way, this could work as a brainstorming exercise for an external topic. Trying to fit disparate ideas into a common narrative creates new viewpoints for that narrative. Imagine writing a story about wineries of the Great Lakes region, and when stuck for inspiration, randomly hitting the following five pages: Inger GiskeødegÃ¥rd, Tahuna Breaks, Vincent Hallinan, List of Pittsburgh Pirates first-round draft picks, and Telephone numbers in the British Indian Ocean Territory. For each page, try to fit the the content or concept into the larger narrative. Completely random brainstorm. Let your mind go where it will. At the end of the exercise, go back through and see if there are any useful insights; any new and unusual ways of thinking about Great Lakes wine.

 

Wikipedia as a Life Line for the Creative Urge

John Winkelman

If you are like me – and I know I am – then you know that when the creative urge strikes, it doesn’t always come hand-in-hand with ideas. You know you want to do…SOMETHING… but have no idea what that thing is. Much like the adrenaline high of a sudden scare which leads nowhere, the creative juices which were so powerful in the morning sit unused, and gradually sour into an afternoon of sitting fatassedly on the couch, watching television.

While browsing through Wikipedia the other day in the grip of post-urge ennui, I realized that the “On this day…” link on the right side of Wikipedia’s main page is a treasure trove of disparate events, united by the theme of having happened on this particular date, offset by a certain number of years. What if someone was to take a random-ish handful of the events which happened on a day, and from them construct a story, or a poem, or the plot to an adventure game? I tend to look at things through the lens of a semi-practicing Buddhist, so the idea of cycles and recurrence appeals to me, and the filter of requiring a specific date makes the data set manageable – it provides the constraint which helps stave off the onset of option paralysis.

Putting this idea into practice, look at the page for September 25. A lot happened on this date in history. Here is a (very) small sample:

275-Tacitus becomes Emperor of Rome.
1513-Balboa reaches the Pacific Ocean.
1775-Ethan Allen surrenders to the British.
1789-Creation of the Bill of Rights.
1972-Norway rejects membership of the European Union.
2008-China launches the spacecraft Shenzhou 7.

Fletcher Christian was born in 1764, Lu Xun in 1881, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1969.

Johannes Secundus died in 1536, Pope Clement VII in 1534, and George Plimpton in 2003.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT!!!

But you can see where I am going with this. Narrative frameworks could be constructed which follow specific threads or sub-filters of the information on that page – say, only the events which are political in nature, or only the deaths of artists, or only the births which happened in years evenly divisible by 10. Start with a set of disjointed data. Apply an arbitrary filter. Come up with a loose narrative which allows for a significant number of the events in the filtered set. Apply a second filter. Tighten the narrative. A third filter. Now the narrative either falls apart, or contains within it the seeds of a story.

While it can be difficult to pull a complete story out of such an exercise, it can provide the seed of something much more complex. Or, perhaps there is a poem somewhere in the mix. Or the framing story of a game. Or even a film script.

At its simplest, constructing a coherent story from such an arbitrary list of data is a good thought experiment. With National Novel Writing Month starting in a few days this could be the seed of something amazing.

The Elimination Dance

John Winkelman

If you require a certain pen to write.
If you have been intimidated by a raccoon.
If you ever made an aesthetic modification to your car which earned you a ticket.
If you have a “thing” for women in sweat pants.
If you count your time surfing the ‘net as “reading”.
If, after watching the movie PI, you spend unusual amounts of time staring at leaves/smoke/the sun.
If you weep for the future.
If you feel the guilt of ancestry.
If you have ever claimed to be “A descendant of…”
If, in a fit of youthful ignorance, you once made a “fuzzy navel” out of peach Schnapps and orange Tang.
If you drank more than one.
If you have ever given/received bleeding rug-burns during sex.
If you kill the fish you don’t keep.
If you feel superior at inappropriate times.
If you really think food can be decadent.
If you have ever looked up at a tall building, caught a reflection of the clear sky in a window, and momentarily thought that the building had not finished rendering.
If you have seen a sundog.
If you have ridden a cow.
If you have ever laughed yourself awake.
If you have ever changed religions for less than a day.
If it left you feeling unfulfilled.
If you know the taste of a spear.
If you think it is too loud right now.
If you still don’t think you will ever need to know “that”.
If you have been hospitalized by a paper cut.
If you think the word “organic” is often misused.
If you think silence is awkward.
If you once considered returning to school because of something you saw in a movie.
If you think the motions are running through you.
If you have ever bullied someone with your knowledge of their religion.
If you have ever, out of fear of others reading it, censored yourself in your private journal/diary, and then gone back a few days later and filled in the missing parts, only to have someone confront you about what you have written and accuse you, among other things, of being “wishy-washy”.

(with a nod to Michael Ondaatje )