Saccadic Narcohypnia: “Story Time”

The second of a probably longer series. This one focuses on crap I can’t stand in short fiction. Well, two craps I can’t stand, anyway.  The script and video are below.

Saccadic Narcohypnia 2
“Story time”

Hola. ¿Cómo estás? Recently, I’ve put in some time doing slush pile reading for my school’s literary magazine. For those of you not in the know, a slush pile is where a whole bunch of submissions, usually short stories or essays, are read by a group and all the stories that don’t meet the magazine’s standards are cut so the editors can focus on the ones worth reading. If you’ve ever submitted an article to a magazine and felt like the editor probably didn’t read it, you’re probably right. But considering how HUGE these slush piles can be, this is an infinitely better system than having the poor editors read everything that comes in.

Typically a story will come in and we can give the story an X or a check. Three X’s and the story is gone. Blah! Into the void. Three checks and it goes to the editors who work some sort of voodoo magic to properly determine what gets into the magazine.

I usually find myself giving X’s because most of the stories are really, really bad. And you can usually tell by the first line, but sometimes you can’t and that makes me feel bad because sometimes there is nothing wrong with a story except for one mistake that wrecks the whole thing. These are simple, easy to correct mistakes and you know them when you see them. But for the time I have to talk, I’ll have to comment on just two colossal mistakes that you should avoid as if your writing career depended on it.

The first one is Not Writing a Story. Now, this sounds silly, but most of what I read weren’t really stories. To be a story you need a beginning, a middle, and an ending. There is this thing called a Freytag’s triangle. First we have a beginning where there isn’t any excitement, but then a problem is introduced and the action rises to a crisis point, either in the Hollywood sense where everything explodes or in the emotional sense where everybody’s heart is ripped asunder, and then the action quickly decreases and the story ends and if we’re lucky the characters learn something or change in some way.

If your work has this structure it is a story, if not, it is something else. Now, what’s interesting is stories don’t need to follow this in order or even start at the beginning. The presentation of the story is entirely up to the author and he can start at the middle and go forward as in A New Hope or he can start at the end and work backwards as in Memento.

Things that aren’t stories can be good, of course, there are many fictional works that are not stories but still amazing, but be aware of the difference and if you want to write a story Write a Story.

The other mistake is, Not Having confidence in your work. If you don’t have confidence, anybody who is reading it will pick up on it right away or you’ll make story exploding mistakes. One story that I remember reading and I’ll try to keep this as vague as possible so if the author ever sees this he won’t break down or come and kill me for putting an X on his story, but okay, anyway… There was this one story that read like a travelogue of this fictional world and it was really, really cool and I was into the story, I loved it because it was so weird and neat and original. And that is what I want when I read. The problem is that in the middle of the story, out of nowhere we get a break in which we are presented by a… presumably fictional… author showing the work I was reading to his friends and they were all like “Wow, that’s really good.” And it was until the authorial intrusion. The author did not have enough faith in the story. No self confidence. This sort of intrusion is… well, it’s as if he wanted to tell the reader that the story was interesting because his friends thought so. Leave it out, man. If you did your job it will be interesting and to do your job don’t second guess yourself. I’ve been to a lot of writing workshops and the author usually knows best. Comments can help especially if you are making factual errors, but in your fictional world you are God and God does not doubt himself.