Writing Tips – Words Deferred

How to Edit Short Stories: An Example

My writing time for the past few weeks has been focused on revision. My latest story, Red Eye, has now been reworked more thoroughly than any other short story I’ve written.

Does that make it the best thing I’ve ever written? No, not necessarily. There are a million factors that determine a story’s quality. What careful revision does is help make a story the best possible version of itself.

I’ve written about revision before:

I think revision is not discussed enough. This is partly because there’s more romanticism to first drafts: the blank page, the whispers of the muse, and bringing a new piece of art into the world. The raw creative energy of a first draft.

But first drafts often aren’t that good. They can be misshapen and muddled. They may be missing pieces, or not quite sure what they want to be. Like the golem, revision takes a roughly shaped form and puts magic into it that brings it to life.

First, I’ll outline some basic principles. Then I’ll discuss how they played out in my revisions for Red Eye.

Principles of Editing

These are a few things that work for me. Use what works for you and ignore what doesn’t. I am never entirely consistent with this process. I’m always changing and trying new ways of working.

Each story also has different requirements. So even if you have a consistent general process, it may still need to adapt to each individual story’s needs.

Focus on the Core Concept

Unlike longer works, short stories don’t have much room for meandering and asides. They work best when they have a distinct core concept. This might be an idea, a plot point or twist, a character, or even the structure of how the story is told.

There are many different engines that can power a story and drive it forward. The core concept is often very close to whatever got me excited about writing the story in the first place, although some stories will turn out to have a completely different focus from what you expected when you started writing.

The core concept is the measure for everything else in the story. Anything that doesn’t strengthen, deepen, or explore the core concept should be questioned and considered for removal.

Get External Feedback

The written word is an imperfect communication channel. The author stands on one side, with an idea of the story in their head. The reader stands on the other. Between them: two cans connected with string. This is the story, and just because you think you’re sending it with perfect clarity over the wire doesn’t mean the reader is receiving it the way you want them to.

The only way to effectively reconcile the story in your head with the story the reader received is to ask them. If you aren’t used to detailed feedback, you may be surprised how many different experiences and interpretations a dozen readers can have with the exact same story.

The first challenge is finding those readers. Friends and family may be an option. Writing groups and online critiques are another. More is generally better, but the sweet spot is probably 5-15 readers. Fewer, and you’ll miss useful critique, more and it will become overwhelming.

The second challenge is parsing the feedback. Put aside ego and be as open and honest as you can be. Some feedback you will disagree with. The reader may want something that doesn’t align with your core concept. The reader may identify a valid problem, but offer a bad solution. Individual readers will inevitably miss or misinterpret things, or get confused. This isn’t necessarily a problem if it’s only one reader in fifteen. If multiple readers have the same issue, it deserves scrutiny.

The final challenge is deciding what to change. It may be helpful to start with a list of problems, and then translate those into solutions. One change may be able to fix several problems, or one problem may necessitate several changes. I like to make checklists and take many editing passes, focusing on one or two things each time.

Big to Small

Try to make big, sweeping changes before line edits and more localized changes. It’s a waste of time to polish a paragraph if you’re just going to delete or replace the whole scene later.

This is something to strive for, but editing is an iterative process, so don’t stress over it too much. Sometimes an epiphany doesn’t strike until deep into the editing process. Don’t let the sunk cost fallacy discourage changes that will make a story better.

Cut, Cut, Cut

This was a hard lesson for me to internalize. If you have a naturally flowery or verbose style, it’s perfectly fine to run wild in early drafts. However, it’s important to cut that back as much as possible in revisions. Even first drafts written in a sparse style can often be trimmed significantly.

When cutting, look at what reinforces the core concept. Compare the trimmed and untrimmed versions of a sentence or paragraph. Be honest about what is really lost when removing a word here or there. Only keep what’s valuable.

Value isn’t measured solely in understandability of the plot. It may be critical characterization, or lyricism, or structure. You should be able to articulate why a cut doesn’t work, and default to brevity.

If you’re not used to ruthless cutting, it may feel bad at first. Short stories are an inherently tight medium, and given two versions of a story, the one that can say the same things in fewer words will generally be stronger. If you’re trying to get your work published or sold, there are simply more opportunities for shorter stories than longer ones.

Take frequent breaks when trimming. Once you’ve read and tweaked the same sentence a few times, it becomes hard to look at it objectively. Time is a necessary part of the process.

Example: Red Eye

Red Eye is a sci-fi noir short story in a future where a longevity serum extends lives. In rare cases this serum makes the person a “Red Eye,” activating a latent psychic power to see the future. These visions always come to pass so long as the Red Eye is still alive, and every Red Eye sees an apocalyptic cataclysm looming in the future.

The main character is a Red Eye police detective who catches other Red Eyes so they can be given a longevity-counteracting drug, in the hope that this will stop the collective catastrophic vision from coming to pass.

Red Eye is a long story for me, generally staying in the range of 6000-7000 words through many iterations. It is also an old story that stole ideas from things I wrote in my twenties. A version of it sat in a drawer for a number of years when I wasn’t submitting my work for publication. I revived it in 2024, and that is when I began editing it in earnest.

For stories I write today, I generally let the first draft sit for a couple weeks. Red Eye was an outlier in that regard.

Initial Revisions

My first editing pass is a gut check. I try to forget everything I know and come at it as a reader. What obviously works or doesn’t work? I try to find my core concept. At first, this was the idea of the psychic who locks the future in place by seeing it.

I also noted right away that the story was long, and I wanted to trim it down significantly.

I made some initial changes, fixed obvious problems, and did my best to trim. My goal at this early stage is to have the right scenes in the right order and rough shape. (Realistically though, things can change.) Then I take a light polishing pass where I check spelling, grammar, and flow. Much of this polish will be wasted, but I do it to avoid distracting first readers with small errors.

First Feedback

My first audience is my family. They are avid readers in various genres. At face value, they are not necessarily the “perfect readers” for my work, but that’s fine. They are kind enough to give me their time and energy, and they’ll be somewhat gentle with me while pointing out any major flaws.

With their initial feedback, I hope to catch anything egregiously confusing, any plot holes, and a handful of random smaller problems. They may also bring ideas or suggestions.

For Red Eye, the feedback told me that this is a complicated plot, and it was hard to relate to the main characters. That meant I would need to make it easier to understand what was happening while simultaneously putting more of the characters’ feelings and motivations on the page. And I still wanted to make the story shorter.

I made some changes based on this feedback, and jotted a few notes for later.

Detailed Feedback

Next, I submit to Critters, which is an online writing group designed for getting feedback on works in progress. It takes a story a couple weeks to get through the queue, which provides another natural break.

If I have major concerns from my initial edits and first reader feedback, I may include a question or two along with the story. Often I do not. I find that including specific questions will cause many readers to focus solely on those concerns, and I really want this feedback to clue me into any problems that I’m completely unaware of.

The Critters critiques will dribble into my inbox over the course of a week. I usually read each one the day it comes in, but I do nothing about them at first.

Reading feedback from strangers can be emotional, depending on how effective they are at constructive criticism. I have received a good amount of critique and I like to think I’m even-keeled about it. I still think it’s normal and expected to feel good when a reader compliments your story, and bad when they dislike it or are confused by it. Reading feedback as soon as it comes in gives me space to feel any of those things without the need to take any action. It lets some of that feedback lodge in my brain and start to marinate.

When all the critiques are in, I go through them again, systematically. Any initial feelings I might have had are now blunted and I can take in the critique more honestly. I respond to everyone with a brief thank-you email. This isn’t strictly required for Critters, but it’s polite, and it forces me to consider the feedback. I’ll often write a sentence or two in my email in response to what was said.

While I’m doing this, I copy all the feedback into a single document. I may do some light organizing, like putting similar feedback together or trimming out empty pleasantries and suggestions or complaints that I’ve decided to ignore.

The feedback for Red Eye reaffirmed my concerns about plot and characterization, and provided a lot of good smaller-scale line editing suggestions. Interestingly, while I was worried about the story being too long, my readers really didn’t think it was.

The Hard Edits

This is the toughest part. I have a story and a ton of feedback. Now it’s time to make it better.

Since this story was longer than I’m used to and I received a ton of good feedback, it took me a long time to organize my document of problems, and a long time to decide how I wanted to try to solve each of them.

For this particular story, I created a reverse outline in the form of a list of scenes. I gave each scene a descriptive title and noted the pages it started and ended on. Red Eye had eleven scenes ranging from less than a page to seven pages.

I also listed all my characters. This can help to see where whole characters can be cut or combined, although I didn’t do that with Red Eye.

I then looked at my checklist of problems and solutions and placed them under the scenes where I thought they made sense. This included big things and small things, with the big things first. Some bullet points migrated between scenes as I worked.

This is the grunt work, simply going through one problem after another, sometimes finding that your idea for a fix doesn’t work and finding a new one, and rearranging, adding, deleting. This is usually where my opinion of my own writing is at its lowest, because I am working through all the worst parts of the story. It’s important to remember that the end is near, and the story that comes out of this process will be the best it has ever been.

Additional Rounds of Feedback

I will note here that you may choose to make major changes to a story, and then go back for a more rounds of feedback to get an idea of how well those changes worked.

I did not do this with Red Eye, but I certainly see stories go through Critters multiple times. It all comes down to how worried you are about the shape of the story and the changes you’ve made.

I also think that there comes a point where it becomes more valuable to move on to the next story than iterate yet again on the current one. This is just something you have to feel out and decide for yourself.

Polish and Cleanup

When the big, sweeping changes are done and I’ve addressed the major problems, I turn to polish and cleanup. The scenes, characters, and plot are solidified, and I look at the individual sentences and words. First I address small items from reader feedback. Then I read through each scene several times to find anything that sounds off.

Haruki Murakami says that you know you are nearly done with editing when you find yourself adding words or punctuation in one pass, then changing it back in the next. Some changes will come down to your current mood and the time of day.

My final step, again, is to cut, cut, cut. Tighten all the screws. Get that word count as low as it will go. For Red Eye, I allowed my word count to creep up by nearly a thousand words throughout the process of fixing all the bigger issues. Then I trimmed about the same number of words out again.

That might sound pointless at first, but it’s actually fantastic. I was able to effectively replace something like 10-20% of my words with better words! That’s what editing is all about.

Take a Victory Lap

If you get to this point, all that’s left is to put your manuscript into a word doc with standard formatting. Add the author info and title and page headers. Add the word count (and see if you can shave off another fifty or hundred).

Then stop and take in your beautiful story. Appreciate your hard work. Editing is all about finding the flaws—the negatives. Take a moment to feel the good vibes of a finished story. Be proud.

Then fire up Duotrope or Submission Grinder and find somewhere to submit that thing. And start working on the next story.

Making Monsters: Nightmare Creatures for Horror Stories

As a speculative fiction writer, I tend to stay in the zones of sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t go across the tracks to horrorville very often. However, I’m currently writing a horror story featuring a monster who appears human. That got me thinking about monsters and how to write them effectively.

Despite my limited horror writing experience, I do read a good amount of horror and have analyzed a fair number of short stories through Critters critiques. As authors, we inevitably read far more work than we produce, so it’s important to learn not just from our own mistakes, but from others’ mistakes (and successes) as well.

In my opinion, horror is reliant on pacing and rising tension more than any other genre. While “conflict” and “tension” are sometimes used interchangeably, the difference is important here. Physical violence is common in horror (although it’s hardly the only form of conflict available). But too much violence runs the risk of verging into absurdity or action/thriller and losing those “creeping dread” horror vibes.

To feel like horror, there should be rising tension throughout, and outright conflict only at key “peaks” of the story.

Save the Reveal

Any connoisseur of monster movies knows that revealing the monster too early is a mortal sin. Mystery, uncertainty, and fear all build tension. So long as the reader and the characters don’t have a complete understanding of the antagonist, there’s always the possibility of something new and unexpected happening.

To this end, it’s important to slow roll the reveal. Dribble out information and understanding. The characters might think they have a chance against the monster when they discover that it’s blind. They’ll learn how wrong they are when they discover it has superhuman hearing and sense of smell.

The unknown is always more spooky. This goes for all aspects of the horrific. When describing the monster, give the characters and the reader glimpses, not straight on views. Show us a stray tentacle, a slime trail, a bloodshot eye through the crack in the door, or the sound of sharp claws scraping on the window.

If there has to be a full reveal, it should come close to the end. However, there doesn’t always have to be a reveal. Sometimes the story can resolve, and the characters can even win, without ever completely understanding the monster. Cosmic horror especially relishes the unknowable, and often outright refuses to fully explain its biggest bad guys. They are too horrific or mind-bending for mere humans to comprehend while staying sane.

Use All of Your Senses

Vision is the sense that able-bodied humans use most, and it’s usually the first mode of description authors reach for. Hearing is a distant second place. The rest of the senses are a lap behind on the track.

In any fiction it’s a good idea to shake this up. Hearing, touch, smell and taste can all add verisimilitude and depth to a story. For horror, this is even more important. Since mystery and the unknown are vital to creating tension, preventing characters from seeing the danger will ramp up that tension.

Since a lot of horror lives in the realm of speculative fiction, there may even be opportunities to include “extraordinary” senses beyond the standard five. Characters might get the feeling that they’re being watched, or the extrasensory certainty that something horrible is about to happen.

Using the full array of senses is an opportunity to make associations with things that cause discomfort—the feeling of bugs crawling over skin, dripping slime in an unexpected place, the smell or taste of rot, the sound of crunching bones. These kinds of sensory discomforts are another key way to ramp up the tension in a story.

Be aware that you may lose certain readers when you get into phobia territory. This is par for the course with horror, and audiences should expect a certain amount of discomfort, but you’re still going to encounter certain readers who absolutely can’t get enough axe murder and will still throw a book across the room when they get to the bit with the spiders under a character’s skin or the clown in the sewer.

Metaphor and Synecdoche

Another important way to maintain mystery and reveal without revealing is to use layers of indirection. Metaphor and simile can give a sense of what the monster is like, without providing the whole picture. Synecdoche substitutes a part of the thing for the whole.

We know the creature has a snout that snuffles like a pig when it seeks out its victims. We know that it has a slimy hide with bristly, needle-like hair. We know that when it was feeding on that old man in the shadows, it was all sharp claws and red-tinged fangs.

Twisted or False Innocence

Another tactic for introducing mystery and uncertainty is to start with something safe and known, and systematically show that this surface-level simplicity hides sinister depths.

The classic examples of this tend toward typical innocence and innocuousness: children, dolls, nuns, clowns. These cheerful, delightful, or inherently good things and people slowly reveal aspects that do not match what they’re supposed to be.

The feeling of understanding something, only to have to revise that initial impression naturally brings some level of discomfort and tension with it. It speaks to the primal parts of the human brain that are responsible for studying the dark jungle around us and noticing on the third or fourth pass that the ordinary shadow under that tree is really a tiger.

Reveal Through Reaction

Effective fiction requires a level of empathy between the reader and the characters. Luckily, most humans are natural empathy machines—when we see something happen to somebody else, we tend to think about how that makes the other person feel, and we can even generate a sympathetic response that makes us feel the same feelings we perceive in someone else.

In all fiction, and especially in horror, it’s the author’s job to help the reader activate that sympathetic response. Sensory descriptions are a great way to do this. Again, as a culture that’s immersed in TV and movies, we tend to think very visually, but other senses often are even better at eliciting this empathy in the reader.

Importantly, fiction offers an avenue that isn’t entirely possible to replicate in TV and movies: the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters. Of course, the POV of the story may be a limiting factor, but in first person, second person, and “close” third person points of view it should be possible to delve into the thoughts and emotions of at least one character.

Reveals are Climaxes

With mysteries and uncertainties providing vital sources of tension in horror stories, it’s only natural that reveals should be moments of excitement or relief. Major revelations should come at a point of maximum tension. This can be used as a pressure release valve before moving into a new part of the story and ratcheting up a new source of tension. However, the reveal is often closely coupled with a moment of violence, pain, or trauma, turning that inherent excitement toward terror.

Reveals are also sometimes opportunities to raise the stakes. What started as “I don’t want to die,” may become “I can’t let this evil be unleashed onto the world.” One of my favorite takeaways from Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story is that the character’s personal story should tie into the broader external action. What this means is that good stories have personal stakes for key characters, but those stakes are tied to the bigger events.

In Stranger Things, a group of kids has to fight monsters to save their friends, but those monsters also have bigger plans to wreak havoc on their small town and the world. In The Omen, fear of a monstrous child is heightened by the possibility that he may be the Antichrist. The Alien movies aren’t just about avoiding the Xenomorph, but about preventing it from spreading.

Most horror—or at least horror with monsters in it—ends in defeat, or victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. The climactic reveal may be the piece of information that is needed to fully understand the monster, and thus discover a weakness that can be used to defeat it.

The final opportunity for tension comes at the end of the story, just beyond the climax. The monster was finally defeated…or was it? Did that mangled corpse twitch? Did the eye open? Or is there a clutch of eggs somewhere cool and moist, waiting to hatch? Was the demon really banished, or is there a strange glint of red in that side character’s eye?

One of the hallmarks of horror is leaving the reader with an unsettled feeling even after the final sentence, and a great way to do that is to leave some tension unresolved.

The Short Fiction Posts

In 2026, I’m once again focusing on short stories, so this seems like a perfect time to revive a series of six posts I did in 2024, all focused on short stories.

In this series, I cover why short stories are important to read and write, how they’re generally categorized by publishers, and how to revise and submit for publication. Finally, I wrapped it all up with a comparison of the two most popular websites for tracking your submissions: Duotrope and Submission Grinder.

Novelist as a Vocation — Reference Desk #23

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Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.

Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.

King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.

The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.

For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.

If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.

Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it.

Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA, worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.

A Revision Checklist

After my recent re-read of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, I decided to create a revision checklist. For this list, I started with items from the book, then added some of my own based on my weaknesses and what I typically look for. I’ve split these into several categories to help focus. If you want to make your own checklist, you can split items up into whatever categories make sense to you.

There is a lot to keep track of when revising a story. Too much, in fact, to keep track of all at once. This is why it pays to make multiple revision passes, working from big to small, and working on only a few things at a time. The checklist is a convenient tool for keeping track of it all.

One checklist like this can’t cover everything. It’s just a starting point. There will be changes that are specific to each story. The “general purpose” checklist can also change with your writing style. As you rid yourself of bad habits, you may find that you don’t need to check for those things anymore. If you want to focus on something new (maybe something that comes up repeatedly in reader feedback), you can add it to the checklist.

Story

☐ Introduce important characters early
☐ Describe character physically when first introduced.
☐ Can any characters be merged?
☐ Avoid using multiple channels to show the same characterization or plot point (dialogue, action, narration, etc.)

Chapter/Scene

☐ New scene or chapter when location/timeframe/POV changes
☐ Pacing - should this feel faster or slower?
    ○ Adjust scene or chapter length
☐ Focus on important aspects for scene
    ○ Characters/characterization
    ○ Physical action
    ○ Dialogue
    ○ Background info
    ○ Tone

Dialogue

Mechanics

☐ Avoid swifties (alternatives to "said," adverbs on "said")
☐ Single attribution per character per POV/scene
☐ Avoid tagging with redundant explanations 
☐ Beats (action in dialogue)
    ○ Do two things at once — illuminate character, reveal something
    ○ Punctuate an emotional shift

Character

☐ Each line fits character/shows character
☐ Dialect - word choice, cadence, grammar. No phonetics.

Misc

☐ Read aloud!
    ○ Read each character’s dialogue consecutively, out loud, to hear inconsistencies in voice.
☐ Avoid big soliloquies - back and forth flow
☐ Complexity - misunderstandings, indirect questions, leaving things unspoken

Details

☐ Avoid weak words - seemed, mostly, some, a little, a bit, slightly, somewhat, sort of, kind of, like, as though
☐ Avoid cliches and idioms
☐ Avoid italics and ”emphasis” quotes
☐ Avoid phrasing that draws attention to itself
☐ Avoid description in a dependent clause (accidentally simultaneous actions)
☐ Avoid repetition
☐ Use exclamation points very judiciously
☐ Use brand names judiciously
☐ Use expletives judiciously
☐ Use adjectives judiciously
☐ Replace adverbs with better verbs

Narration

☐ Bad/excessive summary or exposition.
    ○ Work in exposition along the way
    ○ Provide information at the point it becomes relevant
☐ Narration follows POV character's focus

Characters

☐ Avoid summarizing character feelings
    ○ Show through action/dialogue
    ○ Have a character react to or describe another
☐ Time spent/level of detail on character should reflect importance

Point of View

☐ Establish POV as quick as possible in a scene.
☐ Evaluate POVs
    ○ What info is necessary? Is an omniscient  perspective necessary
    ○ What perspective is most interesting?
    ○ More distance makes perspective changes less jarring
☐ Limit interior monologue

Pacing

☐ Should this feel faster or slower?
    ○ More or less description
    ○ Sentence and paragraph lengths

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers — Reference Desk #22

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Renni Browne and Dave King aren’t household names. They aren’t famous authors like Chuck Palahniuk, or Chuck Wendig, or any of your classic famous authorial Chucks. They’re editors. Their advice isn’t wild or shocking, and it doesn’t claim to make writing easy or save you the hard work. It’s just twelve fairly straightforward ideas that can be used to edit fiction and make it better. The result is one of my favorite books on writing.

This book has been on my shelf for years. I have the second edition from 2004, and the original was published a good decade before that. It’s not exactly timeless, but it’s about as close as you can get while including references to a broad swath of literature. I take it out every few years when I’m planning to do a lot of editing, which is why I recently re-read it.

Each chapter focuses on one thing: Show and Tell, Dialogue Mechanics, Interior Monologue, etc. The authors explain a few problems they look for when editing, then provide short examples from published books, workshops, and manuscripts. Each chapter finishes with a bulleted checklist that can be used for your own work. Finally, they provide a couple of exercises that you can try, if you want to use the book as a sort of self-guided class.

After the last chapter, there are two brief appendixes. The first contains the editors’ answers to the exercises. The second is a list of recommended books for writers, split out into craft, inspiration, and reference. Lastly, there is a solid index, so you can easily find that half-remembered advice without needless skimming.

This structure is something worth noting. So many books on writing are meandering or mix anecdotes, ideas, and advice in ways that make them difficult to use as tools. This book has a few anecdotes and asides, but it’s organized so that you don’t have to wade through any of that when you’re busy trying to find some specific thing that resonated. It’s worth reading the book from cover to cover, but it’s also designed in a way that allows it to be useful as a reference.

If there is a weakness in this book, it’s a focus on a modern, mainstream, “popular” writing style. The authors don’t talk much about the exceptions to the rules, or how to make strange and unusual fiction. This is not a guide that will help much if you’re writing House of Leaves, or Poison for Breakfast, or This is How You Lose the Time War.

I don’t think that’s a major failing. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers advocates for clean, concise, clear fiction. That’s a pretty good starting point for any writer. I suspect the authors would suggest that this is table stakes for fiction. If you want to do something more, something wild and crazy that breaks the rules, you will do it more effectively if you have a good grounding in the basics first. This book provides that.

Five-Finger Brainstorming for Fiction

I have a day job in software development where I’ve worked with large corporations. Thanks to that job, I’ve had plenty of exposure to corporate efficiency buzzwords and processes, from lean six sigma black belts to leveraging synergies.

While the eye-rolls induced by these terms are often justified, they usually start with a useful kernel of truth before metastasizing into something a VP drones on about in the all-hands meeting as everyone tries not to cringe.

This brainstorming method is based on the five whys, a corporate-speak process for digging a few levels deep to find the real root of a problem. I like it for brainstorming fiction ideas is because it is fast and easy and generates some unexpected connections.

Five Finger Brainstorming

Start with the first premise that pops into your head. It can be almost anything. It doesn’t have to be particularly interesting or story-worthy. However, don’t be afraid to start with something big like a hostage negotiation or first contact with aliens.

Example:

A man kills his neighbor…

Next, ask yourself why that first event happened, or what it implies. Repeat this until you’re at least five levels deep. You can count them off on the fingers of one hand.

Don’t think hard. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head each time. This technique works best if you let your subconscious take the wheel.

A man kills his neighbor…

because the neighbor knows his secret…

his secret is that he is hiding an alien in his basement…

because he is in love with it…

because he is an alien too.

Next, look at this sentence or paragraph as though a breathless child had just run up and told you this story. What questions would you have? I usually have a couple. These questions are natural jumping-off points for expanding the idea further.

Are they the same species of alien?

Why does one need to be hidden? Does one pass for human while the other doesn’t?

What happens after the murder?

Bonus: Story Trees

You can expand on this with a different style of brainstorming—one that is slower and more methodical. Try it with an idea that feels like it has potential, where you weren’t satisfied with your initial blurbs.

Look at each answer as a branching point in a tree. The original idea is the root. Instead of expanding that idea once, expand it in five different ways. Then go down the chain for each of those branches.

(Why yes, my MSPaint skills are incredible. Thanks for noticing.)

Be aware that filling out all the branches results in exponential blurbs. If you don’t want to go that far, just fill in a few branches that pique your interest. Remember, inspiration often strikes when you’re straining to come up with one or two more ideas. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to stop at five if you want to keep going.

Two Techniques that Work Great Together

The five-finger technique helps dig deeper into the reasons and consequences of an initial idea or event. The story tree forces exploration of alternatives, which can sometimes get you past easy, tropey explanations and into more interesting territory.

In brainstorming, quantity leads to quality. With these techniques you can generate a lot of ideas quickly, so don’t be precious about them. They’re meant to be quick and disposable. So start counting, and come up with something new!

Carter Vail’s Five Rules for Being An Artist

There’s a chance you’ve come across Carter Vail if you ever find yourself scrolling through Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, or the other short video platforms on the handful of social media sites that make up the modern internet.

He may be best-known for his goofy songs about eating coins, using karate against aliens, or protecting yourself from the Dirt Man, but his “real” songs have been in heavy rotation on my drive-time playlists.

He recently released a concise and honest how-to video for building a creative career. It’s tailored toward musicians, but most of the points he makes can be easily translated to other artistic endeavors.

Watch below, or click through to YouTube.

The List

Find an *art of your choice* community
Become indispensable to that community
Cash in favors to make *your kind of art* ferociously
Make people care
Stay in the game

Thoughts

It’s interesting to note right away that this list assumes art is a collaborative endeavor. It’s possible to be a solo singer-songwriter, but I think most people will agree that music is among the most collaborative of the arts, perhaps only behind TV and movies in the number of people who have to come together to make something.

Writers and painters are more likely to balk at this. Many of us are used to working alone. But even in the world of fiction, there are beta readers and writing groups and agents and editors and marketing people. You might find yourself writing for other media, for comics or RPGs or video games. As you progress and do more, chances are good that you’re going to have to interact with some or all of these people. No man is an island.

“Make people care” is innocuously simple at first glance, and immediately stands out as the hardest of these steps for most of us who have tried to do it. Today more than ever, there is an infinite abundance of art out there. It’s a struggle to be seen and connect.

I see the fifth step, “stay in the game,” as an extension of this. Rare is the artist who never thinks about giving up. Making people care takes time. You never know when (or if) your work will reach the right set of eyeballs. It may be tomorrow. It may be a decade from now. Do you give up or keep going, harder than ever?

As Carter says, “Stay in the game, make art, and put it out into the world.”

(Don’t) Write Every Day

Last week, in the second post of my series on writing short stories, I had already missed my weekly goals. Hardly the end of the world, but I was still a little disappointed in myself.

I have a notebook from NaNoWriMo that says “Write Every Day” on the cover. It’s exactly the thing that NaNoWriMo advocates. It might be the most commonly given writing advice. After all, if you want to be prolific, you’re going to need to write a lot. Right?

Well, yes and no.

The reason we have this mantra is because it’s hard. Most of us don’t write every day, even if we aspire to. However, simple aphorisms usually obscure a more complicated truth. Writing every day doesn’t guarantee success, and success doesn’t require writing every day.

The Self-Designed Job

Most of us who write fiction on spec are writing entirely on our own. There is no job description, no education or work history requirements. Nobody evaluated our resumes. We woke up one day and decided to write. Even those of us who have more formal writing jobs are often freelancers or contractors.

It can be powerful to choose your own goals and working hours. It can also be difficult. It’s not as simple as going into the office 9–5. It’s not as easy as having work handed down from a boss. Being self-directed means there are no defined boundaries to the job. You can work too little, or far too much.

I realized a few years ago that I was always setting goals for myself, and almost never satisfied with my own achievement. My performance reviews for my self-defined job were consistently bad. But this is really just my own personality issue. It doesn’t actually reflect my performance. Understanding that, I can more easily recognize that feeling and let it go.

Writing is More Than Writing

It’s not surprising how many writers hate talking about their own work, or trying to sell it. We write because we love writing, not because we want to do writing-adjacent business stuff. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. If you want people to read what you’re writing, there’s probably some amount of business and self-promotion that needs to be done.

Beyond that, writing is more than putting words on the page. There’s work to be done before the first draft, coming up with ideas and refining them. There’s work to be done after, revising and editing. There are classes, books, and blogs about craft.

There is even the undefinable work of being out in the world, observing people and things, having the experiences that will inform the work. Fiction can only be as interesting as the inner world of the author. That stew of ideas requires ingredients and time.

I’ve even found blogging or journaling to be incredibly useful for my writing. Sometimes experience isn’t enough; it takes reflection to unlock that understanding. I can’t count the number of times that writing about my process resulted in exciting new ideas.

Moving Toward the Mountain

If you’re like me, and you have that voice in the back of your head that complains when you’re not writing “enough,” there are a few things you can do to address it. Make a list of all the things that contribute to the writing. Include things like ideation, editing, and critique. Include that fun business stuff, whether it be sending work to traditional publishers, working on self-publishing, or something as mundane as accounting for taxes. Include reflection, like blogging or journaling.

Ask yourself honestly if you’re allocating enough time to rest, recharge, and feed that stew of ideas that will, in turn, feed your stories. Don’t be afraid of taking a break, or even a vacation. If you want writing to be a “real” job, it should come with sick days and vacation time.

When pursuing goals, there are a lot of different ways to move toward the mountain. Sometimes the path isn’t straight. We have to put words to paper if we’re going to be writers. But not necessarily every day.

Reference Desk # 20 — Consider This, By Chuck Palahniuk

(Bookshop.org affiliate link)

I’m always on the lookout for good books on the craft of writing. Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are actually quite a few of them. I have at least a dozen on my bookshelf at any given time, a selection that morphs slowly, like the ship of Theseus. In fact, there are probably hundreds of good books on writing. These books have a tidbit here or there that will lodge in your head, only to pop up at an opportune moment, leading to some small improvement. Or they’ll provide some high-level idea that inspires an adjustment in your way of working.

Consider This is something else. Having just read it for the first time, I think it’s safe to say that it is one of those rare great books on writing. There is an easy way to tell if you are reading such a book. It reads like an autobiography. Writers see the world through writing, and it is only natural that we should get to know each other best through our writing philosophies. A great book on writing feels like you’ve cracked off a little piece of a writer’s soul and slipped it under your ribs. A warm little splinter next to your heart.

The subtitle of this book is, “Moments in my writing life after which everything was different.” I suspect a fair number of writers will count this book as one of those. This is not a book about how to write well. It’s a book about how to write when you are Chuck Palahniuk. And really, what other book could we possibly expect from him?

Postcards From the Tour

If you’re not familiar with Palahniuk (pronounced “paula-nick”), he is the author of Fight Club. He has written more than twenty other successful books and comics, a good amount of short fiction, and a few non-fiction pieces, but if you know him from anything it’s probably Fight Club. His writing career spans over thirty years.

Much like Stephen King’s On Writing, the book is half advice and half anecdotes from the author’s life. Unlike King, whose book is more or less neatly split into the writing parts and the biography parts, Palahniuk’s is a mish-mash.

Each chapter focuses on a particular broad topic: Textures, Establishing Your Authority, Tension, Process. Between these sections are Postcards from the Tour, vignettes from Palahniuk’s life that may or may not directly relate to what comes before and after. He wraps the thing up with a list of recommended reading, and an interesting, brief chapter called “Troubleshooting,” which is essentially a list of problems that you may run into with your work and his suggested solutions.

There are motifs that span the book, like the favorite quotes from authors Palahniuk has known, inscribed alongside tattoo art. “For a thing to endure, it must be made of either granite or words.” “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.” “Never resolve a threat until you raise a larger one.” And, of course, “Readers love that shit.”

Palahniuk makes it clear that much of the advice he’s providing is not his own. It was given to him by others. He may have taken it to heart, tweaked it, and made it personal, but it is really a collection of advice from all of the people who helped shape him. When Palahniuk makes a point he wants you to remember, he says, “If you were my student, I’d tell you…,” but this is not workshop book. It is not a syllabus to be followed. It’s a conversation between fellow writers.

If You Were My Student

Consider This is packed with small pieces of good advice; so much that it is impractical to dig into all of them here. In fact, I kept running into things that made me pause to consider how they would help me in one way or another with the stories that I’m currently working on, and made me wonder if I needed to revise some pieces I thought were done.

He tells us there are three textures for conveying information: description, instruction, and exclamation. A man walks into a bar. You walk into a bar. Ouch!

He tells us attribution tags can provide a beat within a sentence. Use quotation marks for detail and realness, paraphrase for distance and diminishment.

He tells us the Little Voice is objective and factual. It is unadorned description, the documentary camera. The Big Voice is explicit narration, journal or letter. It is opinionated. Intercutting Big Voice and Little Voice can convey the feeling of time passing.

Palahniuk also makes more than a few suggestions that made me think, “That’s all well and good for Chuck, but what about the rest of us?”

He suggests that each chapter should be a self-contained short story, to the point that it could be published independently.

He suggests a liberal mixing of first, second and third person points of view.

He says we should create a repeated “chorus” to break up the story parts, like the rules of fight club. Use lists, ritual and repetition.

I have an unsettling suspicion. The parts that feel wrong to me—the parts that seem too unique to Palahniuk—might be just as useful as the parts I found immediately helpful. I just haven’t quite grasped them yet. Maybe in five years or a decade they’ll hit me like a lightning bolt and I’ll feel the need to revise all my works in progress yet again.

Readers Love That Shit

If it’s not obvious, I think this is a book on writing that most writers should own. It’s raw and personal, often strange, and very particular to Palahniuk. That’s precisely what makes it work. It’s a collection of writing advice from many writers, all channeled through Palahniuk over a decades-long career. I took copious notes on my first read through, and I have confidence that I will find an entirely new selection of things to consider when I read through it again.