Today, we’re looking at what I learned about story-writing from writing a story a week for 52 weeks, but to do that I have to say a little about Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury was my true introduction to short stories. His collection, The Martian Chronicles, seemed so different from anything I’d read to that point. I was twelve or so, I guess, when I found it. Since science fiction was my drug, the book had to cross my path eventually, but The Martian Chronicles stories didn’t read like anything I’d seen before. How he used language created the contrast. Even at twelve I could see that he wrote . . . I don’t know . . . better?
At any rate, his impact was twofold. First, his way of telling stories that I mentioned. Second, I loved books, and when I was twelve, I longed to be able to write one. The idea of MY name on the back of a book seemed special. But being a normal kid, I really didn’t like to write! When the teacher gave an assignment on Friday for a 500-word paper that they were going to collect on Monday, the writing seemed to take forever.
No desert is longer than a blank sheet of paper for a twelve-year-old with a school writing assignment.
I have some of my old papers from junior high. I ran into one lately. Lightly written on the side of one of these 500-word assignments, I had recorded how many words along I was as I crawled toward the 500-word finish line.
So how could I possibly write a novel? To twelve-year-old me, writing a novel was the true science-fictional concept.
Bradbury, though, wrote some very short stories. The first story in The Martian Chronicles is less than a page long. I might not be able to write a novel, but I could manage a page. Being an author suddenly seemed within my grasp.
Here’s an example of Bradbury at his Bradburyish. It’s the opening to his novel, Dandelion Wine:
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer. Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream.
See! He’s special.
So, much later in life, long after I actually started publishing and writing, I revisited a piece of advice Bradbury offered to young writers. I wasn’t “young” in age, but I figure we’re all young in writing, no matter how long we’ve been doing it.
He said, “Write a story a week for a year. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
So, long into my career, I took the challenge.
Here’s what it taught me about short story writing:
SUMMARY OF LESSONS LEARNED FROM WRITING ONE STORY A WEEK FOR 52 WEEKS
1. Almost every story started feeling small, stupid or insignificant. Even the ones that didn’t feel that way were simple, single-noted or slight. However, after two or three days, my interest in the story grew.
What seemed trivial at the beginning took on more significance. Through working on the story, my engagement with the story increased. By the end of the week, I sometimes found I’d tied myself into a much larger and layered story than I thought when I began.
A couple of times, the story turned out to be more than a one-week effort. I learned to trust that the story would become more interesting than it started. No matter what I thought at the beginning, the story would deepen. Here’s a way to try this on your own: use a writing prompt from someone else. All you have then is the merest kernel, but you still grow a story.
2. The malleability of sequence in writing became more evident the more stories I wrote. Details that I included at the beginning just because I needed to invent something to complete the scene (a physical description, a line of dialogue, an action) often became pivotal later ALTHOUGH I HAD NO PLAN ON USING THE DETAILS WHEN I PUT THEM IN. I reinforced the idea that I could trust my earliest decisions and use them to solve problems. Here’s a way to try this out: write richly early. Give your characters pets or eccentric memories and traits. Be specific about setting. Write odd dialogue. You’ll find your own story to be rich with things you put in at the beginning that you can use later.
3. In the same sense, the realization that an early detail needed to be added, altered or deleted when I got to a later part in the story became easier. Because I wrote faster, I became less wedded to the early stuff and more ruthless about removing or replacing it. Writing this many stories this fast revealed to me more thoroughly the wholeness and connectedness of the narrative from the process side.
4. Different impulses got me into the stories. A couple I wrote just because a setting appealed to me. I wanted to describe a place richly. Others started because of a situation. A couple started because I had an idea about language, like I wanted to write a story that built like a song, or I intentionally wanted to be poetic. One story I wrote in first person but never used the pronoun “I” just to see if I could do it. Some came from autobiography, which may be because autobiography is the low-hanging fruit of inspiration, but it’s also the stuff that feels really important as I write. I wrote from writing prompts (there are plenty of places on the web with writing prompts—just Google for them). I wrote to themed anthology descriptions and used the theme as a prompt.
5. I found that I wanted to try different things because the previous stories were so fresh in my memory. Like, I didn’t want two first-person stories in a row, or if the last story the characters were young, then the next one they’d be old. I wrote characters who were different from me (different ethnicity, backgrounds, education, vocabulary, etc.). If my last story had a downer ending, I wanted the next one to have a different feel. I wanted to try different styles.
6. Because of the pace, I grew more conscious of my first readers. The stories started to feel confessional and because my first readers know me well, I became more aware of when I used autobiographical elements I thought they would recognize. Sometimes I used those elements for fun, and sometimes I worked hard to disguise them.
7. I found that I ping-ponged when writing the stories between being really interested in the language I was using and being really interested in the story I was telling. Weirdly enough, I think I’m a better storyteller when I fall in love with the language and just let the language go than when I’m focusing on plot points and structure.
8. Story writing rhythm feels like a Slinky’s motion to me, when you hold both ends and then oscillate. Things bunch up and don’t move, and then suddenly rush to the next bunch point. The thing is that I’m very self-conscious about the bunched-up points, and they are frustrating or bothersome. To get through them, I sometimes have to trick myself by giving myself some immediate goal, like how much can I write before “Stairway to Heaven” finishes on my CD? Other times I remind myself that I can’t edit nothing, so I’ve got to get something on the page, even if it’s not particularly good.
9. I write better and faster if I type with my eyes closed. This is a lesson I constantly have to remind myself about.
10. My best approach to submitting the work is to absolutely believe the market I sent it to will reject it. That’s a tough state of mind to stay in, but when I submitted so much work so fast, the rejections came back relentlessly. I sold a story about one out of every eight times I submitted, so that meant I could have multiple rejections in the same week. However, even on the day I had an acceptance, a rejection later was discouraging. So, to battle the discouragement, I assumed the story would be rejected. No big deal when it came in; they were going to reject it anyway. Every sale was a pleasant and beautiful surprise.
I finished my writing challenge in 2015. Of the 52 stories, 50 sold to magazines or anthologies. I’m still circulating the remaining two. I have faith they’ll find a home.
In a future blog, I’ll talk about the process of starting, writing and editing a story a week for a year. That was revelatory, too.
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this long post, you have persistence! Also, taking up a writing challenge and giving yourself a goal is a great motivator. A story a week for a year might be too much or not suited to your writing.
Anything that fights the horrifying lack of momentum that is doing nothing, putting off your writing dreams for another day, is to be commended.
Go do it!
James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. Recently, he retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Choice awards. Years and years ago, he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.
