Wooden Door - Short Story

The house was a small cottage, Flinn’s first. He had only looked at the pictures in the online real estate viewer and knew the house was right for him. He had payed the measly 100k and had driven his black land rover to the house immediately. The Penske truck, per his frantic waving, pulled into the driveway behind Flinn’s own vehicle. He and the two men inside the truck began to unload, until everything that had been in the truck was in the house. He thanked the two men and they drove away, tipping their baseball hats as they went.

Flinn began to rearrange the furniture throughout the one-story building. It was not an arduous task, and that night he slept in his bedroom, which was fully organized and laid out perfectly. He awoke to the alarm he had set on his phone. Just what I need to start my day. Mozart’s 5th symphony, he thought. He jumped out of bed.

Flinn walked into the kitchen and grabbed a protein bar. He still had some unpacking to do. But first, he would take a look at the door. The door was the reason he had bought the house, though, in all fairness, there were other good reasons. But the door had sparked something in Flinn’s imagination, and he had known that the house had been made for him. It wasn’t exactly a door in the picture. More of an opening with a mysterious looking steel box. On further investigation and after having asked the owners, he had confirmed that it was real.

He locked the doors and closed all the windows, making sure that no one could get in without his noticing them. He would not be caught off guard. Flinn started in the bedroom. After pulling everything that even remotely resembled a lever (and breaking some things in the process), he determined that the door was not in his room, and moved on.

Hour after hour he spent, searching for the door. Opening windows, pressing screws, flipping every switch, all without avail. He could find nothing. Well after lunchtime he took a short break to eat another granola bar, then went right back to work. Whistling cheerfully, he pulled back curtains, tapped walls, and pulled every longer carpet string. It was tedious work, but he found nothing. There is no heroism in tedium, he realized, and sighed dejectedly.

At eleven o’clock, he gave up. He flopped in bed, disheartened, closed his eyes and laid in bed for hours before he went to sleep.

Flinn flipped open his laptop lid in a hurry. He had noticed something about the house, something which could give him a clue. The online real estate place might still have the house up, as the transaction had been done so quickly. He typed in his long password and waited impatiently for twenty seconds while the laptop turned all systems on. It was finally ready, and he double-clicked on the internet icon.

He clicked on the bookmark icon that would take him directly to the website. His heart thumped in his chest as the page loaded slowly. “Load!” he shouted at the screen.

The page loaded and the images quickly popped up in their places. His heart pounded even louder as he zoomed in on the picture of the opening. It took a little while to load, and when it did, he quickly took a screenshot in case the website was taken down. He examined it carefully, looking for the one distinguishing mark.

What he had noticed when he had looked around the house for the umpteenth time was that each room was painted in a different color, sometimes only a shade or two from the next room. If the picture had a little tiny sliver of the paint color, he would know what room to look in.

After fidgeting around with the zoom, he finally found the color of the wall: blue. There was only one room in the house painted with a blue that dark. It was the living room.

Flinn slammed the computer lid and sprinted out of his room. Once in the living room, he looked around for anything that could be the hiding place of a secret door, but saw none. Still, he knew it was the living room. There wasn’t much to it; just the fireplace, some pictures he had provided, a few light switches, and the bland carpet.

He flipped all the light switches, trying every combination that made its way into his head. After thirty minutes of trying, he reasoned that it could not be complicated, or the owners would have told him. He tried the light bulbs, twisting each one. He then tried simple combinations involving the light bulbs and the switches both, but nothing happened.

The fireplace was the only obvious appliance left in the room, besides the outlets, of which there were only two. He had already tried those. Seeing no other options, he examined the fireplace. He saw nothing he could do. Everything was completely normal, and there were no hidden nooks and crannies. It was just a solid extrusion, a block with a hearth.

Flinn noticed that it was getting colder. He was right by the fireplace, so he decided he would turn it on to see how well it worked. He took the gas key which the owners had given him and inserted it in the slot, twisting to start. He went to the kitchen to get a matchbox, and ran back into the living room to light the fire. He threw the match on the fireplace and watched it burst into flame. It was a lot warmer, so he moved closer to the fire, taking the key out of its place. As he did, he noticed something strange. There was a slot for a small key right on the little metal extrusion for the gas key.

Something clicked inside him and he bolted upright, shouting, “A keyhole! There’s a keyhole! I found it! I found it!”

After several minutes of frantic shouting, he realized that he didn’t actually know where the key was. It was not the housekey, which he had thought at first. It was something else, something more complex. He groaned as he realized that the object of his search had changed. He had potentially found the door, just not the key to get past the door. In this instance, he assumed he was just missing the key. Though he didn’t know it, he was correct.

The next few weeks Flinn spent looking in vain for the key. Months passed, in which he spent less and less time looking. Then years. He married a lovely woman, and soon after the honeymoon he renewed his search for the key, with the help of his wife. They still found nothing.

After his wife had two children, the War happened. He built a bomb shelter under the house and went off to fight. He fought in the next two wars, and then left the military. Four more wars happened, but he had had his fill of killing people who didn’t want to be killed while fighting a war he didn’t want to fight over a problem that didn’t exist.

When he was older than he had ever hoped to be, he bought himself a rocking chair to tell stories in. He told stories of hiking with his family, of the military and the battles he had won singlehandedly, of all sorts of adventures. And yet he never told of the key.

One day when Flinn was feeling very old and wise, he heard the doorbell ring. Standing outside was a handsome young man, waiting patiently. Flinn opened the door.

“Please, come in,” he said.

The young man smiled. “No, thank you. I only have one question.”

“Yes?”

“Have you found it yet?”

Flinn sighed and smiled a little. “I’ve lived in this house seventy years, and I still haven’t found it. Looked for a combined total of a year, probably. Why?”

“I’m afraid my parents didn’t want you finding it. In their will, they left me this.” He held up a small, thin stick of metal. “It doesn’t belong to me.”

Flinn took the object and held it with reverence. “Thank you.”

The young man bid him a good day, climbed into his car, and drove away.

Back in the living room, Flinn fiddled around with the key and the keyhole. It clicked after a few minutes and Flinn stood back. In an incredibly anticlimactic moment, the fireplace clicked forward a few inches. He stepped forward, opened it all the way, and removed a reinforced steel box. There was no lock, no key, no latch. Only a large button. He pressed it. The top flipped open and revealed the inside. He fell to his knees and gaped. Gaped at what was inside - nothing.

Inside was an absence of existence so complete, so abject that not even the vastness and emptiness of space compared.  In the steel confines of the box, there was no space, no time, no anything. Life changed in an instant and the world, for all he could tell, froze. Nothing could have even half-prepared him for that lack of anything, the defiance of everything. And that was exactly what nothing did. It was not nothing as the absence of something he could touch, it was an absence of everything.

This will be my final story, the one I won’t try to explain.

He closed his eyes, reached forward, and touched it.

Ember

The pain. Ember was quite sure they had never mentioned the pain.

Aching, searing pain that started in her lungs, and moved its way to her chest. It expanded like an inverse bubble in her modified body, wrapping itself around her ribs and trying to choke them. The other teens were several yards away, also hanging from the bars while trying to hold their breaths.

It felt quite suddenly to Ember as though she had cracked a rib. She could hear it, too, coming through her bones and sounding like a dull clunk. Just like the sound her commander’s head should make, happening in her ribs. It was probably just Cothis, the statistics of hallucination.

Ember’s thoughts wandered when she was in pain. It was her brain’s way of coping, a government program inside redistributing the feeling to other aspects of her consciousness. And, like a government program, it probably would have worked better if it wasn’t in charge of everything.

The program decided it wanted her to drop to the ground, so she did. Ember breathed a long, panging breath. A guard-bot clicked warily, but Ember cared not.

“Give me one more reason, and I’ll quit,” she said.

It did.

The pain of sudden electrocution made Ember want to tear her arm off and cut herself in half with it. She decided to rip apart the robot instead, embracing her primal lust for war. It didn’t make her feel any better, but she stopped feeling worse. With the purpose that came with immediate elimination of extreme pain, she strode toward the door and keyed herself out with the tattooed lines on her wrist.

As the door buzzed its surrender, Ember heard the alarms going off. The frantic crowd around her appeared calm under their projections, and they would want to cling to each other as the klaff chased her down. They wouldn’t be able to, though; the “no-touch” rule was enforced by electric fields.

“I wish you could see me,” she said out loud. The figures appeared not to notice. “I wish I could see me,” her breath muttered under her. She slapped it for being so insubordinate, and it retreated back to her presumably broken lungs.

She kicked her heels forward and zipped forward at speeds near the sound barrier. The halls, though pristine and neat, seemed uneven as she leaned further toward freedom. But she knew, as she had been told hundreds of times, that no one really wants freedom. They simply want change. Right then, change was better than the hell of military training.

Leaning back, Ember looked over her shoulder. A thick body with tentacular appendages ran behind her, easily keeping pace and gaining. In a fluent movement she drew her gun, spun around and aimed at the perforations at what should have been the creature’s face. The appendages were too fast, however, and took the weapon from her grasp and tangled her in what she only hoped wasn’t a loving embrace.

“Why attempt just, frailty?” it cracked, breath hissing from its arms as it did so. “Catch, tear the inside.”

Ember closed her eyes. Her hair wasn’t functioning, not performing its basic task of translating the words. It meant that she was being erased.

“Akram has found his race, I see,” she said. And those were her last words as a hand was waved over the lines on her wrist.

*

Ember lay on the table, her mind inactive for the reason that it was removed. It was her third one, and yet her body still desired trouble; her soul, change. Her purpose was in her very depths, the part of her that operators could neither erase nor find. The air hummed with the silent freedoms that could have been. Her mind would never know it, but she was destined - eventually, in some lifetime - to find one of them.

Somewhere within the recesses of remaining sanity and wakefulness, Ember found energy. No twisted, manufactured consciousness would override her own.

She twitched.

An Exciting Sort of Job (Cullen North)

The gun. It's always the gun.

I'm 16, so I can't legally carry a gun unless I have to. That's supposed to mean when the stars fall from the sky and angry werewolves attack the president. But often times, I can't wait that long. I would die if I did. I'm a ranger. Sort of. All I wanted to do on that not-so-fateful day was go through the usual routine and then take some knock-your-socks-off pictures of deer. No angry werewolves attacking the president, so I couldn't take dad's gun.

You know how the movie characters are always so wrong? Well, it turns out the stars decided to fall to see if gravity really worked. And to spite me. In other words, I should've brought dad's gun.

When I got to the site where I work as a ranger, I parked my car in the usual gravelly rectangle. I don't know who chose it as the parking space, but it had to be someone who had no depth perception to joke about.

Through the usual routine I went, taking care of a few barely-injured-but-very-loud animals, looking for signs of rabid wolves or coyotes or foxes. Why didn't I take the gun, you ask? Because there have never been any rabid wolves or coyotes or foxes. And if there were, I could use my hawk. Or my knife, which is better than any knife you'll ever see. But I digress.

It went wrong when I walked halfway down the steepest hill - more of a mountain - in the property. I looked down at Ol' Robert's cave through my binoculars, and saw no signs of a recent exit.

Ol' Robert was a grizzly who was once in some kind of mining accident, they say. His brain's messed up, but he's still alive. He'll attack anything that moves, and forgets when grizzlies are supposed to hibernate. So he sleeps most of the time. It's when he's awake that he's dangerous.

Seeing no signs of an exit, I walked back to my tree house and set up the camera to take pictures of the deer that would come through soon. It took me at least twenty minutes, but I finally had it just right. It would look amazing, and I could make some good money selling the pics to the right people. They were going to be one in a thousand, maybe even in a million. The landscape was better than a fried apple pie dipped in dutch chocolate, and the camera did it all justice. It was going to be a new car, if I could get it right.

I waited. For at least an hour, I sat motionless, the tree house lights off, terrified that I would scare off the timid deer if I moved so much as a few inches. At one point I resolved to sit for another hour. That was when I heard the unmistakable grunt of Robert.

I knew I had to scare him off, but I didn't really want to shoot blanks into the silent midday air. If I fired a shot, the deer could be off and running, and I would never see them. On the other hand, Robert could try to eat one of them. There wasn't really much of a choice.

And suddenly I remembered I hadn't brought the gun.

I want to say I panicked, but I didn't. I was in a state of utter shock and confusion that I sat for thirty seconds before I even got up. The lights were still off, but Robert could definitely smell me. He didn't hate me, but the two things he likes most are sleeping and eating. And I was the easiest thing he could kill, because he could also smell that I didn't have the hated gun. In other words, I was as dead as a cow. That was dead. (Seriously, there doesn't need to be a simile for death. Everybody understands it.)

I snatched up my binoculars and ran to the window from the direction I had heard the grunt. Robert was about a tenth of a mile away. He could get to me in about a minute, at the very most. I closed the curtain over the window and thought. 

The car was much, much further away than a tenth of a mile. I didn't have any bear spray, and even if I did, I doubt it would have worked. I still don't know how messed up Robert's brain is. There was no way I could escape unless Robert wanted to kill something else. And that was unlikely.

What did I do? I would like to say I took everything I had learned from my extensive research and training to attack Ol' Robert, or at least confront him. But I was too scared of the outcome. My chance of life was, in every possible situation, about the same as the chance of Congress sticking to the Constitution.

As the weak sun trickled through the gaps in the curtain, I closed my eyes and sighed. I flipped open my phone to call my mom and tell her she would probably never see me again. And then I heard a bang that sounded about the size of the mountains where I worked.

I jerked open the door and looked out to see my dad. I didn't wonder how he came, or why he was there. I just waved and clapped like a stupid seal. Dad didn't notice, and instead fired another round. Grumpy Grizzly had had enough, so he galloped off.

"Why are you here?" I shouted. Dad looked up at me and waved. I waved back, still waiting for his answer. He put his backpack back on, picked up the things that had fallen off, and walked towards the treehouse. I lowered the rope ladder and helped him up. "Well?" I asked again when he was inside.

"I wanted to go camping out here in these woods," he said. "We didn't have a lot of things that we needed, so I went out and bought them. That's why I wasn't there in the morning. You could have asked your mother for the gun, you know."

I rolled my eyes, but didn't comment. He knew that I hadn't been expecting the grizzly. Remembering that Robert could still be roaming around, I asked dad for the handgun and trotted away to look for Robert. It took about half an hour, but I made sure he wouldn't be able to leave the area around his cave without my noticing.

Much later that day, dad and I were sitting as still as an old cassette player in the tree house, waiting for the deer. I was uncomfortably aware of how unnecessary it was, seeing that the deer had probably all run away, but I said nothing. Just in case.

Finally, at about eight o'clock, the deer came. Dad and I had gotten tired, and were playing card games, when dad looked out the window and noticed a few of them wandering out into the open (ish) fields.

I dashed to my camera and spent the next arduous half hour taking the fantasized photos. They turned out well enough, but not as well as I had hoped. The gunshots had scared most of them off. So much for that new car.

That night, dad and I determined that he would leave the handgun in the tree house. If I ever used it I had to write down the reason. I objected, but eventually I had to give in. It would have been much more interesting if we had just left it the way it was.

Ol' Robert would agree.

Your Lead Character Should Make Bad Decisions

Recently I have been thinking a lot about character development, for the purpose of making my lead an actual person to the people who read what I write. After about an hour of reading, I found a lot of helpful advice. But not a whole lot of it was about morals, and I can't recall any of it that was specifically about moral choices a character has to make. So here I am to give you never-before heard advice, as far as I can tell.

In the first chapter, something has to happen, your main character should have to make a choice. (This doesn't always happen, but it's advisable that it does.) That choice must have a reason behind it, and the same choice has to be made for a reason. If there is, indeed, such a choice, it should be of a moral significance, even if only slightly. And your lead should make the questionable or wrong decision.

Think about it: if you really have to make a tough decision, more often than not, you would make the right one. Maybe you would regret it, maybe you would make it for questionable reasons, but it would still be the right decision. When you really have to think about something, and yet you still make the wrong (moral) decision, that shows a lot more about your character.

It is a rare occurrence when someone really has to think hard about a choice, and then makes the wrong one (talking about morals, not life decisions).

Everyone has something that they spend a lot of energy, thought, effort, research, money, time, relationships, friendships, or sanity trying to hide. That one deep, dark corner of their heart. And yet, the wrong moral decisions they make give you a glimpse into that inner person.

With all that said, the never-before heard advice is: your lead character should, in some chapter of your novel, make the wrong moral decision. Preferably, this paradox of creating a likable character would occur within the first or second chapters of your amazing story you have to tell the world. But it still should be there.

It doesn't even have to be the wrong decision. It could just be the questionable one. For example, do you get fired from work and chase the guy who just robbed a store, or do you leave it to the police? If that's a tough decision for your main character to make, the reader knows more about him than if it never occurred to him to help the store owner.

Just remember that thoughtful, yet wrong decisions on the part of your lead can help develop him or her so much more than the right ones, or none at all.

I say this at the end of every blog post, but thank you for your time. It comes in short supply these days, and I appreciate your willingness to lend me such a valuable currency. Thank you.

Book Review: Master of the World by Jules Verne

Nowadays, not many stories or novels have moral lessons hidden in the ink. But all the classics do. Jules Verne's novel Master of the World, which he published about a year before he died, is no exception. It's a fantastic story that also serves as a lesson in pride and power.

It's an event story, with very (very) strong elements of idea. It begins when a mountain in South Carolina is suspected of being a volcano. The news goes wild, the locals freak out, but no one can get a look at its crater. The news dies down, of course, because eventually it becomes old. Shortly after that, however, an incredibly swift automobile is seen, and the news picks up on that. Another very fast vehicle, a boat, shows up, and the news writes about those for a while. However, when a fast submarine is discovered soon after that, one newspaper hypothesizes that all the machines are one and the same. This is widely accepted, and happens to be correct.

The main character, a detective, is one of the most thoughtful characters in literary history, and what's better is that he has a right to be, because he's a detective. He is the eyes through which we are given the main moral lesson delivered through the book, that of power and pride. In the novel, a single man has an incredible vehicle, and he makes sure that everyone in the world knows it. After a while, the public is so terrified, yet in awe, of the mysterious vehicle that many governments offer very large sums of money in order to own the machine. The prices offered go up and up, until finally the inventor puts a notice in the newspaper that he refuses all offers.

But he doesn't stop at that: he says that "with [the vehicle], I hold control of the entire world, and there lies no force within the reach of humanity which is able to resist me, under any circumstances whatsoever." If the public had been hysterical before, it was nothing compared to what the reaction was after the letter was published. That's when the main character is called to arrest the driver of the vehicle. And he gets close. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it's a surprising one.

The monopoly of power in relation to the public is the most obvious, and the least subtle of the moral lessons: everyone wanted it. When they couldn't have it, they still wanted it; when it was a threat, they wanted it destroyed. The power was so far advanced, they had no way of even addressing it. However, it was not simply the love of power that drove their desires; it was the pride of having power, being associated with it. When the public's prideful love of power couldn't be applied, they wanted the power gone. Also, they were more than just a little bit scared.

To put it in a more modern light, it would be as though someone had singlehandedly mastered interstellar travel, teleportation, and nuclear fusion - and put them all into one vehicle. People would have mixed reactions; they would be terrified, yes, but if the owner were benevolent, it would be slightly less terrifying, and they would hope that the latter was the reality. Governments would probably make a lot of stupid decisions trying to get it, because they want power. The pride of owning the machine, the reputation it would bring, would flare brighter than the rational fear (so Verne predicted).

However, Jules Verne shows quite effectively that governments would not be alone in their desire; the people would want the machine as well. In his novel, the citizens knew very well that the millions of dollars offered for the new vehicle would be taken from their tax dollars. But they didn't mind, because of both national pride and the hunger for that kind of self-image, the association with power.

The power and pride in relation to the driver/inventor of the vehicle, the self-proclaimed "Master of the World," is a little more intricate and implied. The inventor is a very intelligent man, and obviously a master technician. He could have made millions, if not billions, by using his talents across multiple industries. Instead, he wanted to rule the world. Why?

In the prequel to Master of the World (yes, there's a prequel, and it's called Robur the Conqueror) he had already put himself above the rest of humanity (pride). He had a new and innovative flying machine, and he decided that society wasn't ready for it, because of their love for power. They would, he figured, use it for their own personal and destructive gain. He didn't want that, so he flew away and didn't reveal his secret.

So basically, he already knew that his judgment skills were better than everyone else's, that he was less selfish, and that he was just a better person. This turned into hypocrisy, to the point where he decided that since society was so degraded and behind him, they needed a guiding ruler, who would tell them how to do better, and who could do whatever he wanted. His pride, his love of power, got in the way of his judgment. This is, in the end, what made things that much more difficult for him.

And that's really what happened with society and government: their pride in their image and love of power, the sense that they could do things better, led them to make decisions that very well could have made things worse. The only difference is that things didn't actually get worse, the perception got worse. The "Master of the World" wasn't so lucky, but you'll have to read the book.

Should you read this book? Yes. It's short, it's a good read, and I only scratched the surface of Verne's moral lessons in the book. And it's free. Get it, read it, and see for yourself if it's a good lesson in morals and society.

I appreciate that you read to the end. If you disagree, or think this was a terrible review, or think I'm as dumb as a horse, let me know in the comments so I can disagree with you. Thanks!

The Different Types of Stories (and how it should affect your writing)

There are a lot of different ways to look at stories. Seriously, a lot. I've only known four or five of them, but I've seen many more than that. In this post, I will give you the Story Structure Theory that has helped me the most in my work as an author.

I won't be so arrogant as to claim that this is the best of all the systems. Nor will I take credit for something I didn't invent. This blog post is a shameless summary of Orson Scott Card's ideas, which I think are fantastic.

He sets up four story types: Milieu, idea, character, and event. They've helped my writing improve, and I hope they do the same for you. I'll go over each of these story types and give examples, starting with milieu.

Milieu literally means "a person's social environment." So, a milieu-type story will focus on the world around a character, whether it be social (for things like romance or thrillers) or aesthetical (for sci-fi/fantasy). It is the world itself, the society, the weather, the MC's family, and basically every element that pops out when you create the world in the first place.

Every story has a world, a person's environment, but in this particular type of story it is what the author focuses on, what they write about the most. There can be a good standard plot line with things happening and so on, but those won't be as strong as the world the author creates. I haven't read for myself, but I've heard that author Hugh Howey creates milieus very well.

Milieu structures are, in essence: an common observer with our same perspective gets to the new/strange/different place, observes things, is changed by what he sees (positively or negatively), and then returns as a different person. Milieus don't have to just be the trees and the grass; they can be the evil emperor who constantly sends out his minions to attack the protagonist. Or a milieu could be the odd weather in a place.

A good example of this played out in a book would be Gulliver's Travels, or even Planet of the Apes. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a good example: the story doesn't end when Dorothy kills the witch. It ends when she goes back to Kansas.

Second, there is idea. This story type is about characters who look for, and eventually find, new information (or make discoveries). To quote OSC himself, "The idea story begins by raising a question; it ends when the question is answered."

I think it would be safe to say that nearly all mystery stories follow this structure. The beginning question is "who committed this crime?" and the book ends when the question is answered. Other types of stories can follow this line as well; for example, raising the question "how did Ancient Rome fall?" and ending with the author's opinion, or just a good or interesting explanation.

The character type of story is quite common today. It focuses on the changing of a character's role in the places that matter most. Sure, in one sense, almost every story is "about" one or more characters. However, most stories are not about who the character really is. Character type stories are.

OSC words it very well, so I'll quote him again: "The story begins at the moment when the main character becomes so unhappy, impatient or angry in her present role that she begins the process of change; it ends when the character either settles into a new role (happily or not) or gives up the struggle and remains in the old role (happily or not)."

The Hunger Games has a strong character element to it, as does Stowaway by Karen Hesse. Captain Nemo in the book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea follows this type of story, though the book itself does not.

Finally, we have event. This may just be the most common of all the structures, and it's probably the one that most people will want to write.

The story starts with the universe out of order (to put it a little drastically). Something is wrong. This could be the One Ring being re-discovered and a powerful adversary reappearing (LOTR), a boy being transported into another world that is tyrannized by an evil wizard (Beyonders: A World Without Heroes), a father's empire dissolving and family wealth disappearing (Artemis Fowl), or the murder of a King by his brother (Hamlet). All of these have a world where things are generally good - and then they get bad. The rest of the story focuses on the protagonist attempting to put things right.

The event story ends when a new order is put into place or, in some cases, when everything goes back to being exactly the way it used to be, or, in a select few cases, when the "good guys" fail, the world goes into chaos, and all order is destroyed. 

The story starts not at the point when the world becomes disordered, but rather at the point when the main character becomes involved. This is why it is rarely a good idea to write a prologue, and you should avoid it at all costs: the main character is the focus more than anything. You should know from experience that people tend to skip the prologues, and even if they don't, it will subtract from the rest of the experience of the MC's struggles and triumphs.

So, how should this affect your writing? To start, each story has every element in it. Your book, your short story, your film project, etc. automatically has an idea, or a question that should be answered, a milieu around your character where a bad event happens.

Now, not all stories have a particular focus. Maybe you decide that your story best falls under the idea and event structures, and you don't want to change it. As long as you're making sure to look past your own ideas, that's fine. (But if you can, try to narrow it down to one major genre.)

Something I found in my own story is that for the first half or so, it was more idea-focused. There was nothing particularly wrong with the world at first. Then it changed into more of an event-based story. I have yet to hear from my beta readers if that's a good idea or not, but so far they've told me they're intrigued. As long as you keep the story moving, you can't really go wrong when you're not writing blindfolded.

Well, that's it. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope this was helpful!

P.S. There's something really exciting that I've been gearing up for for a while: about once every other week, I'll do a book review. I'll start with the lesser-known or lesser-read classics, and then do some more modern writing. This is one reason I blogged about this, so you understand what you're reading when it comes to those reviews.

I'm also going to post a short story once a month, hopefully. I'm really excited about that too. I'm not sure what I'm going to do first, but I do know that it will most likely be adventure (without any magic or over-the-top tech).

Thank you for your support!

Don't Write Blindfolded

In our society today, nearly everyone wants to write a book. 80%, in fact. But of those, very few will actually try to write one. And of those, even fewer will actually finish. Why is that?

If you want to write a book, but haven't yet, you need to get on that. Make your goal a paragraph, a hundred words, or even just a single sentence. Just get on it.

If you have started, this post is for you. From my experience as a writer and from the experiences of other writers I know, you've probably not just started one book. You're on your third, or your eighth, or you one hundred and sixty-fourth. Whatever number it is, you're probably not just working on your first. Why?

Because you got bored. Or because the story wasn't coming to you. Or because you lost inspiration. Or because you got a better idea. Or all of these. But these all have the same problem: you're writing blindfolded.

What I mean is that you don't have a plan. There is no goal to your story, and you don't intend for there to be one. You just have a bunch of cool characters, maybe some awesome gadgets or intriguing wizards. You've created mansions, huts, shacks, cars, streets, skyscrapers, entire worlds in your head. It's exciting at first, but when you lose inspiration, or when it gets old, you move on. But it can be fixed.

The easiest way to fix all this is to add a goal. What is your character doing in the skyscrapers, why is the group afraid of the bad guys, and why do we care that a side-character betrayed the main character?

We care because the main character is a vigilante, looking for his parents that the FBI took when he was fourteen. Or because Jim stole the plans for the new super-spaceship and gave them to the communists.

The more difficult way, especially because you've already started writing, is to plan it all out. Now, this doesn't work for everyone, including some famous authors, but it worked for me and many others. Probably most others.

So, plan it all out? That sounds tedious. It can be, if you plan each and every detail. All I mean is that you should have ideas of scenes. The MC goes to Paris, gets caught by the police for doing something wrong, goes to prison, escapes with another man, and they take over the French air force to attack the killer robots.

That's a little bit of a ridiculous example, but you get the point: each scene, not each time your character breathes. Be careful to remember that the story still needs a goal.

Not all stories need goals, but those are few and far between, and take a particularly good author. I'll cover the types of stories and plots later this week or early next week. For now, just try to find a goal, a reason for your character to do anything, in your story. You might be surprised.

Thank you for your time, as always.