David Kubicek

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Archive for the tag “fiction”

01 Jul 2010
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Unconscious Writing: Putting the Subconscious to Work

There are two schools of thought about how writers write:

  • Some writers write complete, detailed scene plans before they put down a single word of first draft; they believe that they are  consciously in charge of every idea and every plot twist in their stories.
  • Others believe that a large part of their work rises up from the subconscious.

I’m a subconscious writer. I believe in letting my subconscious take an active part in my storytelling. This was not always so.

When I first started writing I thought I had total control of my stories. A story I wrote called Be a Man changed all of that. It was a simple story, I thought, about a kid who has an unpleasant experience in swimming class and becomes disillusioned about his teacher. I gave it to one of my former English professors, Bob Bergstrom, to read.

When Bob gave me his critique he launched into an in-depth analysis of the character and what was really happening in the story. I was shocked. I admitted that everything he said was true, but I hadn’t realized it was there. That was a lot of stuff to pack into a 2,300-word story.

I forget how long the idea for Be a Man gestated–tumbled around in my mind–before I put it down on paper. But I do remember that it was about two from idea to writing of Two Coffees. I was at Godfather’s Pizza with a friend. She indicated a table not to far from us and told me about the dude who she’d see when she was in with some of her friends the other night. He’d ordered four glasses of beer, set one in front of himself and the others around the table. Then he proceeded to carry on a conversation with the invisible buddies who, apparently, possessed the other three beers.

As you can see from the story a lot changed from conception to execution. This 900-word story is on my Website because it’s my favorite, particularly because my subconscious was deeply involved in the writing. I discovered this on re-reading the story a few years after I wrote it. I submitted the story three times, and it has been published twice–excluding its online publications.

I believe that even writers who believe in strictly outlining and scene-planning everything are influenced by their unconscious minds whether they know it–or like it–or not. But I don’t think they take full advantage of the powers of their subconscious.

The subconscious needs time to work. It cannot be forced, but it can be nudged. Here are some ways to nudge it:

  • If you’re working on a story problem, sleep on it. Turn it over in your mind, and your subconscious will work on while you’re sleeping.
  • Take a break, sometimes a long break. Your subconscious will continue working even while you are awake, engaged in other activities.
  • Be patient.

How do you know your subconscious is working? Because suddenly, out of nowhere, an idea will pop into your mind, and often it will be better than what you had been thinking of.

The patience part is the most annoying to me because things may not come together as quickly as I’d like, but when the ideas do come they are inevitably much cooler than if I had wracked my conscious mind for solutions. For example, I’m working on a young adult dystopian novel with the working title of Beyond the Wall. The story has changed dramatically in the last couple of months, so dramatically that the title will definitely have to be changed because the wall probably will not exist in a physical sense.

This also is why I have several projects going at the same time; if I need to prime my subconscious to work on one story, I switch to another while my subconscious takes its own sweet time, and I check back regularly to see if some new ideas are coming. I don’t have any trouble switching back and forth between projects. It’s not a bad ability for a writer  to try to develop.

I have always wanted to write a novel or short story fast, in white heat, like some writers (in his book On Writing, Stephen King says that he writes the first draft of every novel, no matter how long, in three months). That would be seriously cool. I’ve tried it on many occasions, but all I succeeded in doing was creating extra work for the garbage collector (or these days, to be politically correct, the recycling dudes).

If that works for you, great. But if you find yourself constantly getting stuck on story problems, instead of whacking at your conscious mind with a sledge-hammer, try gently consigning the challenges to your subconscious for a few days.

Posted in Writing Fiction and tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
25 Jun 2010
4 Comments

Poll: Do You Write by Longhand or Computer?

Posted in Polls and tagged , , , ,
24 Jun 2010
2 Comments

Writing Short Stories Teaches Discipline

During the first decade of my writing career I wrote short stories as if I had a patent on the form, about 200 of them, and that’s only the ones I have a record of. There were many more that I deemed unworthy of being submitted and took a direct route to obscurity–the trash can.

After that fairly prolific period, I moved into other areas, and my short story writing slowed to a trickle. I wrote two novels (unpublished), three screenplays (not produced), started a publishing company (published five books), and finally became a photojournalist (published more than 3 million words). When I again focused on fiction writing, I concentrated on the novel.

But the other day I came across an interview with a fellow named Stephen King, who is not only a prolific novelist but a prolific short story writer. King said that when writers concentrate too much on novels, they tend to lose interest in writing short fiction. I would add that the short story is a good laboratory for learning discipline.

Every story has a perfect length. College students often want to know how long their assignments are required to be. I had a writing teacher in college who, when asked what length a story must be, said “As long as it needs to be.” A story could be 1,000 words or 100,000 words, as long as it does what you intended it to do. That’s pretty much what King said.

If you are focusing only on novels, you may be missing lots of good ideas for shorter fiction.

For me there are a couple of obvious advantages, not in any particular order,  for writing novels over short fiction:

  • The pay is potentially better, and you will be paid a royalty per copy sold, whereas selling a short story to a magazine is a flat fee (although you may be able to pick up an occasional reprint fee if someone likes your tale well enough to include it in an anthology).
  • You can develop memorable characters in novels; this is the part I like–developing characters with depth and reading stories about characters with depth. In a 5,000-word short story this is an almost impossible task.
  • A novel may be easier to sell, and there are more markets for novels–although this is an arguable point.

Plenty of magazines (including some online mags) buy short stories. Start with Writer’s Digest, which publishes several Writer’s Market directories. You can even subscribe to Writer’s Market online. If you write in a particular category–science fiction, mystery/crime, literary, etc.–there are many magazines that publish those types of fiction. Glimmer Train is one magazine that not only pays well for fiction, but also has several contests each year.

Writing short fiction is more difficult  than writing novels.  You must focus on a single, defining event, and any wasted words or other mistakes will jump off the page. But for those of you who are starting out–and even for seasoned novel-writing pros–writing in the short form will teach you discipline.

In the past ten years I’ve written a total of three short stories, even though I’ve had plenty of ideas that I jotted down for future use. But  the Stephen King interview has inspired me to start writing some of those stories, although I certainly will not neglect my current novel.

To watch the Stephen King interview as well as comments from a couple of other prolific short story writers:

Stephen King

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Ray Bradbury

Posted in Writing Fiction and tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
18 Jun 2010

When You Should be Paid for Your Writing, and When it’s okay Not to be Paid

In the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, in a nearly three and a half minute segment–laced with, as Spock said in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, many “colorful metaphors”–writer Harlan Ellison rants that writers must be paid for everything they write. Everything.

In general, I agree with him. People–sometimes even editors, who should know better–undervalue writers. Isn’t there an old joke in Hollywood that when it comes to power and respect the screenwriter is one step below the janitor who cleans up the studio?

Back in the days when I was doing writing-for-hire work, a fellow wanted me to write his book, for which he magnanimously offered to pay me $100. To write the whole book. That’s one of the reasons I no longer seek writing-for-hire jobs.

Ellison scoffs at the idea of giving away his writing for publicity; publicity, he says, will not do him as much good as cold, hard cash. He’s probably right. Ellison has been writing for more than fifty years and has a respectable track record across several genres, including television. So the publicity value of working for free is negligible, but the cash would buy some groceries.

But for writers at certain stages in their careers, giving away freebies may be helpful. These stages include:

  • Beginners who are trying to become noticed.
  • Writers who are known locally or regionally and are trying to broaden their appeal.
  • Writers who are trying to create platforms, to brand themselves, to become known as an experts of particular subjects.
  • Writers who already have platforms but want to promote their expertise in other areas.

All of the above can be done most effectively on the Web where writers can create their own Websites and blogs, can be guest writers on other blogs, and can comment on blog posts they read. This is a seriously cool time to be a writer; creating a platform is much quicker and easier than before the advent of the Internet. The networking possibilities are virtually limitless.

As I wrote in an earlier post, one of the Four Steps to Building a Successful Writing Career is marketing. When I write for my blog or other blogs or post articles at other sites around the Web, I’m working in the marketing/PR area; the free work I do will eventually pay off in a growing audience for my work.  Writing is an art, and I would write even if I never made a dime, but when I move on to the production step, I’m writing fiction and nonfiction for which I eventually expect to be paid.

For another perspective on being paid for your writing see the blog of novelist Allison Winn Scotch.

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06 Jun 2010
11 Comments

Day Jobs of Famous Writers Before They Were Famous

Most writers have been faced with the challenge of making a living while waiting for that big break. Day jobs I’ve held included dishwasher, custodian, film processing lab technician, copy-editor, advertising copywriter, publisher, and print shop stripper (it’s nothing dirty; I “stripped” negatives into paper frames which were used to “burn” offset printing plates–with today’s direct-to-plate technology, printers may not even need strippers anymore).

Here’s a look at jobs held by a few famous writers before they were famous. Some of them eventually were able to write full-time, others never sold enough books and had to keep their day jobs, and others like Scott Turow (who continues to practice law) and John Grisham (who remains interested in politics and considered running for U.S. Senator from Virginia in 2006) maintain their non-writing career interests.

  • Dashiel Hammet: The author of hard-boiled detective stories and novels started out as a private detective. His first case?  To track down a thief who had stolen a Ferris Wheel.
  • John Grisham: Author of such legal thrillers as The Firm and The Pelican Brief, is an attorney who, from 1983 to 1990, served as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives.
  • Jack London: The author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and The Sea Wolf had a variety of experiences, including oyster pirate, gold prospector, and rail-riding hobo .
  • Langston Hughes: One of the first African American authors who was able to support himself by writing, he was, according to legend, discovered by poet Vachel Lindsay while working as a  busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. Hughes had dropped his poems beside Lindsay’s plate. In his poetry reading Lindsay included several of Hughes’s poems, which resulted in journalists clamoring to interview the “busboy poet.”
  • William Carlos Williams: The poet and fiction writer was an excellent pediatrician and general practitioner, although he worked harder at his writing than he did at medicine.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: The American poet, philosopher, and essayist assisted his brother William in a school for young women they ran out of their mother’s house.  He later was a minister and lecturer.
  • Henry David Thoreau: He began as Emerson’s handyman, moved on to selling vegetables, returned to the family pencil business, was a tutor and a teacher.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: The author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables was a weighter and a gauger at the Boston Custom House, which housed government offices for processing paperwork for the import and export of goods. Later he was Surveyor for the districts  of Salem and Beverly as well as Inspector of Revenue for the Port of Salem. He also wrote a campaign biography of his friend, Franklin Pierce, in which he left out some key information, such as Pierce’s drinking.  On his election, Pierce rewarded Hawthorne with the position of United States consul in Liverpool.
  • Dan Brown: Before striking gold with Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol , he was a high school English teacher.
  • Zane Grey: Early 20th century author of such popular novels as Riders of the Purple Sage, he would eventually publish nearly 90 books and sell more than 50 million copies worldwide. After years of rejection, he sold his first book at age 40 and was able to give up his day job as a dentist, a job that he hated.
  • J. K. Rowling: After her daughter was born and she separated from her husband, the author of the Harry Potter series left her job in Portugal, where she taught English as a second language, and returned to school to study for her postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) so she could teach in Scotland. She completed her first novel while on welfare.
  • Mary Higgins Clark: After graduating from high school, she was secretary to the head of the creative department in the internal advertising division of Remington-Rand, a business machines manufacturer. She took evening classes in advertising and promotion and was promoted to writing catalog copy–future novelist Joseph Heller was a coworker. She also modeled for company brochures with aspiring actress Grace Kelly. Her thirst for adventure led her to become a stewardess for Pan American Airlines where she was on the last flight allowed into Czechoslovakia before the Iron curtain cut off east from west.
  • Harlan Ellison: The man who would later distinguish himself as a preeminent speculative fiction and mystery writer held many jobs before he was 20 years old, including tuna fisherman, itinerant crop-picker, hired gun for a wealthy neurotic, nitroglycerine truck driver, short order cook, cab driver, lithographer, book salesman, department store floorwalker, and door-to-door brush salesman.
  • Scott Turow: The author of such best selling novels as Presumed Innocent and Reversible Errors, still practices law as a partner of the Chicago firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, although on most of his cases he works pro bono.
  • Nicholas Sparks: After graduating from college the author of such best sellers as The Notebook, Dear John, and The Last Song tried to find work in the publishing industry and applied to law school but had no luck in either area. So he embarked on other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone, and starting a manufacturing business.

This post is dedicated to my cousin, Unitarian minister and scholar Dr. Wesley Hromatko, who inspired me to look into the day jobs of some famous authors.

Posted in Writing Fiction and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
17 May 2010
2 Comments

One Writer’s Process for Writing a Novel

I’m at the end of what, to me, is the most annoying part of the writing process: planning the story.

When I started writing, I wrote short stories, tons of them. My process of writing a short story is much like Ray Bradbury’s. Bradbury said: “My stories run up and bite me on the leg–I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.”

A novel is a different beast. It is generally 50,000 to 100,000 words. Most of us couldn’t write one of them in an afternoon. Not even the prolific writer Isaac Asimov managed that. The story tension must be maintained throughout. There are usually many characters that must be kept straight and a few subplots that must interact in just the right ways.

Unlike a short story, which grabs my leg and hangs on until I write it down, a novel to me is more like hit and run. Then I have to catch it and wrestle it to the ground and try to tame it. At first, I have fun thinking of the possibilities. But as I get down to specifics the irritation sets in.

This is the period during which passersby accuse me of sitting around doing nothing or even sleeping. Well, sometimes I am sleeping, but sleeping is the best time to work on your story. It really is. You prime the pump, so to speak, by thinking hard about your story, then you drift off to sleep and let your subconscious do the work. You’d be surprised what kinds of revelations pop into your mind the next time you’re working on your story–while you’re awake, I mean.

Sometimes during the planning process I get a lot figured out. Sometimes not. That’s when I get impatient and start writing. I’ve never been good at just starting to write and letting the story flow–unless I have a solid idea of what the story’s about. If I don’t have the characters and their purpose in the story well delineated, if I don’t have a solid conflict, if I don’t have some idea of where I’m going, I usually wind up with hundreds of pages of junk.

When I wrote my second novel (which, alas, still is unpublished) it took me six months to get it started. I wrote, then threw away what I had written and started over. I did this several times. I’m not alone in using this method. Mark Twain wrote 400 pages of Huckleberry Finn, then tossed it and began again.

NOTE: I don’t mention my first novel simply because it was so bad that the garbage collector refused to touch it–he suggested I call the hazardous waste people.

I’ve been working on my current novel, a young adult dystopian story, for weeks (all right, months), and I still haven’t quite got it figured out. I have, however, just written a clear, concise paragraph in which my heroine states precisely what she wants and the major obstacle standing in her way of reaching her goal.

The paragraph has a character, a setting, a conflict, and a nemesis–although we don’t know from reading the paragraph that one of the other characters mentioned is the nemesis. That’s a surprise I’m saving for later.

Although I usually see a short story in its entirety and follow a familiar path to a foreseen conclusion, I usually begin my longer works without knowing what’s going to happen along the way. Sometimes I know how they will end, but sometimes I don’t. This is one of those times.

A famous sculptor, I forget who, said that he sees his finished work in a block of stone. He just chips away everything that isn’t part of his final sculpture. I look at writing the same way: the story is there, the writer just has to reveal it.

I’m ready to start the next phase, the less annoying phase, and start expanding on the paragraph. I’m ready to start revealing my story. I have a heroine and a nemesis, a setting, and a conflict. I want to find out what’s going to happen to these characters. My typing fingers are itching.

That’s a sketch of my writing process. What is your process?

Posted in Uncategorized, Writing Fiction and tagged , , , , ,
13 Apr 2010
3 Comments

Researching Your Stories: Write What You Know, Even When You Haven’t Experienced It

“I disagree with the advice ‘Write about what you know.’ Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.” – Donald Windham

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’ve probably been advised once or twice by a well-meaning writing teacher or Beta Reader, to write about what you know. Usually they mean to write about things you’ve experienced. While it is good to write what you know, you don’t have to experience it to know it.

When I was attending the University of Nebraska I knew a science fiction writer named Cindy who’d had two stories published in Analog. One of those stories had been critiqued by a writing Professor from whom I was currently taking a class. The Professor had admonished her to “write what she knows,” and apparently he was skeptical that an alternate reality was something that Cindy understood. That story went on to become her first published fiction.

Although some writers have  written excellent fiction that has grown out of their experiences, for most of us there is research. The research can range from a little to extensive.

While in college, I wrote a story for a writing workshop about a custodian cleaning the morgue during the graveyard shift. He has a habit of drinking on the job and is a little tipsy, so he believes that one of the bodies dropped off for an early morning autopsy is really alive but is in a coma. I had never been in a morgue so I called Lincoln General Hospital and asked if I could come over and take a look. A nice fellow showed me around the morgue (the first thing I learned is they didn’t like to call it the morgue; on the door was a sign that said “Clinical Evaluation”), and I went home and wrote the story.

It turned out that one of my classmates actually had been a custodian on the graveyard shift at Lincoln General. He thought I’d worked there at one time myself. When I told him I’d just done research, he said I’d nailed it. He asked if they still had that barrel of brains … I said no, just the jars containing bits of organs in the closet.

“Clinical Evaluation” became my first published story, appearing in Pig Iron Press’s 1983 anthology The New Surrealists.

Arthur Hailey was an example of a writer whose backgrounds were almost entirely researched. The author of such bestselling novels as Airport, Hotel, and The Moneychangers, Hailey would choose an industry, spend months researching it in-depth, and then set a story in that industry.

Although Hailey was a pilot, he didn’t have much personal experience (and most of the time he had no personal experience) of the things about which he wrote. But no one could ever accuse Arthur Hailey of writing about things he did not know.

Whatever you write about you can fill in the parts you don’t know with research. Sometimes what you haven’t experienced can be a major part of the story.

When you research, use “live” rather than “dead” sources as much as you can, or as much as you need to. A dead source is anything you find in a book, magazine article, a document, online, or any other place it is written down or recorded. A live source is when you get your information by talking to people who have had the experience you’re writing about. In the examples above, Cindy used dead sources–and her imagination–to get her science fiction story right; Arthur Hailey and I used live sources for our research.

Use “live” sources whenever you can because they’ll be able to tell you things you usually won’t find in books. You’ll be able to ask them questions that will help give your story the touch of verisimilitude that it needs. For instance, you’ll be able to ask a person who grew up in New York City what it feels like to window shop on  Sunday morning, what the traffic’s like at that time, and how many pedestrians are out.

You probably would search long and hard for that information in a book, and you may not be able to find precisely what you want by surfing the Web.

The Internet, however, is a good tool to use for contacting “live” sources around the world and getting almost instantaneous answers. For example, the Australian writer Steph Bowe–whose first novel, Girl Saves Boy, will be published in Australia this September and the summer of 2011 in the U.S.–recently posed several questions to her American followers on Twitter about how an American character would react in certain situations.

Make sure that your research is thorough. Dean Koontz is another example of a writer who does extensive research. He cautions writers to be sure to get the tiniest details right–for one of his novels he had to find out the color of taxicabs in a certain Japanese city.

Don’t assume that you know something; find out. I thought the slang “blow away” was descriptive of what happens when someone gets shot; the force of the bullet knocks the victim over. Then I researched it for a novel I was writing. As it turns out you’d have to use a pretty big gun for that to happen. I mean a seriously big gun. If you shot someone with a .357 Magnum or a shotgun, for instance, he would just drop like a sack of potatoes, not go flying off his feet like he did in one movie that shall remain nameless.

That’s the sort of thing that somebody, somewhere will know, and it’s annoying to be at a book signing and–to paraphrase Ray Bradbury–have one of your readers say, “Dude, on page 227 where Joe gets shot and it flings him over the back of the couch …” and you say, “Yeah,” and he says, “Nah.”

So write what you know, but you don’t have to personally experience it to know it. You know what I mean?

Posted in Writing Fiction and tagged , , , , , , ,
06 Apr 2010

Voice in Fiction: What it is and How to Develop it

Voice is important to a piece of writing. Most agents will tell you that voice is a key factor in whether they accept or reject a novel. Hearing that sends many new writers into a panic–OMG, what is a voice, and how do I develop one?

I can’t give you much advice on voice, other than to assure you that you have one.

Voice is, simply, how you write. Some folks might call it your style. Your voice will develop as you learn to write. Your main literary influences will have some input into your voice. You will borrow things from them but you won’t copy them—or you shouldn’t; that would end in disaster. But you will meld these influences into your own style, your own voice.

For example, my major influences when I started writing were Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway. I got my love for creating imagery from Bradbury and Steinbeck, and I strive to keep my prose simple like Hemingway. I borrowed dialogue techniques and narrative techniques from all three.

But I didn’t copy those dudes. My imagery is down to earth (more like Steinbeck than Bradbury, whose imagery gets a little flowery at times), and I tend to mix longer sentences into my prose than Hemingway. The result was my own style, my own voice, that was different from my literary mentors.

Since then I’ve learned from lots of other writers. I learn something from almost every good novel or short story I read. I even learn from the bad ones (i.e.—don’t use that technique or the story might stink to high heaven).

Your voice doesn’t have to stand out like Bradbury’s. It may be more subtle, but it will develop and become more distinctive the more you write.

One thing I do know about voice is that you can’t consciously develop it. If you try to create a voice you will meet with a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. Your writing will sound phony, and that’s a bad thing if you’re trying to get your work published.

The best advice I can give you concerning voice is: don’t worry about it. Work on your craft, write the kinds of stories you like to read, and your voice will take care of itself.

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