The Story Behind the Story: Running on Empty

It's October, so how could I not publish a ghost story for Halloween?

This one, too, is courtesy of a NYC Midnight: the 2014 Flash Fiction Challenge. My prompt was to write ghost story (obviously), at a gas station, with a dunce cap.

I knew right away I didn't want to do the traditional go-sit-in-the-corner-wearing-a-pointy-hat dunce cap. It took me a while to come up with the twist I used in the story. It was a risk, not using the traditional dunce cap, but the judges liked my take on it. Whew!

The premise, though, came relatively quickly. If you've read "A Seat at the Bar," you might have guessed that I prefer "Twilight Zone" type ghost stories to the hair-raising scary kind of ghost story. This will only solidify that inference.

The hardest part for me was describing the gas station, finding just the right details to show that this place was unusual but still possible in today's day and age. It took a few drafts to make that work, and I have a screenwriter from my former writers' group to thank for the more perfect details that ended up in the final story. Thanks, Gary!

If I say anymore, I'll give away the story . . .

Click here to read "Running on Empty."

The Story Behind the Story: The Legend of Donnie Doheny

It's NYC MIdnight time again! The 2015 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge began last month, and as usual, it pushed me outside my comfort zone.

The last two years, I was assigned Romance as the genre for my first story. I was all prepared for Romance 3.0, but no, the Powers That Be threw me a curveball. I was assigned to write a fantasy this time around. Now, I've read Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia, but fantasy is not a genre I read widely or relate to very well.

Obstacle #1: find a subgenre of fantasy that I could write comfortably within the assigned 48-hour window.

Part 2 of the prompt was a location. In my case, a skateboarding park. My entire knowledge of skateboarding can be summed up thusly:

Photo by miflippo/iStock / Getty Images

Obstacle #2: learn enough about skateboarding to write about it convincingly.

Part 3 of the prompt was an object: a projector. Easy peasy.

I got my assignment around 11 pm Friday night. I slept on it, because when I do that, I often wake up with an idea. This time, not so much. I did my usual Saturday-morning volunteer work at the local animal shelter and then went for a swim after. Somewhere in the middle of my laps, a premise came to me: Cursed object! The one ring! My preciousssss!

By the time I finished my swim, I had the whole story outlined. I even had the name Donnie Doheny, named for the California beach near where I used to live. The trick? Remembering my awesome plot until I got home. Thank goodness for smartphones! I sat in the locker room and typed my outline on my phone.

I wrote Draft 1 that night, Word open on one half of my screen, the Wikipedia entry about skateboarding on the other.

The next day I revised and edited: 12 words over the 1,000-word limit, 7 words under, 4 words over, back and forth, back and forth. I finally found a version I was happy with at 995 words. Story submitted!

I brought the story to my writer's group for their feedback. THEY LOVED IT! They gave me suggestions for fleshing it out a bit, and I'm still working on those changes. What I've posted here is my original story with one change: I had to rename a character because I realized that I'd inadvertently borrowed it from a series I love. Oops.

Click here to read "The Legend of Donnie Doheny."

The Story Behind the Story: In the Deep

Two years ago, I found out about NYC Midnight and its contests from a member of my then-writing-group. At the time, I was struggling to sit down and write, struggling to generate new story ideas. The idea of contest with a deadline and provided prompts sounded like the perfect solution. I'd always done well with externally-imposed deadlines. Far better than I ever did with self-imposed ones. So, I signed up for the next Short Story Challenge.

For the first challenge, contestants had a week to write a 2,500 word story based on their given prompt. Mine was to write a fantasy about an astronaut on a fishing trip. As usual, the main character came to me first: a former astronaut now working as a deep sea explorer.

I sat down and the words poured out. I was almost a thousand words in when I realized I was writing science fiction, not fantasy. Oops. I liked my story, though, and didn't want to through out everything I'd written. I needed a way to turn what I had from sci-fi to fantasy.

The glitch? I wasn't sure what makes a story a "fantasy." It's not a genre I read. Sure, I've read my share of the classic epic fantasies: Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, etc. But most of my reading is history or historical fiction. I needed to find out what defined a non-epic fantasy.

God bless, Google. I found lists of comment fantasy tropes and characters. I found one that fit my sci-fi story, and voila! my sci-fi became fantasy.

I felt good about the story when I submitted it, but I wasn't sure it was "fantasy" enough for the judges. Turned out, it was. I didn't make it past the first round of that competition, but I was encouraged by the judges' feedback. And thanks to the help of my writing groups, I was able to fix some of the issues identified by the judges.

Click here to read part 1 of "In the Deep."

The Story Behind the Story: The Hydrant

I'm the first to admit that "The Hydrant" isn't a story. It's really a character sketch. But writing it was one of my most favorite writing experiences ever.

I was working as an editor at A Major Publishing Company. During a Lunch and Learn workshop, we did a writing exercise. We were presented with an excerpt from the work of comic artist Will Eisner: a series of panels depicting an immigrant woman who lived in a broken-down building collecting water from a hydrant, carrying it back to her room, and feeding her baby.  Almost instantly the words of the "story" came to me. I couldn't write fast enough. At no time since have words flowed from my fingers the way they did during that exercise.

Some day, I'd like to acquire a copy or a print of that page. so I can post the text with the images that inspired it. I can't even find the image online to link to. (Seriously, my image search led to some rather interesting and scary results.) But if you'd like to see the panels, they're on page 65 of Eisner's  graphic novel, New York: The Big City.

Click here to read "The Hydrant."