Fiction writing tips from a master short-storyteller

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My mind was restless and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t afford that, I had to wake up at 5 a.m the next day and go to work. Hell, it was already the next day. 1 a.m. I kept thinking about the trunk of my car, and if I’d find something odd hidden in there. All of it was because of that damn book, North American Lake Monsters: Stories, by Nathan Ballingrud. I’m still not entirely convinced it is really just a book and not memories I have from others lives. That’s how good it is.

North American Lake Monsters is a series of 9 short stories and the perfect combination of the bizarre and the mundane. These stories blend the uncanny and the everyday struggle of life, with a variety of characters in very different situations and locales, but with a single similarity: they will take you down a road you’ve never been before, near the shore of a lake where the water is always deeper (and darker) than it seems. You’ll care about the characters, and they will care about you too. They will try to make it right. But, you know, life is hard.
I can guarantee you that, whatever meaning or interpretation you get out of each story, they will stay with you for long after you read them. The writing is elegant and clear — no fancy or over simplistic stuff. Nathan really knows how to tell a well-written story and he’s the master of sentence length. Forget about writing workshops, read this book instead. I’m serious.

I was so impressed by it that I sent Nathan an e-mail. I said “thank you for those memories” and also asked him how to keep writing when you have a busy routine. God, how I hated waking up 5 a.m. and getting home at 7 p.m. every day. Nathan answered my e-mail (thanks, man) and said he didn’t advocate the “write every day” mantra. He said he wrote North American Lake Monsters: Stories over a period of nine years. Can you believe that? He made me feel like I shouldn’t complain about my routine. He also inspired me to tell my stories, regardless of how long I take to write them. Here’s some of what he told me:

“If it takes you a long time to finish a story because you can only write on weekends, or on any kind of irregular schedule, that’s okay. Just make it a damn good story. That’s what matters in the end. And that’s how I deal with that issue, even today.” — Nathan Ballingrud

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And here are some notes on how his advice shows up in his writing:

I. Some stories can end without a clear conclusion, as long as they end with a clear tone.

You don’t always need to tie everything together in the end. Not everything has an explanation. If the story has a constant tone, just make sure the ending is as good as the climax and serve to this tone, then stop.

II. Reveal the weirdness of the character through dialogue, and give life to it only at the end of the story through actions. Use the middle of the story to build tension.

Why spoil the mystery around the character right at the beginning, if you can just hint that something strange is about to happen? That’s a good way to keep the reader interested. And you can use it to distract him. Send the reader’s paranoid concerns down one lane, and sneak behind him with something else. He will be surprised and also satisfied as if he already knew it would happen, but not how.

III. Or, introduce the character’s weirdness only to the reader, giving life to it in the story later. This will make the reader tense through the whole thing.

The idea here is the same as above, but with a slight change: only the reader knows the character is on the edge.

IV. Start with the character’s struggle and then cut to the first action scene that really moves forward with the story. At the end, relate the story’s conclusion with the first scene.

It’s hard to start a story without moving it forward from page one and keep it interesting, but that can make your story deeper. The trick here is to present something that will keep the reader with you. Nathan just had to present me a character taking care of his debilitated mother in a dark room using a flashlight to keep me interested. Something was wrong, and I kept reading.

V. Introduce the character through a scene that gives him depth and has action, and then break that scene up with a catastrophe that puts him in danger (physically, mentally, socially), transforming him.

That’s the receipt to tell a killer short story filled with action and a good protagonist. You don’t have to skip the action to build the background.

VI. Build tension in a way that a seemingly common drama scene can be used as the climax or ending of a story.

Characters should have problems (as real people do), and that’s what gives them depth. If you can keep adding problems and make them correlate to each other, you’ll have built a huge problem that he now has to deal with. If he is still acting as a “normal” person, then he will deal with it “normally”, as human beings generally do. Like screaming. And if you built the problem in the right way, that reaction can be used as the breaking point of your story.

VII. End the story with the character breaking down even further than he did in the climax.

That might leave the reader kind of lost, but in a good way. It’ll leave him desperate. To do this, I’d suggest using note VI or VIII.

VIII. Write about a family drama occurring around a bizarre event that has no clear relation to it.

That’s an interesting approach to the bizarre. Instead of making the weird the major problem of the character, use it as a way to intensify his real problem. The character’s struggle might have nothing to do with weird-and-possibly-cosmic stuff and everything to do with being-a-human-being-on-planet-Earth stuff.

IX. Let the character fall into misery in front of his loved one.

First, build a romance. Then give problems to one of the characters and make the other deal with his problematic partner. Then make the problematic one hit his face in the mud in front of his love. What will become of their relationship then?

X. Live your own life.

There’s no other way to write really good stories than living your own life, and making it as interesting as possible. Get out there and see the world with your own eyes. Only they will remember what you saw when you sit down to write.

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Those are actually ideas on how to approach writing, even the last one. I usually take notes after finishing great books as a way to learn from the writers, but every experience with a book is different, so maybe you won’t find any usefulness on my notes. But maybe you will.

And maybe they will help you tell damn good stories too.

[This article was originally posted on Medium. It is here now thanks to @stellabelle ]