The Dialogue

Open with me sitting on my ugly yellow sofa staring at my laptop, trying to create new characters. My muse sits on the back of the sofa, hunched over me like a bird of prey.

ME: Before I start writing, I need to fill out these character outlines. What are the two main characters’ names?

MUSE: Christof and Sally.

ME: Next up: ages. How old is Christof?

MUSE: Thirty-two.

ME: And Sally?

MUSE: Seven hundred million and four months.

ME: Next on the character outline: occupation. What does Christof do?

MUSE: He’s a Christmas tree farmer.

ME: I’m not writing a Hallmark Christmas Special here.

MUSE: *Bursts into flames*: I SAID HE’S A CHRISTMAS TREE FARMER!

ME: Okay, okay, sorry. What does Sally do?

MUSE: She’s a five-thousand-ton space squid in human form, sent to steal all of Earth’s Douglas Firs, the Christmas trees Christof farms. They are the only plant that can provide oxygen to her home world.

ME: Great! Conflict! Next up: family.

MUSE: Christof is an only child. Sally has two thousand siblings who will die without Douglas Firs.

ME: Conflict deepens! Now what about eye color?

MUSE *Leaps off their perch and starts to pace*: The story begins with Christof playing Jenga by himself in his trailer. When he was a kid he was a Jenga prodigy but those days are long gone. He hears a crash outside and finds Sally stealing one of his prize Douglas Firs.

ME: We’re not ready for all that. What’s his eye color?

MUSE: Thinking she’s just a local, he orders her to get off his farm.

ME: We’ll skip eye color. What’s his mother’s maiden name.

MUSE: When Sally refuses, he pulls out a can of bear mace. It’s the only thing his sister left behind when she vanished twelve years earlier.

ME: Christof can’t have a missing sister, I just wrote in my outline that he’s an only child.

MUSE: He sprays the bear mace. Sally starts screaming, clutching her face.

ME: Wait! This is too much. I need to finish my outline.

MUSE: Overwhelmed with guilt, he carries Sally to his pickup to drive her to the hospital.

ME: You literally just said she weighs five thousand tons!

MUSE: On the way, Christof realizes this strange woman is healing much faster than she should. At a traffic light they gaze into each other’s eyes and are each instantly struck by cupid’s arrow. *Clutches their chest.*

ME: I’m not writing a love story. I don’t know what I’m writing. None of this is in my outline.

MUSE: Do you want to write an outline or a story?

ME: But… I need to…. I’m still working on….

*They stare at each other for a beat.*

*I start typing, furiously.*

MUSE: And then Sally blows up the car.

ME: What?

Curtain.

In Short

Outlines can be very helpful, I use them all the time. BUT the best way to create characters is to take them out on “test drives.” Put them in a scene and let them interact with each other and experience conflict. Follow your story, even if it takes detours away from what you planned out. The story knows what it’s doing, trust it.

Ironically, character and plot outlines can be a lot more helpful if you use them after you have written a rough draft or at last a few scenes. Get to know your story and characters first then organize everything into an outline.

If you want more tips on how to create great characters, check out The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass.

If you want to read more about my thoughts on outlines go here.

Best Short Story From May

The best short story I read during the month of May was Out of Print by Wen Wen Yang recently published in Apex Magazine. This is a quick read (less than a thousand words) but it’s a tender, beautiful story that follows what happens to fictional characters when people stop reading their stories.  Definitely check it out.

What else happened this month?

One bit of exciting news: I received a certificate officially stating that my short story The Last Time My Twin Destroyed The World was runner up in the New England Science Fiction Association’s Short Story Contest.

Also, I got A LOT of writing done this past month. I did some heavy revision on my horror short story, “Rage and Redemption” and started sending it out to publishers again.

I also revised another short story, “The Year Skyler Richards Ruined Christmas.” Figuring out which publications to send this one to is a little more difficult since it doesn’t neatly fit any genre. It’s a dark comedy and (obviously) holiday themed. It’s sort of horror, the way that a hot dog is sort of a sandwich. I’ve sent it out to one publication and am slowly starting to accumulate a list of other potential publications.

Over the past year I’ve gotten into writing comic book scripts. I wrote a script for a short anthology but was advised to take one of the longer stories and expand on it into a single issue, 24-page “light” horror comic. This was good advice. I’m love the story and am revising it now. I hope to start looking for illustrators later this month.

Finally: I did some further edits on my novel Edge Country. I will be submitting it to an editor later this month.

In terms of books, I read Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil and Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu and Soo Lee and listened to Starter Villain by John Scalzi.

So that’s was May 20024. Just to wrap things up, for absolutely no reason, here’s a photo of my cat being a little emperor.