Musings on Monday’s Mystery

This past Monday I posted a short story called Hourglass. At the end of the story, I challenged you, the reader, to suggest what genre(s) the story might be. The few that dared respond came up with good suggestions that were not completely off-mark. For today’s A-to-Z Blogging Challenge article, I thought I would answer the genre question–at least as best I can–and offer some thoughts about the story and how I approached writing it. This is not intended to be instructional. I am no way in a position to tell the many talented writers who read my blog how to write stories. There’ s much I can learn from you! Rather, this is one writer’s approach to a writing challenge that might inspire you to try a similar approach, or confirm for you that you don’t want to do it this way. And either response is completely valid.

 Why “Hourglass”?

I’m not sure why the word “hourglass” appealed to me. I certainly had no pre-conceived story ideas. It just sounded like a word with a lot of potential. When it came to writing the story, I thought of as many ways an hourglass could be used. Every time I couldn’t get away from the hourglass’s traditional role of marking the passage of time. I liked the way Terry Pratchett uses the hourglass in MORT, where Death has a room full of hourglasses, each with a person’s name on it, marking the passing of that person’s mortal life. I considered stealing this, but I decided it was too original (to me, anyway) to steal. For me, stealing ideas is like laundering money: you don’t want to be the only person through which the idea has passed. If I’m going to steal an idea, I want to be able to point to at least a couple of others who stole the idea before me. So, in the end I decided to keep the hourglass as a device to time something. But what? This is supposed to be flash fiction, so the stakes had to be high and clear without having to develop layers of plot, character, and world-building. And since the story is supposed to center on the hourglass, that passage of time had to matter.

The Genre

I don’t write horror, and I don’t write paranormal… but I have to admit that I consider it quite a skill to be able to write a story that makes a reader have nightmares. This means the writer has done a great job of creating an atmosphere and drawing the reader into his or her world in such a way that the reader’s imagination is fully engaged. In my view, if you can do that, you’ve got yourself a page-turner. I’ve never really had the opportunity (or the story) to test my creep-inducing skills, and thought this might be a good time. Obviously the length of the piece dictated against a lot of atmosphere-building, but that itself was part of the challenge. Also, “Haunted House” fit the letter of the day! So, there’s definitely supposed to be an element of suspense and paranormal in this story. How far I succeeded is your call.

I decided my main character (who I had already determined would be male and have a name beginning with “h”) would have to go into a haunted house. He wouldn’t know it’s haunted. And for some reason he would be up against the clock (or hourglass). This left me with some big questions: WHY would he do this? And WHY would he be timed? And WHAT are the stakes? The first question I think is the most important, because it is key to the whole story. There has to be a strong motive for him to do it. It could have been a dare, and that could work. But I wanted something that hit on bigger motivators than personal pride (which can be a huge motivator): personal survival, and the survival of those we love. As soon as that word “survival” passed through my head, my imagination went all dystopian. I don’t write dystopian, so I would normally have shrugged that off and told my imagination to come up with something else. But for this it seemed the perfect set-up: a post-apocalyptic scenario, with an oppressive government, and food rationing. The big stakes appeared to be built in: survival of the MC and his family–and throw in a sickly mother to make the reward even more tempting! The reward would be extra provisions–including “luxury” items–that would insure survival, and go a long way to restoring the mother’s health. The cost of failure: loss of even the water ration, and the MC being sent “to the mines.” That phrase just dropped into my head, and I thought “what mines?” Then lights went on–landmines! Perfect! The MC would have to work for the government doing life-threatening work in a post-war situation (looking for mines, dealing with disease-ridden corpses–the suggestion of biological warfare…).

So the answer to the genre question is: dystopian/suspense (paranormal?). At least that’s what I was aiming for. A mix of genres I don’t usually write.

 World Building in Flash Fiction?

The one major drawback to writing dystopian (or fantasy) in flash fiction is you don’t have the word count to do much world-building. Writers with greater skill could probably do it, but I think this is why my flash fiction became a short story (albeit a short short story). For the record, I consider flash fiction to be a story less than 2,000 words, and preferably less than 1,000. I think once you break that 2,000 word mark, you’re into short story land. Others may disagree, but that’s my view. In flash fiction, backstory is almost impossible. For me to have droned on about the war, who fought whom, why, and the political, social, and environmental effects of the war would have been way way waaay too much for this piece. This meant that all my backstory had to be loaded into my frontstory (is that a real term?) by means of suggestion and implication. But even this is tricky. I had to put the reader into the world, help them grasp the situation, but not lose sight of the story. Any references the characters made to backstory had to work as natural conversation, but be easy for the reader to understand. And any narration pertaining to backstory had to be directly relevant (e.g., the reason why water is rationed, and meat and dairy are in short supply), and, again, avoid getting lost in a history lesson.

In my experience both as a reader and a writer, the skill of being able to say a lot in a few words is extremely valuable. And this is one of the reasons I jump at the opportunity to participate in Literary Agent Janet Reid‘s “100 words or fewer” story competitions: I really want to hone that skill. As you can tell, I don’t have a problem filling a page with text.

 Why First Person Present Tense?

I decided to write in first person because I wanted the reader to be as intimately involved in the suspense and the scares as possible. I could have done this with a third person account, but I wasn’t sure it would have been as effective. And I went with present tense because I didn’t want the reader assuming our hero survived. The risk with first person past tense is the reader knows the MC survived because s/he is telling you about what happened. If you’re experiencing the event alongside the MC, neither of you know how it’ll turn out, and I think that adds to the suspense.

The First Line

Just a note to say that it’s not going to go down in the history of great first lines (see the discussion of first lines on Jaime Morrow’s blog from last Friday), but I hope it serves the purpose: to get you to read the next line! If you’re asking “what decision?” and read on to find out, the first line has done it’s job.

The Ending

So our hero gets his reward, even though Horatio is dead. Yes, I could have made him lose anyway, or have Horatio jump up out of his grave and eat the hero (mmm… I haven’t done a zombie story yet…), but I didn’t want to go there. I thought poor Harrison had been through enough, and he completed the challenge after all. And it’s Monday, and Mondays are enough of a struggle as it is! Yes, I like a happy ending. So there you have it.

But what does it all mean? Was the house haunted really? Was that really Horatio Harelsson who spoke to Harrison at the beginning? Is Horatio really dead? What’s going on??? And this is the beauty of the first person present tense: you know as much as Harrison. Frankly, I want to leave that as a mystery. Harrison isn’t going to care. He’s got a crate-load of goodies to take back to his starving family, so he’s hardly going to be concerned as to where it came from. If you really want to know the story behind the house and Horatio Harelsson… write it! 🙂

Thank you to everyone that read the story, and all those who commented. Your kind words mean a lot to this doubt-ridden writer. And those of you who suggested words for next Monday’s story, thank you! I hope you won’t be disappointed…