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On Writing: Chekhov's Gun Store

One of playwright Anton Chekhov’s most quoted maxims is this: If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. If you establish an expectation in the reader, particularly a strong expectation, you must fulfill it.

The truth is that every story has things in it that must be fired, a multiplicity of tiny guns whose discharges help create the ending, guns that have been primed and loaded over the course of the story.

These are sometimes subplots: the heroine’s best friend is also looking for a love interest and at the end their expectation is either fulfilled or thwarted but it is never neglected, because the reader will exit the story wondering about that, and all the impact of the story will be thwarted.

But not always. They may be an object that is reprised throughout the work: the lily that signals Death’s approach, the clerk who sold a traveler their tickets.

Let’s look at some of this at work in a story that will be familiar to many, James Tiptree’s The Women Men Don’t See. If you are not familiar with the story, I advise reading it beforehand.

This is the ending. My comments appear in parentheses.

By noon we’re back in Cozumel. Captain Estéban accepts his fees and departs laconically for his insurance wars. (Tiptree accounts for this major character and moves him offstage.) I leave the parson’s bags with the Caribe agent who couldn’t care less.(Another character, who appeared toward the beginning, is checked off the list.) The cable foes to a Mrs. Priscilla Hayes Smith, also of Bethesda. I take myself to a medico (the narrator has been injured in the course of the story, an injury severe enough that it shapes the action and therefore must appear in the final moments) and by three P.M. I’m sitting on the Cabanas terrace with a fat leg and a double margarita, trying to believe the whole thing. (Notice that this creates space in which the reader, like the narrator, can think back over the story and draw conclusions.)

The cable said, Althea and I taking extraordinary opportunity for travel. Gone several years. Please take charge our affairs. Love, Ruth.

She’d written it that afternoon, you understand. (The reader has seen this moment, but not what she wrote. Now it’s delivered.)

I another another double, wishing to hell I’d gotten a good look at that gizmo. Did it have a label, Made by Betelgeusians? No matter how weird it was, how could a person be crazy enough to imagine–?

Not only that but to hope, to plan? If I could only go away… That’s what she was doing, all day. Waiting, hoping, figuring how to get Althea. To go sight unseen to an alien world…

With the third margarita I try a joke about alienated women, but my heart’s not in it. And I’m certain there won’t be any bother, any trouble at all. Two human women, one of them possibly pregnant (here a storyline with Captain Estéban is being resolved), have departed for, I guess, the stars; and the fabric of society will never show a ripple. I brood: do all Mrs. Parsons’s friends hold themselves in readiness for any eventuality, including leaving Earth? And will Mrs. Parsons somehow one day contrive to send for Mrs. Priscilla Hays Smith, that grand person?

I can only send for another cold one, musing on Althea. What suns will Estéban’s sloe-eyed offspring, if any, look upon? “Get in, Althea, we’re taking off for Orion.” “A-okay, Mother.” Is that some system of upbringing? We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine…I’m used to aliens. (Here a conversation is being reprised, and its payload, set up earlier, is now being delivered.) She’d meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?

As the margaritas take hold, the whole mad scenario melts down to the image of those two small shapes sitting side by side in the receding alien glare.

Two of our opossums are missing.

The conversation has been loaded here, midway through the story:

“That’s fantasy.” Her voice is still quiet. “Women don’t work that way. We’re a –a toothless world.” She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”

“Sounds like a guerrilla operation.” I’m not really joking, here in the ‘gator den. In fact, I’m wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.

“Guerrillas have something to hope for.” Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. “Think of us as oppssums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over. Even in New York City.”

How do we emulate that sort of thing as writers? I suspect this is something that most of us will be adding in the rewriting and revision stage, going back through the story to see what pistols our unconscious mind has scattered about throughout the narrative. Recently, for example, in the course of writing a space opera novel, a particular element emerged that shapes things — while I took account of it in writing everything after that moment of realization, I’ll need to go back and tweak the earlier parts to make sure I’ve loaded that object as fully as I can before it delivers its payload in the final scene.

Check what you’ve loaded the story with and make sure it’s all primed and ready to go off.

Enjoy this and want more writing tips and musings on a weekly basis? Follow me on Patreon. Or sign up for a live or on-demand class from The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers!

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3 Strategies for Snaring the Senses

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Use your moments to perceive what's around you in terms other than the visual, measuring warmth and smoothness and smell.
Engaging the senses, particularly the non-visual ones, is often key to creating a story that stands out from the mass crowding every editor’s inbox. It’s such a useful strategy that every writer should have it in their toolbox.

Here are some specifics of how to evoke the senses and entrap your reader (particularly within the first three paragraphs). You may mechanically apply these techniques at first, but if you persist, you’ll find including sensory details becoming second nature and helping you build the story’s world, mood, characters, and even conflict.

1. Do it with verbs. Verbs can evoke the sense in all sorts of ways, but they’re particularly well suited to the tactile, to yanking, fizzing, tugging, as well as the auditory, bubbling, echoing, pulsing. Keep a list of interesting verbs in your notebook or find a way to generate a list to play with: a group related to a particular profession, perhaps, preferably one that depends on the senses. Cooking verbs are more interesting than desk-sitting verbs, for example: fricassee, fillet, mince, chop, simmer, poach, and my favorite, chiffonade (to roll herbs in a tight cigar and cut into 1/8 to 1/16 inch ribbons).

2. Strip away filters. If you are writing from an attached point of view, either first or third person, you do not need constructions like “he smelled the cherry blossoms” – instead, “the smell of cherry blossoms filled the air” or “hung in the air” or whatever verb you like, preferably one that yanks on yet another sense. Those unnecessary constructions intrude on the space between the reader and the text, which should be filled with the vivid evocation of the story in the reader’s head, and not a bunch of words.

For example:
He smelled cherry blossoms coming from the window.
is (in my opinion) much more interesting as:
The smell of cherry blossoms washed in through the window.

That’s anchored much more deeply in your pov character’s consciousness than the first sentence. It allows the provision of a more interesting verb, “washed.” Both of those provide a closer connection to the sensory detail. If you want to dig even further into the character’s consciousness, you might delve into the memories he has of the smell, what feelings it evokes in him (terror, lust, or want are often good ones to use and help develop a character like nobody’s business) or what it tells him about his surroundings that he didn’t know before.

3. Go for the gut, the emotional, the upsetting. Next time something disgusts you, take long enough to get the details down, the oily sheen of rot as it dissolves underneath your touch, the way the smell of durian stuffs itself into your nostrils, the exact configuration of what lies in that toilet. Do the same with the bad and shameful in your history, the things that paralyze you, the inescapable physical details — the way your skin feels hot during a panic attack, or the quiver you can’t fight out of your voice and the way it echoes at the pit of your stomach. Put them on the page and you will be making a story that grabs the reader and tells them something true.

Writing exercise: a meal is one of the most evocative things you can evoke. Write a meal that you loved or hated and include the conversation that swirled through it, letting the diners’ voices tell a story within the table’s landscape.

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On Writing: When A Story Clicks

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One of the things I stress to students is that you cannot wait for the muse. And, in fact, the more you wait for her, the less likely she is to arrive.

For example. The last few days I’ve been working at getting back into the flow of writing daily. I held myself accountable and post daily word counts here or on Twitter. And lemme tell you, some of those words were difficult to wrestle out of my skull and onto the page. One way I can tell things are going in difficult fits and spurts is that I’ll hop around a lot from story to story.

One of those projects is “Prairiedog Town” (which is definitely getting a different title). I started jotting down mental notes for it while traveling through Kansas, but only had a thousand words or so on it before last week. It was slow writing, partially because I wasn’t sure how I was getting from one point to another in the story. I knew it was a piece about a woman reclaiming her humanity and I had a good idea of what the penultimate scene would look like.

So I kept jotting words down in sporadic clumps of a few hundred at a time, yerking the story along in an awkward and impatient way. It helped when I incorporated a prompt from Sandra M. Odell, a woman finding an abandoned teddy bear by the road. But it still was slow slogging. Yesterday I took a break from it.

And then, this morning, while working on it, things began to fall into place. A secondary character had popped up, and I understood how to bring her back into the story — and why. A piece that was supposed to take three days suddenly shortened into a single night, and with that, the ultimate scene came clear. I went through, pulling the threads into place as close to a thousand words came spilling out and into the story.

It’s not done yet — maybe another thousand words to go, but I’ve got a map of it, and comments where I need to go back and insert things. Here, for example, is what a section of today’s work looks like:

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She freezes again. It’s an old code word they used to use, back in the days when they worked together. It’s someplace close but (some distance) to the (direction).

And most importantly at all, things have come together to a point where I’m excited about the story, feel that some clever stuff has been worked in or has had places made for it. It’ll end up being around 4-5 thousand words, and I know I’ll finish it by the end of this month, because it’s designated as the next story to go out in the Patreon campaign.

And if I hadn’t done that picking away at it — scraping those words out of my skull, even though it felt painful and awkward and uninspired — I would have never gotten to that point at all.

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