July 7, 2019

WRITING ADVICE: A Startling Experience Molded Into A “Completely Different” Science Fiction Story…

In September of 2007, I started this blog with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’ve got enough publications now that I can share some of the things I did “right”.

While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!

A few days ago, my son spotted a sign that drew us off of the highway as we were traveling across a state we’d never been in before – North Carolina.

A Confederate cemetery was somewhere in the town and following the signs led us to a small neighborhood of compact houses at the edge of town, and following a road to a dead end, we thought we’d gotten lost because the end of the street was overgrown and looked to be a dead end. We had picked up my son’s car, after it traveled half-way around the world from South Korea, and so we were in two vehicles. He was leading and because it looked like a dead end, I pulled into a nearby road to turn around. My phone rang.

“It’s back here!”

“Cool,” I said, so I pulled behind his car and shut my engine off. We got our and expecting tidy headstones, probably old and hard to read, but certainly a clearly delineated cemetery. What we saw was this: 

Despite the fact that it was more-or-less unkempt, we felt the reverence of the place, talking quietly as we traipsed across the rough ground. Mosquitoes and a sense of trespassing distracted me from paying close attention. But my son wasn’t distracted at all. A 21st Century Memorial stone had been erected (after a long struggle against the forces of tradition and perhaps a bit of stubbornness: “In the years that followed [the War Between the States (what the South calls the Civil War)], efforts were made to restore and preserve the graveyard, but these were ineffectual. The land belonged to a woman who would not sell it or permit its improvement. She passed away and the land was sold to uninterested persons.”).

My son commented, “This is so sad.” He’s an active duty sergeant in the Army, newly stationed in NC, but I didn’t understand what he meant and said so. “They were soldiers, fighting for what they thought was right. Even if it was wrong it’s sad that this place isn’t kept up.”

As a writer, that set off a complex series of thoughts. The advice I’d received and given countless times was that reality doesn’t make very good story. My first really BIG sale, “Deer Hunter”, had actually happened. Just not to the characters in my story, nor was I involved in any way but through my then-roommate, and happening to overhear the conversation he had with his father the day his dad accidentally shot a girl on horseback.

But I wrote for young people, of who exactly NONE would find the story of this happening to an old guy interesting. I needed to make the real incident into fiction. How could I possibly do that? Julie Schumacher, YA author of several books, noted, “Rather than tackle the entire history…find a crucial seed…Zero in on the moments that matter and you’ll have, not a history, but a story…Your job as a writer of fiction is to start with memory, if that’s what you do, but to tell the truth of the story, not the facts.”

Author Azar Nafisi, most famous for her book, Reading Lolita in Teheran, doesn’t write YA, but her wisdom is valid: “Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

Taking that advice to heart, I wanted to tell the story of the CSA cemetery in North Carolina. But that’s not a story. Not even if I picked one person who ended up dying there – the people in this cemetery weren’t there because they died in a famous battle. They didn’t even die in a notable battle (we’d visited a CSA field hospital near Bentonville, NC in March of 1865. It was the last battle between Union general Sherman and Confederate general Johnston. Even though 80,000 men fought, 4000 died, and coupled with the surrender of Lee, Johnston also surrendered…the Civil War effectively ending in April, and finally limping to its conclusion finally in November of the same year.

But I’m not an historian. I know little, if anything of note, about the Civil War. How can I write a story about a Civil War battle and the impoverishment of a cemetery that doesn’t even hold anyone famous, but a bunch of guys who (most likely) died in “…epidemics of chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, measles, malaria, and tuberculosis, among others, [as they] tore through the camps with their poor sanitation and bad hygiene. Along with ‘killed in battle’ and ‘vulnus sclopeticum’ (a Latin term for a gunshot wound), Civil War death registers are full of men who died of typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, and chronic diarrhea…a minor war wound became infected, it often led to death.”

There’s nothing exciting about that to today’s readers. The fact that most of them have no idea of what they’d be reading about.

What I could do, however is use the seed of the story to tell an entirely different one. I could place it on another world; give that world another war; and give that world a form of the Confederates who died as well as a stand in for the Union army – and toss in some innocent civilians caught in the vice grip of war.

“May They Rest” will be the result. Driving back to my home of Minnesota with my daughter-in-law, I finally figured out the form of the story, she showed me how to use my cellphone’s voice memo function and I was able to record the solution to a problem I was having with the motivation of the main character.

I’ll let you know who it goes! My market this time will be CLARKESWORLD and a couple of other online magazines I’ve got my eye on!


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