Links in this episode:

John L Monk’s Hell’s Children

My Bradbury Challenge Story List

 

 

I definitely have crutches as a writer. For example, my first instinct when I’m coming up on my short story deadline is to just write a murder scene. I’m not going to get into what that says about my psychology, it just is what it is.

Early on in the Bradbury Challenge, though, I decided I wouldn’t let myself rely on my crutches. The entire point was to stretch my creative muscles. I’m still trying to find the exact niche, my narrative voice. I think I’m about 78% there, so this may change in the future, but for now, I’m just looking for ways to expand.

So, I can’t let myself use my consistent go-to’s, yet. In the future, I might decide to specialize in one type of story or another. It seems like a good way to perfect one aspect of the craft. But, for now, it’s intentional chaos up in this joint.

It also serves another purpose. I post all of my short stories on MABrotherton.Com. There is a list of them available at MABrotherton.Com/the-bradbury-challenge/, you can go there and check them out. I don’t just post them there because I have a hard time with the concept of selling anything with less than 5000 words. I’m treating them as a bit of a pilot program.

I put them out on the blog and see which ones people comment on. So far, I’ve been pretty surprised by which stories have gotten the most feedback, too. Since my main series is an Urban Fantasy, I assumed my readers would respond to that type of story more. Granted, I haven’t put very many of them up there yet, but I just figured it would be that way.

I was wrong.

So far, the biggest responses have come from For a Few Chips, a first-person short story set in a vague post-apocalypse involving violence and rescuing a little girl. I actually really enjoyed writing that short story and have been asked to turn it into a full length book. I might at some point, but I have hard time coming up with a full length plot for it. It’s on the list.

The other is a vignette describing a house and its history. There isn’t’ actually a story there at all, but it got a pretty good response, which encourages me to try and be a little more purple in my prose. It was permission to incorporate poetry, rhythm and cadence into my text. A big plus for dication, I think.

These little surprises have been a huge encouragement. It makes me want to push harder on fringes of my own writing style. It makes me want to go farther. It make me want to do different.

Which is why I’ve managed to get pretty good at brainstorming over the last few weeks.

It started out as a way to get some cheap words in while on my lunch break at work. I carry a legal pad or three with me in my car because I like to be able to write when I can. I used to do it on my tablet, but my hands can’t handle my tiny Bluetooth keyboard anymore, so now I do it long hand. I’ve already talked about the benefits of writing longhand, so I won’t tout those again, but it is definitely working for me.

For a long time, if I wasn’t working on a story, I would free write. I was taught to free write my freshman year of highschool and it has served me well over the years. But, here lately, I’ve been rehashing my own negativity over and over when just putting words on the page as quickly as possible. It isn’t helpful for coming up with stories. Cathartic? Yes. Creative? No.

So, I made a point of learning some new ways of brainstorming.