Category Archives: The Writing Life

Guest Post by Adria Laycraft

Writing is writing … right? All you do is put one word after another on the page. This fact doesn’t change, no matter if you use a pencil scratching paper or fingers tapping at a computer keyboard. It also doesn’t change whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

You’re all rolling your eyes at this over-simplification, aren’t you? We all know there’s so much more to it than that. As any writer can tell you, it’s a simple process, but it is not easy.

So what are the differences between the writing processes of fiction versus non-fiction? If you’re like me, working by day as a copywriter and by night as a storyteller, you probably have some interesting ways to mentally shift gears when moving from one style to the other.

I learned early on that I experience better results bouncing between freelance contracts and fiction projects if I kept them separate in obvious ways, changing not only my mental ‘headspace’ but also my physical setting. I work on tech writing at my desk, in an office chair, on a large screen laptop with a second monitor hooked to it. A true workplace environment. I have an upright posture and a logical mindset.

Then, when it’s time to scribble some fiction, I curl up on the sofa with a little netbook in my lap, a blanket, low lighting, quiet music. I’m reclined, ready to be entertained and taken away to a different place. Sometimes I even revert to pen on paper, somehow connecting even more deeply to the emotional well.

So, different rooms, different computers, different posture even…all results in a different structure of words.

This blog post request got me thinking.

Just what are the main differences between these two types of writing? Why do they require such a dramatic change in setting for me to accomplish them effectively? Instead of differences, however, I started seeing how they are similar.

Most would say one is logical and the other emotional, and while it’s easy to see why that makes sense, I’m not sure I can agree completely. It is just as important to involve the reader emotionally in technical writing. Take for instance a sales letter. If you do not elicit the right emotion from the reader, they aren’t going to buy the product or click through to the website. On the flip side, fiction written without any logic is painful to read because plotting and consistency are lost.

And while writing a sales letter (or any other non-fiction technical piece) requires careful structuring of certain key elements, what novel doesn’t? Each document has goals that are strikingly similar: to inform, inspire, educate, and entertain. A novel has an inciting incident, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a conclusion. A sales letter has a great headline (inciting incident), a list of benefits with testimonials to add credibility (rising action), a reason to act now (climax), and a call to action with a risk-free promise (conclusion).

So maybe the difference lies in the tone and content of each? Yes, that must be it. Fiction is often lyrical, introspective, and dramatic, while technical writing involves more facts and figures, and a more straightforward language with which to present them. Yet both require strident research to achieve the best results. That lyrical prose needs the perfect word choice…and so does the technical paper. Good research is crucial to both, so in this way they are similar once again.

What I’m trying to get at is while fiction and non-fiction may seem to have very different goals, voice, and content, when it comes time to sit and do the work of writing it all looks the same to me–elicit the desired emotion from the reader, create a good structure of all the necessary key elements, and research your subject(s) thoroughly to ensure proper word selection and the best possible content.

That said, I’ll keep writing fiction in the cozy spot in the living room, and completing my copywriting projects at my desk in the office. Somehow it makes a difference.

Adria is an author and freelance editor that once upon a time earned
Honours in Journalism at SAIT. She co-edited the popular Urban Green Man anthology in 2013, which made the ballot for the Aurora Awards. Look for her stories in Orson Scott Card’s IGMS, the Third Flatiron anthologies Abbreviated Epics and Only Disconnect, FAE and Corvidae anthologies, Tesseracts 16, Neo-opsis, On-Spec, James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and Hypersonic Tales, and a few others. Adria is a grateful member of IFWA (The Imaginative Fiction Writers Association) and a proud survivor of the Odyssey Writers Workshop. She is also a member of the Calgary Association of Freelance Editors (CAFÉ).

Flashes of Halloween

October 31, 2015

Guy Anthony De Marco

As a token of appreciation for our readers and fans, we present a series of flash fiction stories to entertain and scare you. We hope you enjoy them, as does that ghostly figure reading this over your shoulder…

Steaks

Guy Anthony De Marco

Bob hated driving ‘cattle’ trucks. He liked the cargo, but the other drivers drove him mad. Soccer moms cutting him off on their way to the hairdressers and belligerent teenagers flipping him off all contributed to Bob’s loathing of city dwellers. He held his tongue for years, biding his time.

On Bob’s final run, the day he’d retire, he made a detour towards the old Quonset hut on his property. He would butcher and freeze this load to keep him in steaks for months, maybe years.

As he turned the crowded schoolbus into his driveway, he began to drool.

Once in a Lifetime Opportunity

Pamela K. Kinney

“Want a unique experience?” asked the woman in a tight mini dress and stiletto heels.

The man grinned. “What do you have in mind?”

“Something I know you never had done to you before and can only be done once.”

He followed her down an alley. They stopped beneath a sickly yellow light.

The man said, “I’ve done every sexual position you can imagine.”

“This is not about sex.”

The prostitute vanished, replaced by a monster. Before he could escape, it ate him.

Costumed as the human woman again, the monster patted her belly. “Now, you experienced being my meal.”

Troubles

Guy Anthony De Marco

“All right, you horrible jerk.”

The Mrs. is pissed off at me again. I rack my brain, trying to think of what she could have discovered. My mistress died suddenly, so she couldn’t have squealed about our affair. Nobody saw me hit the crippled guy with my car last year.

She’s not crying, so it has nothing to do with the jerk she was having an affair with while I was at work. I killed him too.

“Okay, I give. What did I do this time?”

She held up a severed, partially gnawed woman’s hand.

“I thought you were on a diet, dear?”

Trick Or Treat

Frank Morin

He hated Halloween, with all those grasping, selfish children.

This year he prepared a special treat. The children would gobble them down, not even tasting the ricin. They’d die painfully in a few days, and no one could ever trace the source of the deadly toxin back to him.

Halloween night, he hosted a party of dear friends, but when he went to fetch the bowl of poisoned chocolate, he found it filled with different candy.

His wife called, “Give the brats the cheap stuff.”

“Where are my chocolates?”

“Gone,” she laughed. “They were the hit of the party.”

After the Crossroads

Mary Pletsch

I am sorry, my friend…but you are a mother too. You will understand—I couldn’t leave my daughter alone. You often said how you couldn’t comprehend what I was going through, watching my little girl wither away.

You would not have laughed at me if I had told you that in my desperation I had gone down to the crossroads with four black candles and a Club Pack of chicken breasts, $4.99 per pound on sale. You would not have made fun of my sacrifice. You would have known that even at that price, I would be skipping meals for the rest of the week.

You, if anyone, would have held my hand as I invoked Him. You would have reassured me. You would have told me there was no fault in trying.

The next morning my daughter drank from the bottle He gave me in exchange for the soul of the head of the house. My friend, I am so sorry… On my way to the hospital I walked past my own door and drew the mark on yours.

I will watch over your sons as you would have watched over my daughter, had the situation been reversed.

Vultures

Guy Anthony De Marco

The lines were longer than expected. It took a while to dock with the geosynchronous auction house, where robotic transports shuttled bidders to the main deck. The inner wall of the doughnut-shaped vessel displayed flashes of upcoming items; the outer gave the occupants a view of incoming ships.

Hun-Rey appreciated the attention to detail provided by the auctioneers. Disposable holo-vids of the major pieces, organic foods, and many intoxicating beverages — the house expected to pull in big numbers.

Most of the elite stopped by, pumping each other for inside information. Hun-Rey greeted each one, and divulged misinformation with a smile. He was a professional, a bidder with clairvoyance and charm.

A small bell tolled three times, and the auction began.

“Today we have a rarity. One certified dead world, with many antiquities intact. We will start with item one, a tubular underwater vehicle with all sixteen nuclear weapons unfired…”

Leftovers

Kristin Luna

The tabby strolled down the steps, weaving between the banisters. She hadn’t been fed for days, and her short hair began to suck to her body to display her ribs.

When she reached the ground level of her domicile, she peered into the kitchen and sat on her haunches. She stared at her owners sitting still in their chairs. She approached the youngest one that usually had bits of leftover breading from chicken fingers or cheese or cookie bits stuck to her fingers. She smelled the little fingers, but there was only the smell of acrid pickles. All the same, she rubbed against the little fingers and the rope end that dangled from the girl’s wrists.

She quickly passed by the one with the slick, black shoes that kicked her often and went straight for the one in the slippers and nightgown who poured her cat food every morning. She rubbed against the slippered feet, but again, was given no pats or rubs in return.

Demanding as she was, the feline jumped up to the table, as the action demanded attention in the past. But no one batted her away or placed her back down on the floor. Her presence unprotested, the cat sniffed a puddle of a strange liquid, and paused. She looked at the pool as if considering. But after a moment had passed, the tabby bent her head farther and drank from it anyway. At first slowly, the reddish brown coagulations catching on her tongue, and the sharp flavor different from water or milk. But the tabby was hungry, and this red milk would have to do.

The Semi-True Story

October 29, 2015

mary

Character Craft & Skills Horror Mary Pletsch Narrative Voice POV The Writing Life World-building No Comments

I gave a copy of Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant to my parents with a proviso attached: it’s not autobiographical.

The assumption would be easy enough to make. My contribution to Fossil Lake, the short story “Mishipishu: The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock,” is set at a summer camp for kids. The name of the camp in the story, Camp Zaagaigan (the Algonquin word for “lake”) is fictional; so is Lake Mishipishu (I actually checked on the maps and found a Mishibishu Lake…) My parents, however, would be able to name the real camp and the real lake after they read the story: from the cabin line to that infamous H-dock, the layout of Camp Zaagaigan mirrors its real-world counterpart, and they drove me there often enough to recognize it.

From there it’s just one step further to wondering how much more of the story is real.

I’m often asked whether the characters in my story are “me,” or whether the events are “real,” and all I can ever say is that I write semi-true stories. Semi-true in that I’ve never been able to take a person, event, or revelation and transcribe it into fiction word-for-word. As a writer friend of mine says, real life doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does. Even if I’m starting with something “inspired by a true story,” in order to make event or character coherent, I have to add things here, or take things away that might have happened in real life, but don’t add anything useful to the tale I’m telling. Sometimes changes to the story make it more dramatic, more compelling, or more satisfying; and so the events “inspired by a true story” move ever farther away from a faithful reflection of reality. After all, I’m writing fiction—I’m not required to report on reality. I’m required to tell an engaging and powerful tale.

And semi-true in that I do my best to write characters who feel real: who behave in realistic ways, who are recognizable and relatable, who are emotionally honest. When I write them, I put myself in their position and see the world through their eyes; and yes, to an extent, I feel what they feel, and try to express that emotion in the words I’m writing. Often this emotional connection is informed by my own real-world experiences. I do know what being bullied feels like. I do know what doing something I know is against the rules feels like. I don’t know what it feels like to drown, but I do know what it feels like to not be able to breathe, so I write about that…and imagine one step farther, based on research and my own ideas. These characters aren’t me, but they have pieces of my emotions inside them.

So no, I was never bullied at that summer camp you sent me to, Mom and Dad. No, I never snuck out of the cabin after hours. No, I was never a suicidal twelve-year-old, and no, I’ve never lost sight of the line between reality and imagination.

…or at least, I’ve always found it again in time.

About Mary:

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

The Intricacies of Zombie Decomposition

October 28, 2015

Evan Braun

Evan Braun Horror Interacting With Professionals No Comments

Kids ask the darnedest questions, am I right? Maybe. But when it comes to strange questions, writers got kids beat. The sheer breadth of oddities a writer needs to research to pull off a convincing story is staggering, which is why you occasionally hear from writerly types who get worried that their Google search history might land them on a terrorist watchlist. They may have to look up information about how to make bombs, or how fast bullets travel, or how long it might take for a person’s blood supply to pump out of a slashed carotid artery… I’m telling you, it can get dark.

Google’s great and all, but it’s nice to be able to rely on a flesh-and-blood specialist sometimes. Like a medical doctor, for example! A few years ago, I wrote the following email to a doctor friend:

I have a gruesome question for you. Basically, I have a character who was shot in the chest with a rifle and died five days ago in story time. Now that character makes a reappearance, possessed. I’m trying to describe the appearance and general condition of this individual, but I’m just not sure what kind of decomposition is reasonable to expect after five days. Potentially a relevant story point is that the being who possesses my character can only occupy the dead body for a short time before it completely breaks down biologically, therefore rendering it an unsuitable host. Do you have any general guidelines for me?

Because of course someone with a medical degree will have an answer to this question. I’m sure the intricacies of zombie decomposition are among the first things a medical student has to learn.

But, you know, this particular question was unavoidable. It hadn’t occurred to me until I got to the scene in question that I really didn’t have any personal frame of reference to know how quickly a human body decomposes. And there wasn’t any way for me to effectively pull off the scene without this information. This was a case where my best guess just wasn’t good enough.

My friend acknowledged that his particular field of medicine didn’t bring him into contact with these kinds of bodies (disappointing), but despite his general ignorance on the particulars of neglected corpses, he was able to drop the following knowledge bomb:

By that point the body would have started to expel gases from anaerobioc metabolism; you’d see some changes to the skin, like sloughing, and loss of hair. The eyes would be sunken and there may be some insect activity. There would be rigor mortis, and the wound itself would show some more advanced decomposition than the rest.

If you’re a writer, that short but fantastic paragraph really fires the imagination. I got a lot of mileage out of that description.

So during your wanderings out in the real world, keep your eyes peeled for police officers, medical doctors, paramedics, people who work in forensics (not the accounting kind), etc.—and be extra nice to those folks. You never know the next time you’ll need to hit them up with a gruesome question of your own. After all, sometimes it’s best to keep your darker imaginings off Google’s radar.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for more than ten years. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, was released earlier this year. In addition to specializing in both hard and soft science fiction, he is the managing editor of The Niverville Citizen. He lives in Niverville, Manitoba.