Bev Vincent

No one can tell you when to start a short story.

People can give you all kinds of advice about how to write one, but only you can decide when you are prepared to start.

This is something I deal with all the time. I’ll have a window of opportunity where I can work on a short story, and I’ll have a market in mind, and all I do is spin my wheels when I try to think about the story itself.

Case in point: I want to submit a story to an anthology that has a submission deadline fast approaching. When I first heard about the theme back in 2010, I did some relevant research, created a file, scribbled some notes and put it aside to gestate. Now that several months have passed, I’m only a little bit closer to having a story than I did back then.

That’s not entirely true. Last weekend, I started doing some location research. I have a scenario of sorts in mind. In fact, I plan to resurrect a couple of characters from another story, and I know why they are where they are and how the story opens, more or less. I stumbled around looking for a setting and I found one that is absolutely perfect. So, for the past couple of days I’ve been learning everything I can about this place. I wandered its streets on Google Earth (and isn’t that an impressive tool). I found news stories and a few videos that give me an even better sense of the location and the scenario that forms that background for the location and the story.

But I still don’t really know what is going to happen to the characters after they make a significant discovery.

Sometimes, a story happens like this: anthology theme, “clever” take on the theme, figure out who the main characters are and what they want, start writing.

Right now, I have the anthology theme, my twist on the theme and the characters, but I still don’t feel ready to start writing because I haven’t come up with the consequences of the twist.

It is possible, on occasion, to start with these elements and let the words flow from that mystical source from which they come. The characters do things and the story develops. I don’t know where the story is going, but it goes.

And yet, when I get to the computer these past few days, I can’t bring myself to create that new Word document and write the first words. That tells me the story isn’t quite ready. I’ve plowed ahead and hit brick walls often enough to believe that this sort-of block (something akin to Mike Noonan’s block in Bag of Bones, though not nearly so severe) is telling me I’ll be wasting my time if I go that route. I just need to think about the story a little more. I can see over the first hill or two, but there’s at least one more hill I need to crest before I begin. I don’t need to see all the way to the end—I rarely do with short stories, but I need to see far enough to build up that momentum that will help me get there.

That being said, though, there’s nothing like a looming deadline for motivation. At some point, if I really want to submit to this market, I need to stop dithering and start writing. And hoping the story comes…from that mystical source from which they all come.

I’m doing something a little unusual today. Not with this blog—in real life. For two-and-a-half hours, I’m going to be standing in front of an audience of writers and other interested (hopefully) parties talking about my writing career trajectory in a presentation titled (though not by me): Skills Learned on the Path to Publication. It is sponsored by the Houston Writers Guild and takes place at the Sugar Land (Houston) library.

As I was thinking about my writing career to date I wondered: where should I start? Have I always been a writer? Well, yes and no. Because I grew up in a rural setting with few neighbors my own age and only one channel of television, I became a voracious reader. I probably would have been a reader in any setting, but who knows?  I think reading leads to the desire to write in many people. I certainly took my stabs at it at an early age. I wrote an Agatha Christie knock-off for an eighth grade English assignment. Along with two other stories, mine was cited by the teacher as “good enough to publish.” High praise, and completely untrue, but it was the sort of encouragement I needed. At least the teacher recognized some potential.

I remember tackling a novel one summer in my teens. I wrote it on a plastic-shelled manual typewriter, nothing nearly so romantic as the old Royals or Caronas of earlier generations, but it was mine. I wrote on mill paper, which was plentiful since my father worked in the paper mill. Rough paper about the same color of brown as some fast food chain napkins. My influences at that point were Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury and Charlie’s Angels. I remember very little about the plot except that it had to do with murder among a group of acquaintances who were traveling somewhere, one of them a Farrah clone described in Spillane’s lurid prose. Did I mention I was a teenager? I got at least a hundred pages into that book, typing a page at a time with no idea where I was going or what I was doing. Alas (or, perhaps, fortunately) that manuscript is forever lost.

When I went to university, I continued to write. Having discovered horror novels and stories, I began writing short stories in that genre. Most of them were handwritten in a blank journal with the university crest on the front. Story ideas were listed in the back pages, and the stories themselves sloped and slanted across the lineless pages. Many of them were completed and typed up, though some trailed off into blank space without resolution. I used to share these stories with some of my dorm neighbors, but I never considered submitting one for publication. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about doing such a thing.

Then I ratcheted things up a notch. Twilight Zone magazine was in its heyday and they announced a short story contest, which I decided I would enter. I can’t remember for sure if my submission was typed on white paper or on the mill paper I was still using for scratch. Somehow, I suspect the latter. I probably violated every manuscript rule under the sun, including stapling the pages together and failing to double space. None of my typescripts from that era survive.

The story was called “A Change in the Weather” and had to do with a young boy trapped in a country store by a particularly virulent and no-doubt supernatural storm. Peter Straub was one of the judges for that contest. I am very happy to report that he has no recollection of my story whatsoever. Dan Simmons won the contest. Did I mention I was way out of my league? Oh, well. Small steps. Live and learn.

Unlike my early novel attempt, those short stories still exist in holographic form. For a long time I couldn’t find them, but I finally turned up the journals a number of years ago. In fact, I’ve rewritten a number of them and even had a few published over the years. The core ideas weren’t all that bad, though the execution was amateurish. Some of them are hopeless, like a rip-off of The Mist crossed with “Trucks” that has a bunch of people trapped in a greasy spoon diner after all the dogs in a city (maybe in THE WORLD!) go mad and start attacking people. (Frankly, the story, simply called “Dogs,” isn’t as good as it sounds!)

Now we get to the gap years. If you aren’t familiar with the term, a “gap year” is a year someone (usually young) takes off between one stage of his or her life and the next. Between high school and college, or between undergrad and grad school. Usually the person travels or works.

My “gap year” from writing lasted from about 1987 through 1999.

I honestly can’t explain where my interest in writing went for all those years, and why it returned. I certainly didn’t stop reading voraciously. For two of those years, I was living overseas, so I traveled and worked, but I certainly had a lot of  alone time when I could have been writing if I’d been so inspired. For most the rest of those years, I was living by myself in an apartment in a foreign country (the U.S.!), again not writing. It simply didn’t occur to me that it was something I might want to do with my copious free time.

Then, the urge reappeared. At first, I was handicapped. I would dig my notebook computer out of its carrying case and set it up on whatever perch was convenient, write a few pages, and then return the computer to its hiding place where it would remain for days, weeks or months. The process of starting to write had a level of inertia that I could easily allow to overcome me. If I was going to write, something had to change.

My wife, bless her soul, asked me what I wanted for Christmas in late 1998. After some consideration, I answered that I wanted a place to write. Somewhere permanent, somewhere that could remain undisturbed, where I could sit down, turn on the computer and start writing without having to find a place to set up. She bought a lovely roll-top desk and we found a suitable place to install it. The roll-top was a stroke of brilliance on her part. I tend to generate piles of papers, books, and notes while I am working. At the end of a session I could just back up the day’s work, turn off the computer, pull down the cover and—voila!—my clutter was hidden beneath the handsome, dark, corrugated cover.

That really represents the beginning of my second career as a writer. From that point on, my productivity grew. By 2000 I was being paid to write both short stories and essays and I haven’t stopped since. Writing is now as much a part of my daily routine as breakfast and working out at the gym. I now have my own office, so rolling down the desk’s top is no longer a necessity (nor even remotely possible at the moment).

Sometimes I think I hadn’t lived enough to write when I was younger. What did I know about other people’s lives, let alone my own? I am constantly amazed by very young writers who have something meaningful and universal to say. I know I sure didn’t. Not at 21—not even at 31. Now that I’m in my (very) late 40s I think I’m starting to hit my stride. My necessary gap years are at an end.

I used to write short stories for fun when I was a college student. I shared these creations with a few friends, but I never considered submitting them for publication. I did send one in to the Twilight Zone fiction contest (the contest Dan Simmons one — boy, was I out of my league!) but otherwise I was content to simply create.

Then I became an aspiring writer for far too many years.

We all know aspiring writers. They’re the people who talk a lot about writing, about how they want to write, even about the stories they plan to write, but never get around to the actual process of putting words down on the page. They come up with any number of excuses for why they aren’t writing, some of them valid.

It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I became a writer again. I found the time to write most days, I devoted myself to improving my craft, and I started submitting things for publication.

I met an aspiring writer last week at the place where I normally have breakfast in the morning between my writing session and my day job. I’d been aware of him for a while. Each Thursday morning, he and several other men meet for breakfast. It’s not a very large place, so I often overhear their conversations. This guy talks at length about the novel he wants to write, going into great detail about the characters and the plot, other works it’s similar to, stuff like that. The other men give him a hard time–not because he wants to write, but because he’s been talking about writing for so long.

They aren’t very encouraging. This week I overheard him talk about an article he’d stumbled upon when he was going through his research material for the novel. One of his friends laughed and made a disparaging comment about the amount of dust he must have encountered. I’ve heard him mutter and laugh whenever the subject of the book comes up. They’ve heard it all before.

Last week, the fellow introduced himself to me after seeing a flyer I’d posted on the message board about my most recent book. He waited until the others were gone and proceeded to ask me questions about my writing. More than once he replied wistfully about how he wanted to do this and wanted to do that, but he couldn’t find time. I described my routine to him and I could see his internal conflict. He wanted to be able to do something similar, but for some reason he didn’t seem convinced that he could pull it off. I’m not sure what his stumbling block was — maybe he didn’t really have any faith in his ability to pull off a novel. Maybe he had talked about the book for so long that he had essentially already written it in his mind and so to put it down on paper seemed like drudgery. Perhaps his personal circumstances — family obligations or the demands of his day job — did not provide him with the necessary time and energy to work on his writing for any amount of time on a regular basis.

It’s probably difficult for any one of us to explain the transformation — what it is that convinces us to change from being aspiring writers to the real thing. I remember the excuses I used to come up with in the years before I started writing again. I had nowhere permanent to work. Every time I wanted to start working, I had to set up my computer somewhere and assemble my papers, and it just took too long. I didn’t want to lock myself away in a room and ignore the rest of the family. All very good excuses, and all surmountable, at least in my case. My wife bought me a rolltop desk, and that took care of the logistics. I summoned the gumption to get up at 5 a.m. each day, a time when no one else in the house was awake, to do my work, so I didn’t have to worry about ignoring people. And I mustered the stick-to-it-iveness to keep at it, day after day, week in, week out.

There’s a quote attributed to Dorothy Parker that says, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Aspiring writers never get to enjoy the second part.

– by Bev Vincent

Busman’s Holiday: (n) a holiday spent in following or observing the practice of one’s usual occupation.

What does a writer do on vacation? A better question might be: is it really possible for a writer to take a vacation?

A writer is always gathering material, no matter what else he is doing. I’m not sure what triggers this process. Though I would like to think that I’ve always been a writer, the truth is that I spent a lot of years not writing, and not thinking about writing, either. However, once I decided that I’d procrastinated long enough, a switch flipped inside my brain that turned me into a sponge, constantly absorbing details and processing them as fodder for stories.

Case in point: my wife and I spent Labor Day weekend at a beach house on the Gulf of Mexico. It was a complete getaway. No cell phones, no computers, no internet. Off the grid, as they say. No one knew where we were. We had no idea what was going on in the world—we didn’t even turn on the TV. For four days, we enjoyed quiet time, mostly spent watching people frolic on the beach and listening to the waves crashing on the sand.

We weren’t there for more than three hours before my mind started conjuring up a scene inspired by something trivial I observed. The details coalesced. I knew who the observer was and why he was there, and I extrapolated the real situation into a purely fictional event. One minute I was sitting on the balcony watching someone on the beach and the next I had this little nugget of fantasy, fully formed.

When I went to sleep that night, my mind continued to work, painting in the real-life details that would make the scene more concrete and vivid, and creating the fictional tapestry that differentiates the process from simply recording an observation.

We were supposed to be on vacation, though. I had no tools of the trade—not even a journal or a notepad. Besides, I wasn’t supposed to spend our time writing—I was supposed to be recharging my batteries and relaxing. That’s what a vacation is for, right?

Fortunately, my wife understands. The next morning, when we went to a nearby department store to stock up on provisions, she encouraged me to get a notebook so I could write down my inspirations. I plucked a 15-cent spiral notebook from the back-to-school sale pile and, when we got back to the townhouse, composed four hand-written pages.

The scene was still as vivid as when I had first conceived it. The words flowed out without interruption. There are only a couple of scratch-outs where I started sentences backwards and took a second stab at them. There’s a smudge on the first page from a raindrop. I was sitting on the balcony at the time and a brief sun-shower passed over, but I didn’t stop. (According to an old saying, if it rains when the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife. Now there’s an idea for a story waiting to happen. But wait! One idea at a time!)

Having transcribed the scene onto the page, I was able to go back to soaking up the sun’s rays, breathing in the fresh air, absorbing the mesmerizing sound of the sea, and generally enjoying the time with my wife.

And yet . . . the scene ended but the story didn’t. It was just getting under way. There were numerous implications for the main character. Things were bound to develop as a result of what he had seen and done. Why had another character acted as she had? Those thoughts rolled around in my mind for the rest of the vacation, off and on. It wasn’t a distraction, though. It didn’t keep me from relaxing. But if there’s a second switch that lets you turn off that kind of mental activity, I haven’t yet found it. I worried at that ribbon of story the way a puppy chews on a dangling thread. I came up with a couple of ideas for what happens next, and I’m biding my time until I have the opportunity to explore them. I still have no idea whether I have the beginning of a short story or a scene from a novel, but I know that it will be used sometime.

So that’s what I did on my summer vacation: I wrote part of a short story and came up with the idea for this essay. I wonder if that makes it tax deductible . . .

– by Bev Vincent 

In the introduction to The Green Mile, Stephen King talks about his unique treatment for insomnia. When he lies awake in bed, he tells himself stories. Each night, he starts at the beginning of the current tale and takes it little farther. After a while, he grows bored with one of these remedy stories, abandons it and starts a new one. The Green Mile was an exception.

Most writers are reluctant to talk about stories or novels we’re thinking about or are currently writing. It’s a kind of superstition. We believe that if we talk about a story, it will lose it magic, the wind will go out of the story’s sails, and the whole thing will collapse at our feet. Or we’ll grow bored with it and lose the motivation to put the words down on the page. Writing is about discovery, we say, and if we discover the story before we write it, what’s the point? By the time Alfred Hitchcock got behind the camera, he had already mapped out a film so clearly in his mind that he reportedly found the final part of the process boring. The actual making-of-the-movie part.

The other reason we don’t want to talk about plots under development is that we don’t want anyone else to make suggestions before an idea is fully formed in our minds. People love to make suggestions. How about if he does this? What if she did that? Another superstition—we’re scared that another person’s input will steer a story in a direction other than where we intended to go, as if our own intent isn’t strong enough to hold the course. 

I’m usually reticent about talking about stories, for these very reasons. However, I had an experience recently that made me reassess my position. 

I was invited to contribute to a loosely themed anthology by an editor who had previously accepted one of my stories for another project. I had an idea that melded the themed situation with another genre that is near and dear to my heart, which made me think I could come up with a story that would be different from most of the other contributions. As the scenario developed in my mind, I saw a subtext that added what I considered to be a significant level of meaning to the story. I don’t usually write with metaphors in mind, but this one was too good to ignore. 

The invitation came several months ago, when I was deep in the throes of working on a large project with a short deadline. However, since I’m an agreeable guy, I accepted the invitation, which had a three-month deadline. I was confident that I’d have plenty of time to work on the story once I finished the current project. 

The closer the deadline came, the greater my anxiety level. I’m not usually subject to stress, but I was feeling it. I had made a commitment to submit something, and it just wasn’t happening. The idea still seemed solid, as did all of the elements I foresaw, but the words weren’t coming. I wrote the first page or two, which set up the situation, and there it sat. With a little less than a week to go before the story was due, I was faced with a business trip that was going to take me away from my normal writing routine for four days. 

On the day I was scheduled to leave on the trip, I went out to breakfast with my wife, part of our weekend routine. As we sat in a secluded corner, sipping our tea, I decided to tell her about this story I was contemplating. At that point, I knew the main character and the general setup, along with the high concept, but not the plot. As we discussed the metaphor, my wife’s enthusiasm for the story was infectious. Her suggestions were not about the plot but rather helped me gain a deeper appreciation for the symbolism.

I didn’t get any farther with the story during that discussion, but when I got back home, I opened my document and wrote two single-spaced pages of notes to myself. Thoughts and ideas that arose out of that conversation and the general thrust of the plot poured out. In essence, a loose outline, although I didn’t get to the climax of the story–that was still unseen to me–and some of the details ultimately changed. However, I had about 2/3 of the story dancing around in my head. 

Later that afternoon, on a three-hour flight, I rewrote the first two pages of the story in longhand in a blank journal and then took off. By the time I landed I had a cramped hand and fifteen pages of the story, approximately 3000 words. I typed them up after I got to the hotel and, by the end of the week, I finished the story. Submitted it after a couple of intensive editing sessions and had it accepted with revisions a day later. 

As always, I’m not sure there’s a take-home message here, just a window into one incident in my writing life.The story might not have been finished on schedule without our little tête-à-tête. I’ll probably still be reluctant to discuss my stories as I work on them, but I now know that talking about one isn’t a death knell. After all, storytelling started out as an oral tradition. Where would we be today if stories couldn’t survive being told before they were written down?

– Bev Vincent

I received a surprising e-mail a few weeks ago from a grade eleven student at a magnet school in Nashville. As part of an English class on critical thinking, their teacher had assigned them my short story “One of Those Weeks” from the anthology From the Borderlands (originally Borderlands 5).

This isn’t the first time one of my stories has been read in an English class, but it’s the first time where I have absolutely no association with the teacher, the students, or the school. A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak to the Creative Writing class at the local high school. My daughter graduated from that school, so I knew the teacher. There was a connection that led to that speaking gig. In that case, the class read “Harming Obsession,” and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with them about the story and answer their questions. In this recent situation, however, I have no idea whatsoever what led the teacher to pick my story.

Here’s the part of the essay where I digress from my message and harp on something we repeat over and over, often without feeling like we’ve conveyed the message. From the Borderlands was a Time Warner paperback. I don’t know its sales figures, but it spent one glorious week on the USA Today Top 150 Books list, coming in at #82. I used to see the book in airports all the time, and even found it on the shelf at our local grocery store. In brief, it got serious distribution. I’d be willing to bet that more people saw this story than saw all of my other stories at that point combined. Though none of us got rich off that project, this was an instance of real exposure. An editor called me up to ask whether I had a novel.

And a class several states away studied my story in their class. The students were asked to come up with theories about the meaning of its ending. They presented numerous interpretations of the story, some of them intriguing to me because they certainly weren’t in my conscious mind when I wrote it—but whose to say that I wasn’t thinking that way at some level?

The student who volunteered to contact me believed it was possible that I had written the story primarily to create the type of discussion and thinking they were undertaking. That gave me a lot more credit than I was due—though I didn’t tell them that.

I was more than happy to take some time to respond to the e-mail and subsequent letter to discuss the story with the class. However, in formulating my answer, I discovered that the story meant something different to me now than it did at the time I wrote it. I identified a subtext that seemed obvious, but one that I’d never considered before.

My daughter is an English/Creative Writing major at university so, over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to read her essays on the subject of interpretation, and on the various intents of works. There is the author’s intent, and the interpretation that each reader assigns to the text, all equally valid, and finally there is the abstract notion of the story’s intent, as if it had a consciousness of its own. Until recently, I dismissed that concept as effete intellectualism, the realm of lit. crit. researchers looking for high-minded concepts to make themselves seem important.

By revisiting “One of Those Weeks” several years after it was written, edited, revised and published, I discovered that the story might indeed have its own intent as an entity separate from me, the author. One of the best encapsulations of the story I read came from a reviewer, who was able to summarize its essence in a cleverly crafted and insightful sentence. I liked that analysis so much that I’ve often used it when discussing the story.

However, in 2008, five years after the story first appeared, I see in it something completely different. Things that I’ve experienced in the interim opened my eyes to new interpretations of something I wrote before having those experiences. It still all sounds a little artsy-fartsy to me, but I’m more of a believer in the story as an abstract entity than before.

Try rereading some of your older works, even if you think you’re completely familiar with them. You might discover that your past self can send a message through time to your present self. It’s surprising and delightful when that happens.