Bev Vincent

– by Bev Vincent

Because of the Hardy Boys, I went to Greece.

Seriously.

When I was a young reader, I devoured the Franklin W. Dixon books. The local librarian peered down her nose at me when I checked them out. Her sighs betrayed her belief that they were only on the shelves because the library couldn’t afford anything better. She deemed them junk food, long before anyone used that term.

One of the later books in the series, The Shattered Helmet, was set partly in Greece and the foreign setting fascinated me. Several years later, when my high school history and art teachers announced they were arranging a spring break trip to Greece in 1978, the resonance from that book returned to me. I set about trying to convince my parents I should go. To my delight and surprise, they didn’t take much convincing. Though we weren’t exactly rich, they had traveled overseas for the first time a few years earlier and had an appreciation for the potential benefits.

The trip did not disappoint—everything exotic I believed about Greece based on The Shattered Helmet was borne out by reality, and then some.

Over the years since then, I’ve traveled extensively—Australia, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Hawaii, the Caribbean, all over Europe—and I lived in Switzerland for a couple of years. Most of my journeys took place before I started writing, though. I have photographs and memories of those locations, but when I visited I wasn’t looking with a writer’s eye for detail.

Two days from now, I’m leaving for Japan. I’m spending the better part of a week in Tokyo and Osaka. It’s my fourth or fifth trip to that country, but my first since I began writing. I’m excited about the possibility of gathering local color for a story I might set there some day. I have an idea already—I’ve had a research file about hikikomori on my memory stick for over a year. This trip might help kick start that story.

When I travel these days, I take a recording device so I can preserve intriguing details as I encounter them. For Japan, it’ll be a camera and a digital voice recorder. The country is so high tech that if I’m seen muttering into my hand I won’t look crazy. Video cameras are great tools for recording impressions that you can revisit over and over again later, observing new details—new sights and sounds—to dab into your fictions.

I’ve set tales in Australia, Hong Kong and Canada and have traveled around Texas to capture settings for stories and novels. I like getting details right. Nothing annoys me more than reading a book or watching a film set in a familiar location to discover they’ve bollixed it up. I remember an episode of a TV show where the cast went to Paris. Between the airport and their hotel, the taxi passed every famous site in the city. Boy, did they ever get taken for a ride. Readers of The Da Vinci Code familiar with Paris will suspect that Dan Brown never visited there before writing the book.

Stephen King said that one of the barriers to writing Cell, even though he had the inspiration for the novel several years earlier, was that he originally planned to set it in Manhattan but didn’t know the city well enough. He anticipated all the letters he would get if his characters left town via routes anyone familiar with the city would never use. Readers are quick to let you know when you get it wrong—witness the Dark Tower fans who knew the A Train didn’t go to the station where Odetta lost her legs. When King relocated his zombie cell phone story to a more familiar place—Boston—Cell took off for him.

Books possess the power to allow readers to—in the words of Jim Stafford—take a trip and never leave the farm. The setting can be as crucial to the story as the characters. Sometimes the locale is exotic—a Greek island or Jerusalem, as in Graham Joyce’s House of Lost Dreams and Requiem—or simply foreign (to many of us), as in Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh novels and Colin Dexter’s detective stories set in Oxford. One reason I enjoy David Lindsey’s crime novels is because they are usually set in Houston or other parts of Texas familiar to me.

These writers have intimate knowledge of their settings, either because they’ve lived there or spent considerable time visiting the locations.

We make things up all the time. We create people who never lived and put them through ordeals that never happened. Why not simply make up locations? That’s certainly an option. Science fiction writers do it all the time, and some authors create fictional towns where they can establish the geography as they go along. Ed McBain’s fictional Isola is a Manhattan clone, where he doesn’t have to be slavishly faithful to a real place.

There are advantages to using real locations. Every city and town brings with it history and geography you can use as an anchor for your story. You don’t have to make up as much when you use a real place, and the closer a lie is to the truth the more believable it becomes.

When it comes to setting, though, all the stay-at-home research in the world won’t provide sufficient insight into a place you’ve never visited to convince readers familiar with the setting you know it. The little things get you, details so self-evident no one ever bothers to mention them.

A while back, I set a novel in a small West Texas city. I looked at maps and satellite images, read newspapers and travel journals. Pored over photographs and read guidebooks. I thought I had the place down cold—until I went there and discovered that what appears on maps to be the main street is actually an eastbound one-way thoroughfare. The westbound street is a block north. Something so fundamental to the geography eluded my extensive research. If I had staged a head-on car accident on that street, anyone who’d ever been there would know I hadn’t.

Neither did I appreciate the impact the Amtrak train has on the town when it rolls through every afternoon, closing gates at level crossings and backing up traffic, or from how far away you can hear the whistles blow when the freight trains pass by late at night. Or the way the mountains are visible no matter which way you look, dominating the horizon the same way the Eiffel Tower dominates Paris. I now have hours of video from a camera that I mounted on the dashboard of the car as I drove around, making observations to myself for future reference.

Unless you go to a mill town, you don’t appreciate how noxious smells permeate everything on days when the wind blows in certain directions. Spring Garden Road in Halifax looks perfectly flat on a map, but when you walk up it from Barrington Street toward the university, you discover that its gentle incline can sap your strength, especially on a brisk winter day. If you write a story set in downtown Houston on a Saturday afternoon and populate it with throngs of pedestrians, people who’ve been there will shake their heads, because you can shoot a canon ball down the sidewalk on a hot weekend afternoon and endanger no one. Even the Subway restaurant is closed.

I have cheated in the past—I had to set a story in Prague recently, so I did the research, made sure I included a handful of details to create local color, and kept as much of the plot indoors as possible to avoid egregious errors. Besides, it was a science fiction story set in the near future, so I could hand wave and make things up if I didn’t know them.

When you get location settings right, though, people familiar with your setting will nod and say, “That’s it. Exactly.” You create a connection with them. We’re members of the same club.

Other readers are our armchair tourists and we’re the virtual travel guides, showing them places they might never get to visit, or perhaps inspiring them—like
I was inspired as a teenager—to want to visit these locations.

It’s an awesome power, don’t you think?

— by Bev Vincent

Every now and then someone makes a simple observation that causes me to rethink the way I work. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on this writing thing, I realize I’ve been overlooking something so patently obvious that I wonder why I didn’t come up with it on my own.

Here are a few paragraphs from a novel I wrote seven years ago:

Cherry Tree Drive described a meandering arc that connected two intersecting streets. Number 40 was on my right, directly across from a cul-de-sac. Several tall oak and sweet gum trees grew in the front yard, their thick clusters of leaves providing natural seclusion, obscuring the front of the house. Rows of crepe myrtles formed barriers against the neighbors on both sides. A concrete path led from the driveway around the corner of the double garage and up to a small porch.

Low-maintenance plants filled the flowerbeds next to the driveway. The neatly trimmed lawn was a healthy green, a major feat after the dry summer we’d experienced. Across the street, a neighbor’s sickly brown lawn looked burnt after being clipped too short. It probably hadn’t seen water in months.

A conspicuously official unmarked car occupied the driveway. As I collected my equipment from the trunk, curtains fluttered in the window of the house where I had parked. Someone was keeping watch.

Not exactly scintillating prose, I admit, but I was just starting out, and determined to be descriptive. You might have a pretty good mental picture of the front yard of this suburban house. And yet, something is missing.

Can’t quite put my finger on it.

If I tilt my head to one side, I hear nothing.

If I breathe in a lungful of air, it has no smell.

If I lick my lips, I can’t quite taste it.

Yes, the above description is entirely visual. It’s like a hidden camera was recording everything—the all-seeing eye—with the sound turned off. Determined as I was to immerse the reader in this setting, I forgot about four-fifths of the senses. Were the mocking birds twittering in the trees? Could the narrator hear the sound of rubber against concrete as cars passed on the street? Were there children laughing/crying/shrieking as they played in neighboring yards? Dogs barking on the other side of the fence?

Did the crepe myrtles fill the air with their nectar? Did the humid Texas air wrap the narrator up with a glove of warmth when he emerged from his car? When he knocked on the door a few seconds later, was the wood rough against his knuckles?

The man who taught me this was David Morrell. He gave an abbreviated version of his writing workshop at the Stoker weekend in L.A. a couple of years ago. I was late getting back to the convention hotel after a signing event at Dark Delicacies, and I went straight to the ballroom where he was speaking. I missed over half the workshop, but what I gleaned from the bit I did catch was worth its weight in gold.

We have become accustomed to primarily paying attention to two types of stimuli—sight and sound—because so much of our entertainment comes to us via the screen, large or small. In this medium, the other three senses are inaccessible, for the most part. A character on TV can allude to a strange smell or react to an objectionable touch, but when he does the audience generally doesn’t share the sensation. The camera creates too much distance for such intimacy.

We have the entire sensory palette at our avail, but we don’t always take full advantage. We close our eyes to imagine a situation and we see—and sometimes we hear—but it takes practice to teach ourselves to engage the other senses.

Even our traditional sayings contribute to this bias against the “lesser” senses. A picture is worth a thousand words, we say—but when we look at a picture, do we only see? Under the right circumstances, photographs conjure up scents and sounds. If I see a photo of lemon meringue pie, my tongue reacts to the remembered blend of acerbity and sweetness.

This doesn’t mean we have to lade our prose with overwhelming sensory input, but we’re in the business of world building, and worlds are full of smells and tastes and tactile sensations, as well as sights and sounds. Just as we don’t want our characters to be two-dimensional, we do our fictitious creations a disservice if they are anything less than five-sensed.

When we pick something up, we admire its heft. We run our fingers over surfaces to appraise their texture. We experience subtle aches and kinks at the best of times—more so as we get older.

When we drink scotch, it burns. Hundreds of aromatic compounds form its bouquet. Its peaty smokiness clings to our taste buds. Ice rattles in the glass, which is smooth and cold in our hands. Thirsty yet?

When we get close to a beautiful woman, her scents assail our nostrils. Her silky skin slides beneath our rough hands. We taste salt, or raspberry lip gloss. We hear her sighs and feel the pounding of her heart—and the pounding of our own. A scene becomes much more powerful when we include these elements, beyond what any simple visual description can invoke.

If I limit myself to the visual, I’m cheating—both the reader of the full set of sensations and myself of the opportunity to get beneath my readers’ skin, on their lips, up their nostrils and completely inside their heads.

I still don’t get it right in my first draft. My initial burst of creativity is primarily visual, with a dash of auditory—and I don’t include dialog in that latter category. Only upon revision do I go back and paint in with a delicate brush the other senses that turn ink on paper into more than pixels on a TV screen—into something that I hope envelops the reader with sensory input.

– Bev Vincent

Now there’s a sentence I’ll bet you never thought you’d read.

When I was a kid, we got one television station. (That’s not exactly true. There was also a French station, but we didn’t switch to it unless there was a hockey game on, and only then with the volume turned down.)

Three British TV series from that era blur together in my mind because they all used “supermarionation” technology—creepy puppets with big rolling eyes and mouths that clicked like teeth when they closed. These shows were Stingray, The Thunderbirds (recently a movie) and Joe 90. All featured characters who were part of acronymic organizations that fended off evil creatures and/or empires.

The reason Joe 90 comes to mind now is the show’s premise. Joe was nine years old, but he was a super-talented spy. Whenever he needed a special skill to complete a mission, he sat in a chair inside this gizmo that resembled a set of concentric eggbeaters that spun in opposite directions. The machine was known as the BIG RAT, a strangled acronym meaning Brain Impulse Galvanoscope: Record And Transfer.

The ability he needed (piloting a jet, brain surgery, whatever) was copied to tape from the minds of experts in the field and implanted temporarily in Joe’s brain by this device. So long as Joe wore a pair of special glasses with hidden electrodes, he could retain this knowledge.

When it comes to writing short stories, I often wish I had access to the BIG RAT. I find myself in need of expertise in certain subjects, but only for the brief period it takes to create the story. Some people might have the luxury of studying law to write a short story, but not me. As the saying goes, I have to learn enough to be able to lie convincingly.

I recently wrote a story where the main character was a freight train engineer. Now, I’ve been around trains all my life. I grew up less than a mile from the main rail line through Eastern Canada. I took trains back and forth from my childhood home to university time without number. I used to know how many cars made up a mile of train, and we frequently sat at a level crossing waiting for the red caboose to go by so we could continue on our way into town.

But I’ve never met an engineer, have never been on a freight train, and had no idea what the inside of a modern locomotive cab looks like. It was important to the story that I know these things—not because I was writing a technical manual, but because the protagonist knew all these things. They were second nature to him. Many readers probably wouldn’t blink if I had him stepping on a gas pedal instead of moving a lever to change the speed of the train, but these mistakes would ruin the effect for those who knew I’d gotten it wrong.

How often have we watched TV shows or movies, or read books or stories, and shaken our heads at some detail that didn’t ring true? Dan Brown totally fluffed the geography of Paris in The Da Vinci Code. Unless you’ve been there, you probably wouldn’t know—but I have been, and it temporarily took me out of the story. That’s not to say that if you set a short story in Prague (as I did recently) you have to get on a plane and head for the Czech Republic. But I did a lot of research so that people familiar with the local geography wouldn’t totally hate me for making it all up. You know all those travelogues people post on their blogs, complete with cheesy photos? Pure gold when it comes to location research. Pictures truly are worth thousands of words, and are a great substitute for a costly trip to Europe.

So I did my research. I sat in my BIG RAT and filled my head full of locomotive knowledge. Thankfully, the internet is a decent stand-in for the BIG RAT. I found animated schematics and video snippets shot in locomotive cabs on HowStuffWorks.com. I tracked down “day-in-the-life” features about engineers in newspapers and on career web sites. Those types of articles are usually the first thing I look for when researching a new topic. I googled “day in the life” locomotive engineer and found interviews with men who drive trains, and even one about a day in the life of a train.

If you stood me next to a locomotive (so long as I’m wearing my special electrode-bearing glasses), I think I could find my way up the ladder (8 feet tall) into the cab. I’d know enough to throw the main switch and all the circuit breakers to power up the system. I might even be able to start the diesel engine and get the train moving. Certainly, though, after a couple of days of research, I knew enough so my main character could perform most tasks of his routine existence while at the same time coexisting with the plot of the story.

The stuff I learn is almost never the focus of the story. It’s the window dressing that makes everything else seem real. Without it, my stories would be as starkly staged as Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Readers have to do more work if the walls are all imaginary and the doors non-existent.

I’ve gone to great lengths for research. Literally. I’ve driven all the way across Texas with a video camera mounted on the dashboard to do location research—because there’s only so much you can learn from the internet. A few snapshots and maps of a locality might be enough for a short story, but in this case I was writing a novel and things went so much better after I visited the place where the book was set. You learn things like how often trains go through the middle of town, disrupting its normal calm, what color the mountains turn when the sun sets, how rundown the part of town south of the tracks is compared to the way it looks on the computer, and how many of those open fields where I staged certain scenes have locked gates in front of them.

I’ve gone to lectures, ridden with police officers for entire shifts and attended the Citizens’ Police Academy. I’ve watched documentaries and read books about pertinent topics. I’ve taken mornings off from work to sit in a courtroom and watch jury selection. Much of what I’ve learned has worn off, except for the material I’ve captured in my notebooks, on video, audio or digital film. Like Joe 90, when the immediate need for the expertise goes, the details slowly dissipate. Except for the ones I’ve used as part of the palette in painting the staging for the story.

The secret is to not let the details overwhelm the tale. I often put a lot more in on the first draft than survives upon revision. I’m proud of my research. For a week, I probably bored my wife to tears with train trivia. Did you know that a typical freight train weighs over two million pounds and that it can take two miles to stop? Did you know that the area of contact between a train wheel and the track is smaller than a dime? I do—or I did while I was working on the story. Six months from now, I probably will have replaced much of that trivia with something else. The average speed of an unladen European swallow, for example.

Sometimes the story comes out of the research—“Rule Number One” happened because of my first police ridealong—but normally the story dictates the research. My preference is to do the research before I start writing, but sometimes the writing has to come first for logistical reasons. It’s not every day that I can pick up and drive across Texas, and the story wouldn’t wait for me to get there.

But it would all be so much easier if I could just sit in that BIG RAT for a few minutes and then wear my special goggles while I write. I have to wear glasses anyway. Just so long as they got the prescription right…

– Bev Vincent

An online acquaintance e-mailed me recently to offer congratulations on one of my stories he’d just read. In his message he said, “I’m not a short story guy—I don’t understand the mechanics, so I never write them myself.”

That got me thinking, so I decided to spend my time this month talking about the genesis of a story I recently finished. Everyone’s creative process is different, so I doubt there’s a take-home message here, just a peek under the hood.

I recently acquired a medium-sized whiteboard. Its primary contents are anthology deadlines and other due dates, such as the 17th of each month for this essay. I currently have deadlines for February and March on it, as well as a list of projects without specific deadlines that I want to keep in mind.

Few of these dates are absolutes for me. If I come up with an idea for an anthology, I’ll take a stab at it, but sometimes a deadline sails on by and I have to erase it. I do so with a twinge of regret at a missed opportunity, but that’s life, and there are only so many hours in the day.

A couple of weeks ago I submitted a story, then wiped it off the board and looked at what was next. A loosely themed anthology, small press, pro rates, and the editors had sent me a congenially scolding e-mail asking why I hadn’t yet sent them anything.

As I sometimes do when trying to come up with an idea for a themed anthology—a project I think of as being akin to homework for a creative writing class—I pulled out from my top left-hand desk drawer a file where I keep clippings, hand-written notes and web-page printouts. My idea file. As I’ve said before, ideas are a dime a dozen. Cheaper, probably. Here’s one: mayor of small French town outlaws dying because the cemetery is full. Neat, eh? Just an idea, though, and not a story. Story is what characters do when presented with a situation.

I leafed through the pages. Three paper-clipped printouts caught my eye. It happens that way. I’d had those pages in the file for three years and had looked at them dozens of times before without any stirring. For no explainable reason, the idea seemed like its time might have come.

The anthology had a theme—one of the major characters had to be of a particular profession. As many other writers have said, stories often come not from an idea, but from the confluence of two ideas. I wondered what might happen to an as-yet-defined character of the specified profession encountering something related to my research idea.

Clearly, I wasn’t yet ready to start writing. I can’t remember what I did next. Maybe my morning writing time had run out and I left for work. Did my mind explore story possibilities the rest of that day? If so, it was on a deeply subconscious level. How about while I read and watched television that evening? I doubt it, but perhaps.

The real work started when I went to bed. At some point, I envisioned a scene. Not an entire story, just a vignette that put my character (who was now becoming clearer in my mind) in the situation. It was a very good opening, I thought. Moody, atmospheric, and it quickly got both to the core of my character and into the action.

The next morning I did some online research into any developments or details about my story situation and found some good material. I didn’t have much time left to write, so I jotted down the elements from my dream in shorthand notation. No more than a hundred words.

The scene came back to me again that night. The next morning I wrote it, trying to capture in words the essence of what I’d envisioned. I had some useful background details from my research, and I was growing to understand my character’s personality and plight—a plight that existed before the situation arose. I like it when a character who already has problems encounters a new problem that surpasses the others, or perhaps amplifies them.

All I had time for that morning was that scene, perhaps 1200 words. Just as well—I couldn’t see any farther into the story yet. In the shower afterward, I realized that, given this situation, the main character would logically go for help. That put me on the road to the next scene, and by the time the following morning rolled around, I was ready to introduce the secondary characters she would go to for assistance. Another set piece. A new location, a different atmosphere, and some interesting new people to sketch in.

Another day passes. Character has a problem, character goes for help. What next? Return to the scene of the problem, of course. I chose two of my favorite new people to accompany the main character to investigate the situation. Their dialog as they returned gave me an opportunity to fill in details of character and situation. By the end of the third morning, I was back at the scene of the crime, so to speak, without a clue what would happen next.

The following morning, I still had no idea, so I fell back on a reliable strategy when I’m not ready to write new material: I edited what I already had. It’s a stalling tactic, but at least I feel like I’ve accomplished something at the end of the session.

I had another problem—I had already passed 60% of the anthology’s hard upper word limit. I know it sounds arbitrary to govern story by word count, but this was my assignment, after all. I had tackled this project because of the prompt the anthology guidelines gave me. If I sit down to write a flash fiction story, I know I’ve only got 500-1000 words to work with. Most anthologies have an upper limit. I’m open to the possibility that a story might outgrow its intended market, but I was going to do my best to come in at length. For one thing, this type of constraint makes me choose my words carefully. I’m a much more ruthless editor when I have to hit a target, and I think that editing makes my work better.

By the end of two more sessions I was getting uncomfortably close to the word limit, and I still didn’t have an ending. Time to whip out the machete again. Some mornings I deleted more words than I wrote—but not the same ones, thankfully. Then I had an idea for how to wrap it up. It required me going back into the story and inserting some signposts, but that gave me an excuse for another editing session. After seven or eight days, I finally had a first draft, which I dutifully sent off to my first reader for overall impressions.

I got back a glowing report on the character, the situation and most of the story—except for the ending, which I was starting to doubt, too. It led to continuity issues and questions. I was going to have to explain away a lot of things if that ending was to persist. Back to the drawing board. For the next few days, all I did was revise the first 85% of the story. I needed to give myself room for a new ending—when one occurred to me.

An interesting thing happened along the way, though. As I carved and shaped and honed the beginning, I really found the story, and it wasn’t what I’d started out with. Same situation, same character, but the “horror story” I’d planned to write wasn’t one at all—or at least I wasn’t sure it was. My original ending was an effort to add a supernatural element to the tale. The backstory had rumblings of the supernatural, but that was all hearsay. No incontrovertible evidence.

I was trying to force myself in one direction when the story—especially my main character—was showing me another way. That happens a lot, which is why I don’t write much of what people consider horror. My tales may be tragic, sad, and possibly even elicit a sense of dread, but they seldom deal with anything beyond the ken.

If this story had started as a diamond in the rough, I would have turned it into grains of powder by the time I was done polishing it. Fortunately, unlike with a precious stone, poli
shing a story doesn’t always mean removing material. I have the option of building it back up before I start shaping it again. Perhaps it’s more like modeling in clay. Removing everything that isn’t the story and pushing around the rest into the proper form.

I spent more time editing and refining this story than any in recent memory because I believed I was onto something good and I wanted to get it exactly right. An impossible goal, of course, but I wanted to do right by the story.

My main character dictated the outcome, because it was her story. Regardless of the initial situation and its implications, what mattered was what befell her. The opening scene was the catalyst for personal reflection. I like the way the whole process evolved and I’m especially fond of the Mist-like denouement, but I fear it may not be what the editors are looking for.

That’s okay—my writing assignment gave me a chance to get to know a character who is now dear to my heart, and I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to find a home for her. She’s badly in need of one.

– Bev Vincent

At the end of December, I had accumulated vacation from my day job that I had to use or lose, so I took off the final dozen or so days of 2006. I had great plans for that “free time.” Several of those days, I was going to be home alone because my wife had to work over the holidays. Huge blocks of uninterrupted time. Imagine the possibilities.

I had just finished the first draft of a novel manuscript. I planned to put the book aside for a couple of weeks and focus on a couple of short stories. I have a file where I keep printouts of anthology guidelines, sorted by “expiration date.” I also recently purchased an erasable whiteboard, where I list upcoming deadlines so none slip past while I’m busy doing other things. I could make great headway on getting something prepared for projects with January and February deadlines. Heck, maybe I could even get all the way into the March stories.

Great plans, I say. New story after new story. I could also whip a couple of delinquent old tales into shape and get them back into the submission pipeline. I was going to be a writing fool. Smoke would rise from the keyboard, I was going to type so fast and for so long at a stretch.

My total output of fictional material during the last two weeks of 2006: zero. Nada. Zilch. Diddly squat.

I could blame it on cable TV, which was my Christmas present. For the first time in a decade, I had access to dozens, nay, hundreds of channels. However, being the holidays, most programs were reruns or sports events or seasonal specials. When I did watch TV, it was mostly either old reruns of various incarnations of Law & Order and C.S.I., or vintage movies I’ve seen many times before.

I read a lot. I was also overcome with a craving for baked foods that brought back fond memories of my youth, so I dug up recipes and actually baked stuff. Fruitcake. Oatmeal cookies. Bread. I prepared huge meals for when everyone else was home. We played board games, listened to music, watched movies. Hung out.

So, to reiterate. Total output: Bupkis.

To be fair, I didn’t abandon writing all together. Between episodes of Law & Order, I constructed a web site where I could post book reviews I’ve had sitting around and a couple of interviews I wanted to see the light of day. (It’s Onyx Reviews, if you’d care to check it out.) I wrote several new reviews, reformatted old ones, touched up an interview with Tabitha King, designed the new web page, created the banner and the navigation, acquired the domain name, etc. It wasn’t a total loss. However, nothing at all like what I’d hoped to accomplish.

And yet, in retrospect, I don’t regret a moment of it, and I wouldn’t do a thing differently given the chance to do it all over again. (Not true: I would have rolled the oatmeal dough to a more consistent thickness so my cookies didn’t end up thick on one end and thin on t’other.)

In a sense, I was taking a double vacation. I was getting away from the day job for nearly two weeks, but I was also recharging my creative batteries.

We hear about the creative pool, the one where we all go down to drink. During my usual routine, I write for about an hour to ninety minutes in the morning. I stop for two reasons: first, because I have to go to work. Second, however, because the pool usually runs temporarily dry at that point. There are days when the pool is especially deep and I can write for hours and hours, but those days are exceptions. It seems that my creative pool refills at a rate of about 1500 words a day, on average. It’s just a happy coincidence that my allotted time is usually long enough so I can pump those words onto the page.

Every so often, though, the pool needs more than a day to recharge. The water isn’t running as quickly as usual, and it might even be getting a little brackish or stale. We take vacations from nine-to-five jobs. It’s also necessary every now and then to take a break from the keyboard.

As a result of my decision, passive though it may have been, a couple of anthology deadlines went sailing on by. C’est dommage, as we say where I come from, usually with a shrug. I might have been able to wring the pool dry and put something together for those projects, but it wouldn’t have been my best work.

Once January came around and I got back to my usual routine, I felt recharged and renewed. In two weeks, I did a complete editing pass through the novel I’d completed the month before. Now I’m ready to tackle the list on that new whiteboard of mine. January 17^th: Storyellers essay. Check.

The well isn’t full to the brim—I doubt it ever is. But the water looks cool and refreshing, ready for me to drink it in and channel it into something else.

Not an especially profound message, perhaps, but I think we need to remind ourselves that it’s okay to take a break every now and then. Perhaps even recommended. Get our heads outside of ourselves for a while and look around at the rest of the world with a restful eye and a peaceful mind.

–Bev Vincent

I have a strict and limited budget when it comes to writing.

I’m not talking about finances, however—I’m referring to a “temporal” budget. The number of hours in the day is fixed, and only a small fraction of them are available to me for writing and writing-associated tasks.

Monday through Friday, I get up at 5 a.m., check e-mail and message boards until 5:15 and then start working. I have slightly less than 90 minutes, until about 6:40, when I have to regroup and prepare for the rest of my day.

If my brain kicks into gear right at 5:15 and I don’t get sidetracked or don’t have to spend too much time cogitating, I can produce up to 1500 words during those 90 minutes. Some days I’m lucky to come away with 800-1000. On bad days, less still.

“Writing sessions” aren’t always devoted to writing fiction, though. Once every eight-to-ten weeks I have to turn in a 5000-word column to Cemetery Dance. That takes the better part of a week to produce, even if I’ve been diligent during the intervening weeks and made notes and bookmarked documents. Once a month I write one of these columns, which usually takes one session to draft and another to proof. Book reviews take at least one session to formulate and parts of one or two others to revise and polish.

There’s even more to the writing gig than that. Editing and revising fiction takes longer than writing it, in my experience. Story research can consume an inordinate amount of time. Then there’s the whole process of finding markets, preparing manuscripts, writing cover letters, stuffing envelopes (literal or virtual), documenting submissions (to avoid resending a story to a market a year after they’ve rejected it), recording and tracking expenses, etc.

Beyond that, there are work-related duties. Answering fan mail, which I always try to handle as quickly as possible. Responding to requests for information or assistance. Requesting information or assistance. Reviewing proofs. Signing books for fans or signature sheets for publishers. Performing routine computer maintenance, anti-virus and spyware scans, and backups.

It all takes time—just like the little incidentals in life take money—and the budget, as I said, is limited. Occasionally, something unexpected arises that throws the budget into disarray. The refrigerator dies and needs to be replaced. The car breaks down and requires expensive repairs. Though rewarding, NaNoWriMo was a drain on my temporal budget because I devoted all my energy to a single project for nearly a month. Almost all other obligations piled up, like bills on a spindle.

Then along comes an unstructured weekend, which is like getting a surprise bonus, or finding $20 in your pants pocket while you’re doing the laundry. Though these temporal bonuses can be a boon, I often don’t get as much done as I’d hoped. I do better within a structured timeframe, I find. It’s easy to squander that windfall of spare time. There are always a hundred things to do, and I don’t always get to the big stack of figurative bills on that metaphorical metal spike.

No doubt I’m preaching to the choir. Any writers reading this essay know full well what a precious commodity time is. I’ve heard some readers carp when their favorite author decides he or she can no longer respond to fan mail, preferring to concentrate on his or her writing instead. These disgruntled fans assume that an author who writes full time must have scads of spare time to surf the internet, read fan mail, post on message boards, etc. I can’t address that situation with the voice of experience, but I suspect that if you ramp the writing up to full time, all the other associated obligations expand proportionately. You spend more hours editing, researching, marketing, handling the business of writing, etc.

I believe that most of us would prefer to be able to spend all of our writing time writing. I don’t think many of us would agree with Dorothy Parker when she said, “I hate writing; I love having written.” Sure, we all get a sense of accomplishment when something is done and we can look back proudly on the fruits of our labors. But what do we think about in the next moment? Getting back at it. Tackling that next new idea. Anticipating the feeling of our fingertips grazing across the surface of the keyboard. Channeling thoughts, scenes, ideas, situations, people onto the glowing screen before us, and summoning that inexplicable magic which allows creativity to flow through us.

Time spent like that has no equal, at least not in any other part of the writing business.

– by Bev Vincent

I tricked myself into writing a novel this month.

As you may know, this is NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is “simple”: write a 50,000-word novel during the thirty days of November. I did it last year and found it an exhilarating experience. Didn’t finish the book during November, but I wrote something like 75,000 words and completed the first draft a week or so into December.

This year, I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate. I was nowhere near as well prepared as I was last year, when I had a pretty good overall outline of the novel in my mind. I was also cognizant of the fact that there were nine days out of the month when I might not get any writing done at all.

I registered for NaNoWriMo at the last moment. My intent was to kick-start a book that I’ve been wanting to write for two years, but which has been languishing on my desktop for most of 2006 without attention. I had 19,000 words down, but other work got in the way, and I hadn’t even looked at the pages since June.

I’m never going to get 50,000 words done in November, I told myself. No way. And, as the early days of the month passed, I acknowledged how true that prediction was. I was getting no more than 1000-1200 words written each day, when the average daily output has to be 1666 words to meet the goal.

Then along came the World Fantasy Convention. Three days in Austin where I wrote absolutely nothing, even though I took my laptop with me hoping to get at least thirty minutes or an hour in each day.

I saw the goal fading farther and farther into the distance, and I consoled myself by saying: I never thought I’d make it anyway. If I get 30,000 words done, I’ll be doing great, and I will have pushed well ahead into the novel.

Then a funny thing happened. I started kicking into high gear. Instead of a paltry 1000 words, I was writing 2000 words. Some days 3000. As many as 4000 on one or two days this past week. I started getting back on track. By the middle of November, I was exactly where I needed to be to reach the target: 25,000 new words. I even banked some extra words, so that if I missed a day or two, I would still be on track.

So, I allowed myself to hope. As much as I’d told myself that not meeting the NaNoWriMo goal didn’t matter, deep inside I knew that it did. I don’t like to miss deadlines or fail to meet goals, arbitrary though they may be.

Still, Thanksgiving weekend looms, and I’m going to be away for the better part of six days. I don’t know if I’ll get any writing done at all. So, failure is still an option. It doesn’t matter. Not really. (Yes it does!) No, it doesn’t.

Really. It doesn’t. I’ll probably take the manuscript with me to read and revise while I’m traveling. I’ll take along a journal to record any notes that occur to me. I might even end up writing longhand sections.

Or not. The important thing is that—even if I wrote nothing else this month—I’ve added nearly 30,000 words to the manuscript, I’ve figured out a lot about the story and the characters, and I’m halfway through the novel.

In the book, one character is a novelist who has just finished a manuscript that is vastly different from anything he’s written before. He knows it’s good, but he also believes that his agent, his publisher and his regular readers aren’t going to like it. While he’s contemplating what to do about that, he decides to work on a novella that he agreed to contribute to an anthology being edited by a friend. Something short and manageable. Something that doesn’t represent a long commitment of time. Four weeks’ work, tops. Blow off some steam.

But a funny thing happens to him. During the first session, he falls into the zone and writes eighteen pages. The next day, same thing. Suddenly he realizes that a novella won’t contain this story. He’s accidentally started writing a novel. No fanfare, no rumination, no psychological preparation for the long haul that a novel represents. It simply happened to him when he wasn’t looking.

I know exactly how he feels.

And it feels great!

By Bev Vincent

The man in the Santa Claus suit waves his arm in hopes of a ride on the third morning of the New York transit strike. Despite freezing temperatures and a severe wind chill, sweat streams across his face.

Instead of the usual fake beard and padding beneath a Coca-Cola red suit, he wears a flesh-like mask that clings to his face, covering his entire head. The beard and long white hair were threaded through the rubber a strand at a time. At the neck it connects to a body suit of the type supplied to actresses to make them look pregnant on-screen. Beards get tugged. Hair gets pulled. He wants nothing to spoil the illusion. Only his eyes are exposed, and even these are covered by blue-tinted contacts.

A car slows. They might squeeze in an extra passenger, even an oversized one, but they clearly have no room for his enormous sack. Steam emerges through the openings at his nostrils and the small puncture between his rubber lips. He suspects he’s running late but isn’t wearing a watch. That would spoil the illusion.

The streets are filled with pedestrians, people on bikes, scooters, inline skates, anything to get them wherever they need to be. Men and women hold aloft cardboard signs hastily inked with their destinations. Turtle Bay. Lower East Side. SoHo. Battery Park.

Desperate drivers pick up strangers to satisfy the enforced limit of four-per-car for vehicles heading into Manhattan south of 96th. The red BMW rolling through that stop sign might contain a lawyer, an office temp, a doorman and a plumber. In addition to the deliveryman, the brown courier van speeding past might hold a CEO, an architect, and an exotic dancer. None of them have room for a fully loaded Santa Claus. Several drivers hold their hands up in the universal “Sorry, but what can I do?” gesture.

The man rubs his gloved hands together for warmth and jostles the sack on the ground beside him with his knee to reassure himself of its presence. He keeps thinking about its contents. Though he’s hesitant to stick out a red-gloved thumb, he steps toward the street more assertively.

Finally, a black Escalade with two people up front and a third in the back seat pulls over to the curb. The man peers through the cloud of warmth escaping the open window. “We’re going to Washington Square,” the driver says.

Close enough. The man opens the rear door and places his sack on the seat, making sure the drawstrings are pulled tight. He nestles his left arm around it like a teenager on a date. He senses he’s interrupted a conversation in progress, so he tries to break the ice with that old standby. “Stays like this, we’ll have a white Christmas after all.”

The others, two men and a woman, smile and nod in response. They introduce themselves. Heidi, in the front seat, wearing a white down jacket with a fur-trimmed hood, is a lawyer. Herschel, bespectacled, with a computer on his lap, is a technology consultant. George, the driver, in a dark overcoat, teaches at NYU.

“What do you do?” Heidi asks, then covers her mouth with a white mitten as she bursts out laughing. The others join in. The man’s laughter is deep and jolly, well practiced and natural sounding.

Herschel says, “I heard about this guy who put an ad on the internet night before last. Free rides. No one answered. He put up another one yesterday morning, this time asking for money. He had fifteen replies in five minutes.” He shakes his head. “It’s crazy.”

“I like what happens to people when there’s a crisis in this city,” Heidi says. “They’re nicer to each another than usual. More trusting”
The man nods in agreement.

“Wouldn’t it be great if strikes happened more often?” George asks. “There’s no traffic.”

The man is glad they’re making good time, because he’s getting hot inside his body suit. He’s tempted to roll down the window, but doesn’t want to freeze out the other passengers. “Not everyone’s nice in a crisis,” he says, remembering an ugly scene that happened earlier, people yelling at cops and at each other. His left arm rests protectively atop his sack.

George shrugs. The streets are slick with ice and snow. He seems to be concentrating on his driving.

“No, not everyone,” Herschel agrees.

The man listens to the three as they banter about the strike, its side effects, and anything else that comes to mind. He finds it curious that none of them have commented on his outfit or the fact that he’s kept his mask on the whole time. They act like they know each other, and it occurs to him to ask if they’ve just met.

From his position in the back seat, the man sees Heidi glance first at George, then over her shoulder at Herschel.

“We’ve known each other a long time,” she says.

“Long time,” Herschel echoes.

“Waiting for circumstances like these to go out and gather people willing to join us.”

George clicks a remote control on his visor. Through the frosty windshield, the man sees a garage door opening ahead.

“Eager to join us,” Herschel says. “Get in without question. No struggles.”

The car veers sharply into the opening and the darkness beyond. The man has only a brief instant to consider how easily he was tricked. How perfect the illusion they had created.

–Bev Vincent

Now there’s a subject guaranteed to send most of my potential readers fleeing for the hills, warding off flashbacks of grade school history essays.

This month, I want to write about my perception of my evolution as a writer. I had lunch last week with a guy who works across the street from my office who is also a writer. He’s just starting out—recently submitted a story for the first time—so he wanted to pick my brain and bounce some ideas off me. As I waxed philosophical on the subject of writing, certain ideas formed in my mind in a way that I hadn’t thought about them before.

When I started writing six or seven years ago (after a long hiatus), my mind was awash with ideas. Some turned into plots, but the results weren’t stories in the same way that I think about stories these days. They were simply plots. Maybe clever ones, maybe not, but readers probably came away from them without learning anything about the characters being propelled along by the plot. And that’s just what they were: puppets awash in a sea of plot, no more involved in their destiny than someone aboard a rubber raft being tossed about on a raging river.

Occasionally, when inspiration failed—or ideas failed to convert into stories—I’d go trolling through the submission guidelines reported by places like Hellnotes, Gila Queen and ralan.com. I focused on themed anthologies, because I wasn’t looking for a market for stories—I was looking for stories for a market.

I regarded these guidelines as writing challenges. Homework. Write 4000 words about a crime that takes place aboard a space station. Up to 6000 words set in a bookstore. Concoct a story using the unlikely pairing of cockroaches and vampires, or one featuring absinthe.

Sometimes nothing happened in response to my literary homework, and that was okay. I didn’t write about bloodsucking cockroaches or psychotropic liquor. (The stupid phrase “absinthe makes the heart grow fonder” kept popping up in my head. I probably wasn’t alone in this.) But often something did happen, and I’d end up with a story. As I wrote, I’d periodically click on the “word count” tool, a process that reminded me of tapping my pencil tip on every single word on a sheet of foolscap to see if I’d met the requisite length.

I used these “assignments” to hone my skills. At the end of the submission period, I’d turn in my work and have it graded. Often, the course was simply pass/fail, but sometimes I’d get my paper back with some helpful markings on it, or occasionally the teacher would ask for a resubmit after revision. Sometimes the work was deemed good enough to hang on the bulleting board with a silver star next to it.

A few of those early stories were essentially given away. Published in places where no one read them and little or no compensation changed hands. Just as well. While they might have been well written from a grammatical/style perspective, they were sorely lacking in characterization. I recently renovated one of those early efforts and ended up with a story that is 25% longer and ten times better simply because I figured out who the protagonist was and what his experience meant to him, and why. The linear plot is essentially unaltered, but the story grew a heart along the way.

As I was talking to my new acquaintance, I struggled to put this into words. He had a sheet of paper with dozens of brief story synopses. He would read one out loud and ask if the idea sounded good to me. By way of response, I asked him: What is your intent in telling this story? Is the technology, futuristic vision or ideology what you are trying to convey, or are you interested in showing how the things in your 30-word plot affect the protagonist? Could you substitute the science/dogma with something else and end up with essentially the same tale, or is that integral to what you want to accomplish?

I still get writing assignments these days in the form of invitations to contribute to an anthology. Because I’m congenial and easily flattered, I usually agree. However, these days, when I am delivered with a notion for a story, my first thought isn’t about the space station or the bookstore or even the hallucinogenic booze. I start with the person or people I want to write about. Figure out who they are, what they want, and what their issues are. Once I understand that, I deliver them to the situation required by the anthology theme and see how they react. I no longer want to write stories where the main character could be substituted with someone completely different and the story would essentially remain unchanged.

Sometimes that gets me in trouble, because I occasionally end up writing a story in a different genre than what’s expected for the book—or in no discernable genre whatsoever. I have a short story in my drawer that I happen to think is an excellent character study that explores a fairly profound, universally accessible idea and examines how the character adjusts—or fails to adjust—with his new reality. I can’t for the life of me figure out what kind of story it is, though. On the surface, it seems to be near-future science fiction, but the truth is that the sci-fi element is merely a trapping. I could surgically remove it and replace it with something more contemporary and end up with much the same story.

Getting back to my new acquaintance. What I tried to express was that the blurb-ish ideas he was presenting me with didn’t tell me anything about the stories he had written about them. I could have taken those germs and written stories entirely different from what he had conceived. It’s all in the execution and the intent of the author. When he was telling me about scientists discovering sentient computers that work around errors in programming, he was excited by the technology while I was wondering what the scientists were thinking. Both approaches are valid, and half a dozen years ago I probably would have written about the technology. The scientists would have been two nameless, faceless guys in white coats mouthing words as they were swept away in the torrent of plot.

But my years of apprenticeship as a writer have taught me something. You can fascinate readers with plot, but if you really want to connect with them you need more. You can put all the reptiles you want on an aircraft, but unless there’s at least one person aboard that flight that you can get readers to connect with, all you have is, well, (expletive deleted) snakes on a (expletive deleted) plane.

–Bev Vincent

I recently attended “Harry, Carrie and Garp” (HCG) at Radio City Music Hall in New York. A fundraiser, the evening featured three authors—Stephen King, John Irving and JK Rowling—standing in front of 6000 people doing what they do best: telling stories. They weren’t playing music, telling jokes or leaping through hoops of fire; they were simply reading. For over two-and-a-half hours, a contented audience sat, without refreshments or intermissions, and listened.

The first time I saw a writer really work a room was at my first or second World Horror Convention. I remember sitting in a fairly small room with chairs spread around haphazardly as Matthew Warner “read a story.” That’s an oversimplification of what he did—he was TELLING A STORY, and he made sure the audience knew it. The tale was about a man at an airport who sees something weird happening in the bathroom across from the gate. People went in one way and never came back out again. Matt didn’t hang out behind his lectern and read stiffly from his stapled sheets of paper. He stormed around the room. He made funny faces and aggressive gestures. He got in people’s faces. He directed parts of the narrative at individuals in the audience, as if expecting them to respond. I’m not sure everyone knew what to make of this fellow, but it was both effective and memorable.

Readings are tough gigs, and they don’t get any easier as we get older. I remember one a couple of summers back that was held in an outdoor venue. The organizers hadn’t factored nightfall into the equation, so by the time my turn arrived, I couldn’t see my manuscript. The fellow ahead of me had quit halfway through in frustration. The moon was bright that night, but not bright enough. Someone retrieved a handheld flashlight from their glove compartment for me, so I had to juggle manuscript, flashlight and microphone, while at the same time trying to make sure I was looking through the right part of my new “graduated lenses.”¹ What with making sure the particular sentence I was reading was illuminated and that my mouth was close enough to the mike to make sure anyone more then five feet away could hear me (without deafening those closer than that), I had little left in me to “perform” the story, so I expect it was a rather dreary affair.

I came away from HCG with an insight into reading for an audience. If your material is funny, you’ll get great feedback. That seems self-evident, but I’d never looked at it from the reader’s point of view before. King read the pie-eating contest scene from “The Body,” and Irving read the Christmas pageant scene from A Prayer for Owen Meany. They both had the audience in stitches. Rowling read from Harry Potter. There was a hush over Radio City Music Hall, and her fans were doubtless entranced, but I’m not sure what the experience was like for her—for a reading is a two-way experience. Give and take.

I attended another reading a few years ago where one of the celebrity authors read a passage that was so graphic, visceral and disturbing that the audience didn’t know how to react. This was a general crowd, not at a horror convention. There was polite applause at the end, but I sensed discomfort during the reading, and not the kind that the author was necessarily hoping to invoke.

A couple of other memorable readings: Tom Monteleone reading “Horn of Plenty” at HorrorFind in Phoenix. It was an experience not to be missed. Tom didn’t work the room the same way Matt Warner did, but he put on that story like you put on a winter coat. He wrapped himself up in it and inhabited the character of this young, black jazz musician. If you know Tom, the first two adjectives don’t describe him—I can’t vouch for the rest.²

Then, Gary Braunbeck reading “We Now Pause for Station Identification” at World Horror in New York. I was so blown away I made a point of attending when he performed again at the Stokers in L.A. The story is a first-person narrative told by a radio personality who is broadcasting live (but perhaps not to anyone alive) while zombies take over the city. There’s not a sentence of narrative in the story—it’s a 30-minute soliloquy and listening to Gary “read” (again, an insufficient word) put readers completely in the story. You could close your eyes and imagine that you were listening to the radio as these events transpired. Though Gary did sit behind the table, the emotion and reality his voice conveyed made up for his stationary presence.³

Some stories were never meant to be read aloud. I’ll never read “One of Those Weeks,” my tale in Borderlands 5, because the ending of the story relies on a visual component—the way the words are printed, or NOT printed on the page—that can’t be conveyed when reading it aloud.

Three types of stories are particularly good for readings. There are probably more, but these are the ones that occur to me:

1. Campfire tales. King’s reading of “The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan” from “The Body” is a good example of this. The narrator is telling it the way it went down, just as if he were sitting by the fire entertaining a wide-eyed group of campers.
2. Soliloquies. These are rarer, but Gary’s tale is a perfect example of this. If the reader can find the right voice, he’ll have the audience in his hands.
3. First person narratives. A cross between the two. If you ever get the chance to listen to the audio version of Bag of Bones, you’ll know how effective it can be. The narrator, Mike Noonan, is telling you what happened to him, and it’s like having the author speak directly to you.

I heard reports of another successful Monteleone reading at HorrorFind last week, which makes me wish I’d been there.⁴ We all tell stories, but when you find an author who can not only captivate readers on the page but also transcend the page and entertain an audience with his or her creations, then you’ve found a real storyteller.

---

¹ A polite euphemism for “bifocals”
² The story is available on audio read by Tom as part of Borderlands Press’s Dark Voices series. You won’t get to see Tom, but just hearing him will be an experience.
³ Video of Gary reading this story is available online—a well-crafted Google search should turn it up for you.
⁴ Since I mention Tom so often in this essay, these footnotes are in his honor.