Tag: fiction

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Never Abandon the Blissful Value of Saying What Can’t Be Said

 

MIXTAPE

by Tom Leveen

 

A mixtape says the things you can’t. Or won’t.

Or sometimes: shouldn’t.

Mikey fretted over this daily as he sorted through song after song, classics and new hits, trying to compose his feelings with someone else’s music.

Some of it depended on his mood. Some days it was all AC/DC, which he knew Glorietta liked from back in the day. But this wasn’t the sort of situation where one could blithely record Highway to Hell onto the mix, even if it was one of her favorites. The title was just too . . . inappropriate.

He leavened today’s tape with some old R.E.M., thinking some of the lyrics of Driver 8 said a lot of what he wished to say: take a break, we’ve been on this trip too long.

He’d never say that to her. Even if he could muster up the courage and, hell, write the words down, they still wouldn’t come out right. He had way too much experience with that. Glorietta deserved his best.

Nirvana next? No, too abrasive. Poison? No, a power ballad didn’t work either, not today.

Checking the time—he did not want to be late, so as to maximize their time together—Mikey hurriedly chose some Midnight Oil, followed by U2. Classic stuff. Despite not the world’s biggest U2 fan, in his opinion, The Joshua Tree was one of the top great albums ever made.

Minutes ticked away as he painstakingly constructed the opus. He didn’t have a title for it yet; previous incarnations included A Fragile Flash of Lightning, riffing off Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound of Thunder. Glorietta—she preferred “Glory”—had given him a brief laugh for that, which Mikey cherished. Last week he’d gone full metal-head, nothing but Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Metallica, Skid Row, Queensrÿche, Flotsam and Jetsam . . . and called it Wish You Were Hair, bemoaning that he’d lost his own long locks some time ago and still feeling pretty pouty and petty about it.

Petty! Of course.

Wildflowers became the last song on side B. Glory belonged among the wildflowers, most definitely.

Mikey hesitated as he scrawled the song title on the lined white insert. Did Wildflowers imply too much? That he, Mikey, should be her lover?

No, he decided. Most of the lyrics seemed very pointed at wishing the best for the other person. If that happened to come from a place of pure love and affection and . . . okay, fine, lust . . . Glory wouldn’t be any the wiser.

He hoped. God, the last thing she needed right now his sappy confession of love. No way, man.

Mikey snapped the cassette into its case and ran for his bike. If he pedaled hard, he’d get there just in time.

He got to the hospital one minute after Glory’s visiting hours began. A little breathless, he peeked into her room to see if she was awake.

She was. Barely. The TV was on. Family Ties.

“Hey,” Mikey whispered, still peering around the open door, not wanting to come in without Glory’s permission.

“Hey, you,” Glorietta said, and motioned with her fingers.

It was all the strength she had, and it was all the invitation Mikey needed. He slid into the room and went to the side of the wide bed, where he slipped the case into her hand.

“I, uh, I made . . . I made this . . . um . . . it’s, it’s a new—”

Even in her emaciated state, Glory’s smile lit his insides on fire.

“You know, Michael, one of these days . . .” She had to pause to take a breath. “You’re gonna have to bring a Walkman. Remember those?” Another pause. “Or you could just send me a Spotify list.”

He shook his head. “Not the same.”

“No,” Glory said. “It’s really not. You’re right.”

She lifted the tape to her face, squinting. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Christ, Michael, you’re fifty-five years old, you better get on it.”

Glory smiled again as Mikey shuffled his feet. He wanted to say, “I did. I did find what I was looking for. Forty-five years ago when you moved in next door.”

But he couldn’t, and wouldn’t.

And, probably, oughtn’t.

All these years, nothing but friends. Through her various boyfriends, her first husband, her divorce, her second husband, him leaving her. Never having kids, career like a pinball in one of the old machines they used to play back in the neighborhood growing up. Then finally, this illness. He’d been the best friend he could. So he came every day with a new tape, and he’d keep coming until the inevitable end.

It was nearer than he cared to think about.

Glory gently put the cassette on a nearby table with several others Mikey’d brought over the past couple weeks. He almost helped her do it, her gesture was so weak. But he knew her stubbornness well. She would have given him a raft of shit for helping.

After the tape clattered mildly against the table top, Glory then stretched out her hand toward him.

“Michael.”

Perplexed, he took her hand. She was so cold.

“You don’t have to keep doing this.”

“Yeah, but, I . . . I mean, I do, I want to, I like to . . . unless you want me to stop.”

Glory shook her head weakly against the pillow. “No. Don’t do that. I’m just saying.” A pause. “You have a life. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.”

Mikey licked his lips, eyes darting. The words were right there, he could taste them in his mouth.

They wouldn’t come.

In a burst, Mikey snatched the new mixtape off the table and popped open the tiny radio-cassette player he’d brought on his first visit. He jammed the tape inside, slapped the tray shut, and pressed the play button.

Freddie Mercury said what he couldn’t. Mikey glanced at Glory, to see if she understood.

Glorietta pressed her lips together.

“Yeah,” she said quietly as the song played. “You’re mine, too.”

Mikey smiled, pulled a plastic molded chair to her bed, and sat down. Glory offered her hand again, and he took it.

She fell asleep an hour later in the middle of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. Mikey stayed by her side until visiting hours were over.

He’d come back tomorrow. Maybe with some Beastie Boys.

THE END

 

What did you think? Thumbs up, thumbs down? I don’t think it’s bad for a first draft. Tell me your thoughts!
~ Tom

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Keep Your Notes – They Might Form a Book Someday

I love all the kids in my debut novel Party, of course. And there is a little bit of me in each one of them. But I feel the most for Morrigan. My heart breaks for her.

I think it’s because she was based on a character I created who was an imagined child of mine.

Yeah. True story.

This is a mockup of promo material for the film version of Party, now called Butterflies. That’s Morrigan…and if you’ve read the book, you know that’s about how her night ends!

I was dating someone and got to thinking about what our kids might be like. I smiled as I thought about it, and started writing a short little scene. In the scene, our kid — an only child, by the way! — was a teenager. A girl. And she and I were on our back patio having a conversation.

As happens often when I write, I lost track entirely of the story and just surfed the wave of inspiration. I felt invigorated when I was finished, and CTRL+HOME’d back to the top of the doc and started reading.

My jaw slowly dropped.

Our kid was in bad shape. I didn’t even know I was writing it like that. Far from being some tender, bucolic scene of heartfelt emotion, the scene was dark and broody and kind of unpleasant.

Worst — I didn’t come off too well in it.

That was the day I knew the relationship wasn’t going to go the distance. I was right. (Thankfully for both of us.)

 

Commissioned fan art of Morry

So Morrigan was in many ways the first character to come to life in Party. When I had the idea to throw a bunch of dissimilar kids into a situation and see what happened, I knew the girl in that scene was going to be a part of it.

None of the actual words in that scene ended up in the published novel, but that’s her, no question.

Morrigan just wants to be seen. In particular by her dad. I know that feeling from both sides of it now. I try to remind myself of what happens to kids who get dismissed by their parents, and work harder at not letting that happen in my house.

Morrigan’s a good kid at heart. She really is.

 

In this homework assignment from an English class, it’s clear the student has very specific ideas about Morrigan….

I’m excited to see where she ends up in my new serialized novel, FADE INTO YOU, in which I pluck the characters from Party and plant them into the world of Zero – early 1990’s Phoenix in stead of early 2000’s Santa Barbara. She won’t be exactly the same — none of the characters will — but she’ll still be Morry, that sassy little brat who desperately seeks a connection to people.

So desperately it gets her into trouble from time to time,

But then, that’s where good stories come from, isn’t it?

If you’d like an e-book copy of PARTY, just head to my author website and I’ll email you one right away!

And if you want to learn more about the exclusive serial FADE INTO YOU, head over to patreon.com/tomleveen.

Talk to you soon,
take care,
~ Tom

Categories
Craft

When You Doubt Your Story, Ask This Simple Question

There’s one simple metric to apply to all of your storytelling questions that will solve the bulk of your story-writing problems:

 

Do you have a character, who cares about other characters, facing a goal or a challenge that they will do anything to achieve?

 

If you have that, everything else is gonna work out.

 

I’m working on a project with a guy I met through Gary Vaynerchuk. I had the privilege of being on Tea with Gary Vee, and this particular artist reached out to me after the show with some ideas. We talked and hit it off, and now we’re developing a storytelling video game app—an animated “choose your own adventure” style text-based game. We’re basing the story off my novel Sick, which is already a known property; this is something I won awards for, so I know it’s a solid story.

 

But I can’t just cut and paste chapters into this game. It’s being written in such a way that there are multiple choices, not just the one ending that happens in the novel. I’ve worked on a “choose your own adventure” video game before, but in that game, no matter what choices you made, you’d still end up at the same ending. (It was based on a romance novel, and you do not mess with romance novel endings, lemme tell ya!)

 

This project based on Sick will have multiple possible endings and multiple possible storylines. (And, unlike the romance novel gig, we’re not going to charge people to get the good stuff.) You can play multiple times with different characters.

 

But as I’m working on this game, I find myself getting nervous. This is a brand new way of telling a story for me. I have to keep track of all the different characters and choices, how the story branches out. I’m starting to panic: what if this is way beyond my caliber? I’ve gotten myself into something I don’t think I’ll be able to do, because right now, in terms of marketing, we’re not doing anything new technologically. We’re not introducing a new app or a new way to play games. We’re banking on his artwork and my story. So I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out, “Oh my God, am I in over my head? What if I don’t know what I’m doing? What if I suck?” All the usual things.

 

When those questions hit it’s time to back to the basics.

 

No matter the platform, no matter the format, no matter the genre, every single story is going to come down to the same basic elements in the same basic structure.

 

Do you have a character who cares about other characters, and does she have a goal or a challenge that she will stop at nothing to obtain?

 

That’s it. If you have those two things, your story is really off to a great start.

 

Sometimes, what’s at stake is literally life or death, whether that’s the life and death of one person or an entire planet. But “life and death” still exists when we’re talking about asking a girl to prom, or confronting one’s own metaphorical demons. Those feel like life and death in the context of the setting and the story.

 

One of the tricks I’ve started using, and I’ll do the same thing with this game, is at the top of every chapter, I write myself a little note. That little note says:

 

“I’ll die if I don’t…”

 

That’s it. That’s just a little reminder that every single chapter, my character needs to want something so badly that she will (feel like she’ll) die if she doesn’t get it.

 

In my novel Zero, all she wants from page one is to go to her favorite art school. That’s the thing that she wants more than anything in the world. Other things happen on her quest to do that. She is aided and abetted by her new boyfriend Mike, and their developing relationship appears to be the story. But if you break down Zero piece by piece, you start to notice that Mike is not an obstacle, and not until like the last eighth of the book does he and their relationship become an obstacle. He’s actually, if you really want to get technical, a sidekick! He doesn’t offer obstacles for her to overcome until towards the very end, when Zero makes a choice that screws up the relationship. Instead, the backbone of the story is Zero’s relentless pursuit of the goal of getting to her favorite school.

 

She does not have to obtain that goal for the story to work. Our players won’t have to survive to feel like they’ve spent their time well interacting with the game.

 

One thing I learned from Todd McFarlane during my time working on Spawn was there’s always a “turn” in the scene. Every sequence or scene, something has to move forward. All of storytelling is about momentum, all the storytelling is about moving forward. It’s our job as writers and storytellers to excise anything that is not moving the story forward. Once you have that main goal, that “I’ll die if I don’t…” goal, it just becomes a question of moving that ball down the field.

 

That’s the thing I need to remind myself. Is it clear this character cares about something or someone, and are they determined to pursue a goal no matter what? If so, great; now do I show the character doing exactly that? If so, great.

 

Of course, there are many other techniques to talk about when it comes to developing your story, but if you’re stuck, if you’re not sure, if you’re worried, if you’re nervous…that simple question can answer a lot.

 

If you can’t answer that question, then there’s probably something else you need to work on. Without those things, the other tips and tricks and techniques and ideas about writing and storytelling don’t matter.

 

 

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Uncategorized

How Does an Agent Know in 10 Pages If I Am Worthy?

“I can tell from the first page what genre your novel is probably going to be. If I’m wrong about what genre it’s going to be based on the first page, then, honestly . . . there’s probably something with the writing that the writer needs to look at.”

 

I saw this question on Quora the other day: how does a literary agent know from the first 10 pages if the novel is worthy or not?

 

First, let’s discuss the meaning of the word “worthy.” What exactly does the writer mean when she says “worthy?” Presumably “worthy” means worthy to be published: is it a good novel, is it a good story, is it something marketable it’s something that an agent would be interested in, is it something an editor would be interested in?

 

The issue we have here is, your first step in querying agents and editors is to make sure you are querying the correct person for your work. You don’t want to send a horror novel to someone who exclusively represents romance, for example. In this instance, the literary agent knows from the first page, and certainly by 10 pages in, whether or not you have submitted the right genre to that agent or that editor.

 

Most novels are going to be able to establish their genre well within the first 10 pages, and often within the first page. I run a service on Fiverr where I critique the first page of people’s novels, and every once in a while someone will say, “Well, but how can you tell from the first page if it’s any good?” It’s because when you read as many manuscripts as I do, (never mind how many agents read!) and this many books, this many query letters, I can tell from the first page what genre this is probably going to be. If I’m wrong about what genre this is going to be based on the first page, then, honestly, there’s probably something with the writing that the writer needs to look at.

 

Every Sunday night at 6 p.m. Pacific time, we host a live stream called First Page Sunday. We use my first pages or first pages from published novels or first pages that have been submitted to the show, and we read them and give a quick—very friendly but professional—critique about that first page. More often than not you will be able to tell what genre this story is going to be based on the first sentence, certainly in the first page, and never mind 10 pages.

 

By 10 pages into any book we should be well-established into what kind of book this is going to be, because in those first 10 pages, you’re establishing character; you’re establishing tone; you’re establishing voice; and a really good writer is probably even going to introduce the main conflict of the story. We may not know what it is for sure, but it’s probably going to be there at least in the background if not introduced outright.

 

If you think about some of your favorite stories and go back and read the first 10 pages, you will probably start to see that we know who the main character is; we know that they are headed into some kind of trouble, and hopefully (more often than not) they’re headed into trouble because of a choice they have just made that is going to forever alter the trajectory of their life. All of these things, generally speaking, are going to occur in the first 10 pages. If none of those things occur in the first 10 pages, then that’s how a literary agent is going to say “This isn’t ‘worthy.’”

 

Using the word “worthy” here makes me feel as though the writer believes that something can be objectively good or objectively bad; objectively worthy or objectively unworthy. That’s simply not true. There is, simply and frankly, no accounting for taste. That’s something writers will face when submitting to any agent.

 

Maybe you have written a romance novel, a traditional contemporary romance, and it has a happily-ever-after (HEA) ending. All of your friends say it’s good, your beta readers, your critique partners . . . everybody says it’s great. You send it off to 20 or 30 or 50 agents and they all reject you. Oh my god, you’re not worthy!!!

 

Right?

 

Of course not! That’s absurd. Don’t ever think that.

 

(aside: Do as I say not as I do…)

 

The fact that your awesome romance novel has been rejected by 20 or 30 or 50 agents doesn’t mean you’re not worthy; it doesn’t mean the story isn’t worthy of being published. It means a million different things that you have zero control over. Maybe the agent was having a bad day. Maybe she just got five other manuscripts that sound a lot like yours. Maybe she’s not sure if she’s gonna be keeping her job or not. Maybe her mom and dad are really p.m. sick and she has to care for them and so she’s more focused on that at the moment.

 

There are so many different things that go into an agent choosing to represent or not represent a novel. One of them—and please listen carefully to this—that you cannot ever control is simply this: maybe it wasn’t a good fit.

 

I promise at some point in your career, if you’re going in the traditional market, you will get rejection letters that say “It just wasn’t a good fit.” Every writer who gets that rejection says, “Oh my god! What on earth does that mean??”

 

It means it wasn’t a good fit.

 

There were agents who p.m. passed on Harry Potter. Who said, “This isn’t a good fit.” You might hear that story and say, “That shows them! They didn’t pick up this smash hit! I bet they wish they’d picked up Harry Potter, hahaha!”

 

The reality: In terms of wishing they had that kind of money? Sure, of course they wish they had that.

 

Do they wish they’d picked up Harry Potter? Probably not. They said no because it wasn’t a good fit.

 

That is something we writers and authors need to accept and really get into our bloodstream. Sometimes it is literally that simple. I’ve gotten rejection letters from agents and editors like, “This is awesome, I love it, you’ve got a great voice! . . . It’s just not for me.” So you move on. You can’t bother getting upset by it.

 

By page 10 we ought to know who the main character is, an idea of what the conflict is going to be, and the voice and tone of the novel. The lesson here is to make sure that your tone and your voice is consistent. That’s one of the takeaways I want you to have when you start your novel, wherever you end up choosing to start it. You’re establishing a world and you establish that world on the first page. There’s no escaping it. Whatever it is you’re establishing on that first page needs to carry through the rest of the book.

 

I opened up my science-fiction book club novel—Hounded, by Kevin Hearne—and on page one, there is no question what type of book this is going to be. (The link will take you to the book’s Amazon page, where you can Look Inside.) I don’t know the main conflict on page one but I know the tone, I know the protagonist, I know what he’s capable of, I know the world that we’re getting into. Hearne is able to put all of that into the first page. By page 10, we absolutely know where the story is going.

 

That’s just good writing. Whether you subjectively feel it’s a good book is up to you. I’m going to finish the book, and I may end up not liking the book; that’s up to me as the reader. But was the job accomplished? Yes, I think you can critically look at the book and critically determine whether or not Kevin Hearne has done his job as the writer.

 

Keep writing!

 

(And if you need more advice and feedback on your work, consider joining us at Patreon for only $5 a month.)