Sticking the Landing

when you're not sure where the mat is ...

A frequent question from readers is: Where do you get ideas for stories? The glib, and yet honest, answer is: anywhere and everywhere. One of my first posts on this platform was about prompts, and how they help trigger the imagination.

Actually, I find beginnings easy. Mostly because there’s no remorse about dropping them after two paragraphs if they don’t go anywhere. I’m not the kind of writer who agonizes for days over a couple of sentences trying to force them to work.

A solid beginning will set the tone for the entire piece and push the narrative forward. That initial push might even carry the story without a hitch all the way to the end. Sometimes, however, things don’t go smoothly and endings turn elusive. As an author friend wrote a few days ago: Endings are hard!

Lately, my short story finales have run into problems. I’ve had trouble before with finding the right concluding line, or deciding if the story needed a bit more or a bit less, pondering where to stop. But not knowing how the story should end? Two thirds into the tale, I usually have a pretty good idea.

Not this time. I’ve had issues with two stories back to back.

The first one, titled The Ability to Swing* (to be published in the next issue of Guilty Crime Story Magazine) had a banger of a beginning. The protagonist, his circumstances, and temperament were all there. I could hear his voice and I liked him. (I need to like the people I write about, even the bad ones.)

The story of Nick, the narrator of The Ability to Swing, moved at a good clip until the big confrontation three quarters down. The inflection point. I wrote two different options with their endings and none of them felt satisfactory.

Writers often hear this piece of advice: be tough with your characters, drop them in hot water, pluck them out, and dunk them again.

The problem was not with Nick, but with the antagonist. That smooth criminal needed a sharper set of teeth. With the additional threat, Nick’s position became clearer and more dramatic. My main character was now in water so hot he’d cook no matter what choice he made. It was a possible ending, with a doomed noir flavor, but it didn’t ring right. Too flat. And I guess I didn’t want to leave Nick without a sliver of hope.

But how? I’d built a perfect mousetrap.

I put the story aside and worked on something else, hoping the proverbial light bulb would shine. It took a couple of weeks. As is often the case, the solution was right there, at the core of the story, in the theme itself, but I’d almost decided to shelve the thing. Despite the killer beginning.

*Note: I borrowed that cool title from a 1988 Thomas Dolby song.

The other story is out on submission, so I’ll keep the title under wraps in case one of the magazine editors stumbles upon this newsletter.

It’s a classical tale of bad decisions and their consequences.

When I’m on the fence with a story and not sure that it works as intended, I give it to Jim (my husband) to read. He’ll swoop like a hawk on plot holes and inconsistencies. He’ll also tell me when, to quote Craig Terlson, I’m not “kind to the reader”. It happens when writers are so deep in their stories, so cognizant of all the plot’s nuts and bolts, and the motivations of the characters that they forget that the readers don’t have the same knowledge and attention to detail. The readers go: What happened here? Did I miss something? Where does this come from? In short, they’re lost. Not a good thing.

I argued with Jim that the story was told in first person point of view and, of course, the narrator was in the fog. He only knew what he saw and perceived and the motivations of the other characters were unknown to him. Jim said: it doesn’t matter, fix it.

He was also unhappy with the ending. I’d left it hanging. I like open endings in general, but the last scene looked like a cop out. My character was turning his back on the nastiness. So there I was, with a bad ending and too many unresolved narrative threads that would put question marks in the minds of the readers. Jim suggested a simplified script, which I wasn’t inclined to do.

So, like in The Ability to Swing, I turned to conflict for a solution. Confrontation as revelation. But because I’m not a big fan of fisticuffs, I put that fist in a velvet glove.

I’ll let you know if the story finds a home. It was a difficult birth but I’m pleased with the result. I think it’s a good one.

Latest News

I did a reading for Love You Till Tuesday at our local Women’s League last week. It’s always fun to introduce P.I. Declan Shaw to new audiences. I want to welcome the ladies who signed up for the newsletter at the event. I hope they’ll enjoy these short conversations, every other Thursday.

We have a buzzing writing community here on Substack. From time to time, I’ll share cool stories published on the platform. Here is Peripheral by Liz Zimmers. Liz writes the kind of insidious horror stories that stick with you.
This one is a first class shiver … brrr …

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash