fiction

NaFFWriMo–A flash fiction story, every day of November

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“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” —Ray Bradbury

I read Ray Bradbury’s advice on writing, and remembered it wrong, but I got the spirit, if not the letter of it, right. I took the wisdom as, write a short story every day. It’s likely I was remembering his advice to read a short story every day.

For three previous years November has meant my participation in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) program. This year, I decided to give the same sort of effort, but instead writing short fiction.

I committed to myself to write one flash fiction story each day for the month of November. You might call it, “NaFFWriMo.” Flash stories are as short as a few hundred and up to 1000 words. That means a piece of flash fiction is shorter than the daily average words needed to complete NaNoWriMo, 1,667. Four or eight hundred words is enough for my “NaFFWriMo” effort.

I have now reached 11 days–11 stories, despite a day when I felt horribly sick, and a day when I felt angry and sad and wholly distracted because of the U.S. election.

What have I learned so far?

I expected and it has been true that most of the stories, for which I can only give about 40 good pre-dawn minutes, are rough, raw, and may not pan out. Some have a premise and a start, but don’t arrive somewhere. Some are wooden and uninteresting, even to me. But two or three show great promise, and several others may pan out with more work.

Thirty or 40 minutes is not much time for writing, but with a bit of inspiration, it’s enough for a burst of creative work, and a good raw start.

I had built and banked and continue to tinker with a list of 100 ideas for stories, which I rated on a 0, 1, 2, 3 scale of most to least appealing to me to write, generally based on the degree to which I know what the point of the story would be.

That list has proved useful, but, in fact, the stories still seem most often to just arrive at the tips of my fingers as I sit down to write. That bit of magic that happens is a mystery to me. But I think the act of list building is part of the juice that goes into it, even if I don’t always pluck a theme from the list and set to writing the list.

Is it good for my writing to do this?

Yes! Like NaNoWriMo, the “get it written” pace means you just create, you don’t fuss, double back, edit, tinker, slave over structure, etc. This, like NaNoWriMo, prevents my worst habits as a writer from being allowed: researching junkets, restructuring while writing, losing the spark in some side journey in the process.

What will happen to all this work?

I will develop the stories that appeal to me, and work on them along with others I have written prior. I’ll find critical eyes to share them with, and I hope to learn how to submit them for publication.

And I will report further here about the effort. The next test is Thanksgiving, which has its own distractions and delights. But the family doesn’t get up as early as I do.

Here is the update: “30 days, 30 flash stories — how it turned out“

Remembering Gabriel Garcia Márquez

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Gabriel_Garcia_MarquezGabo, Gabriel García Márquez died today. I remember on my visit to Caracas, Venezuela in 1986, being in a tree-lined square full of book merchants selling from carts. And several of them were calling out “lo último de García Márquez!” Theirs were excited voices with something hot to sell, books! But not just any books.

Gabo belonged to all of Latin America and really all of the world. So it was no surprise that booksellers not in his home country of Colombia, or in his adopted country Mexico, were hawking his books to an avid public.

García Márquez’s work taught me that a story is very nearly anything. And the truth is not what we think it is. And that greater truths can come from the fantastic, the exaggerated, the impossible. And that words can create and make you believe in magic.

He gets credit for taking me away from the wrong-headed idea that some objective concrete truth should be the basis for anything that we write. Or better, he taught me that there’s a different kind of truth  that you can discover with fiction.

His was probably the strongest narrator’s voice that lodged in my head, and I read his books long ago. Surely Gabo would give some credit for that to his gifted translator Edith Grossman whom he greatly admired. But most of all it was his thoughts, his original prose, and the way his mind worked the gave the strength of his writing which spoke right through from the Spanish into the English and into my forming literary ear.

I am a slow reader I don’t re-read books often, but those of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez I will read again and perhaps again and again.

Thanks Gabo.

Image: Wikipedia

Anachronisms

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In 10th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Simmons, put anachronism on our vocabulary test, and gave us the definition to memorize: “Something out of place or time”. Anachronisms are at issue in my professional work as a futurist and in my fiction writing. My futures work involves remembering that the future isn’t mostly the same as today, with a few changes (e.g. using only brainwaves to drive an internal combustion engine, gasoline-powered, four-door sedan).

My fiction writing has to involve intent focus on what would and would not be present in my stories, and since I’ve focused mainly on writing fiction set in the past, the potential for anachronisms is high.

Mr. Simmons used a broader definition of anachronism than most people do, most often, people use it to mean something in the present from the past, which no longer belongs. That’s the least of my worries. A story set in 2013 could have a butter churn standing in the corner, since such things can still exist as antiques (though the thing ought to be explained) but a story set in 1916 cannot have a mobile phone or a woman fighter pilot in it.

The arts of fiction and foresight involve thinking intently about these things. Everything matters. All the details count, and wrong details count multiply, and do only harm. It’s probably harder in futures, because we really don’t know what will change and how much. But in historical fiction, we can at least rule a lot of things out.

The biggest problem is not in material things, but in values and attitudes. It’s too easy to shine a current-day light on the past or the future which supposes that people back then or in that future will have the same values as today. They won’t or didn’t. I’ve learned to be humble about all this, it’s hard to get it right and you need to keep a watchful eye on yourself, and work at it.

Image: Mike Licht, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license

Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

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On my foresight blog, I posted the reverse of this: “Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight” [LINK] 

Since the late 1980s, I’ve worked in the field of futures studies, also known as foresight. I am a consultant to any organization that will hire me to explore how the world is changing and where they might see challenges and find opportunities in that change. That work prepared me in certain ways for writing fiction. In fact, a big part of the work of a futurist is like writing fiction. Nothing is wholly known or provable about the future, so, in essence, you make it up. But like a novelist, you make up something based on logic, truth, and facts. My fiction work is based in history, and I stick to contextual setting truths about history, even as I have my way with my human characters within that reality.

Here are some key things I’ve carried from my work as a futurist to my efforts as a novelist:

1. Technology changes, but it’s the human changes that spring from that which matter most. I don’t write science fiction, but even Sci-Fi, in my limited experience with it, is really about the human things that technology does.

2. Placement in time of a story is a critical step and in that setting you have to get the conjecture right; avoiding anachronisms  and being as true as anyone can be to the times you are writing about. Whether a story is set in the future or the past, it’s important work to avoid putting too much of today’s values into the minds of people of another time. This is unavoidable, but we still have to try.

3. The world is a complex of systems connected to systems. Nothing is simple, and nothing has just one cause.

4. Conjecture is essential, and I’ve had the chance to build a habit of, and comfort with conjecture over years of working to suppose things about the future.

5. Storytelling has proven essential to getting across ideas about change in my work as a futurist. The stories meet what’s already in people’s heads, what George Lakoff calls “frames”. In fiction, your story doesn’t have much success unless it does that. So though we strive for originality, our characters may fit archetypes and other known qualities that the reader brings.

6. Exaggeration, or sharp contrasts, may make the difference in storytelling, as they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. So, even if we don’t think it will ever happen, we may spend time talking or writing as futurists about “what ifs” such as “zero waste” or “free energy.” In fiction, the lives of our characters cannot just be ordinary lives, at least not without something big happening too. We exaggerate, you could say, or at least draw sharp contrasts.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI have posted at johnmahaffie.com, the inverse of this theme: Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

I’ve spent a couple of years deep in the ranks of amateur novelists, working on a couple of novels, which I will confess, though I am a futurist, are set in the past, one in 1916, and one in the 1970s. I am still learning the basics by writing fiction every day, but doing it has already paid off for my work as a futurist. How? Several ways.

1. The parts of the story not told
In building a body of work for a futures project, I learn a lot, and think a lot, and develop a lot of ideas. I collect lots of information. I begin to know the “whole” future that my client faces, or at least have a large body of conjecture about it. But like the readers of a novel, my clients don’t want to know everything about the future, just the part that matters and that they can act on. So, overall, what I discovered in writing my novels is, don’t put something in just because you thought of it and researched it, and went some trouble to create it. That’s not your reader’s, or your client’s problem.

2. Things are complicated
Reinforcing the lesson of foresight, and one that I can benefit from learning, relearning, and building upon, is that human systems are complex: there’s never just one cause for a change, the swirl of forces large and small shape and reshape the destiny of people, families, towns, cities, societies, humankind. In building stories about people, you get a stronger sense of that, it’s the combination of forces that create change.

3. Point of view matters
Writers have to work out the point of view, and the voice they use to get across their stories. In foresight, getting the story told, or the forecast communicated, or the call to action made, means understanding who you are exploring the future for, what’s in their heads, and what needs to be in their heads. We spend a lot of time working out what future to focus on, how to frame ideas about change, and whose interests we have in mind in doing so. The first acts of a foresight initiative involve answering the question, “What future?

4. What’s worth exploring is change
There’s not much for the futurist to do in exploring the present, other folks are far more expert at that. Our value is in looking at change and the intersections of different kinds of change. In fiction, it’s also change that matters. If a character doesn’t change, if there are no points of no return, if nothing really happens, you’ve set a scene but not told a story. In foresight, if you get caught up in the discovery of what’s going on now, you may end up a little smarter, but it’s much more valuable to get at vital changes, what they mean, and how things could turn out.

5. Show don’t tell
Good futures work is about conveying insights and wisdom, but also about explaining, supporting, and giving examples. So like the writer admonished to “show, don’t tell,” in communicating about the future, examples and specifics and the concrete do better work than generalities. Concepts and new framings are powerful, but without the support of a “such as,” or “for example” the listener or reader may not get or accept what you are talking about.

6. Story telling is the thing
Futures work includes telling stories, often those are scenarios–narratives of the future. And the more they work as stories, the better a job they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. The scenarios I’ve worked on lately are better stories, with greater attention to real human lives, ideas, and reactions. Too much of my work in the past played out technologies for technologies’ sake, at the expense of true, deep insights on people. It’s not that I didn’t know the importance of people in futures stories, it’s just that I’ve gained strength in know how to focus on that side.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

NaNoWriMo

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National Novel Writing MonthSometimes, you can’t get the genie back in the bottle. This has happened to me, I think, with NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo is a social activity and fiction writing process all rolled into one. It’s a month-long event that writers join online, committing to writing a novel (in the roughest of drafts) in exactly a month. The requirement is that you complete 50,000 words of new work (a novel of about 175 pages) in November. That’s a daily writing goal of 1,666 and two thirds words per day.

When I first began to hear about NaNoWriMo, I thought it was stupid and a little crazy. But the idea simmered somewhere in the back of my mind. Reminded that November is just a month away, and seeing a little online news about NaNoWriMo brought it back to mind this week. So I put the thought of doing it to a test. Would completing a novel during NaNoWriMo benefit me? Would the experience be worth having? Would it make me better at writing? I can’t say I know the answers, for sure, because I’ve not done it yet, but I moved from, “that’s stupid” to “I might just try it.”

Then, having committed to it being conceivable, I began to explore what I would write about. If I do it, it will interrupt about a year’s work on a novel that I am enjoying writing and intently working on, daily. I would surely have to set that aside for the month of November, because I can’t write for more than about an hour a day.

My current effort is a novel set in the past, and it’s intensely research-driven. I cannot commit to 50,000 words in a  month it I need to do extensive research, though that is a part of my fiction writing I like a lot.

So a NaNoWriMo effort ought to be a story that I can tell without doing much or any research. I played with a number of ideas, and kept creating enticing, but research-demanding themes and story ideas. So I have those, I suppose for future projects. Finally, I began to build a collection of thoughts for a novel I could write, and would like to. I can conceive most of it already, and the ideas keep bubbling up. Perhaps with discipline, I can set to it on November 1, and get at least 50,000 words down by November 30. That’s including Thanksgiving (unless I double output on another day).

From here, October 1, I think I’ll do it. Check back in four weeks and I’ll post on whether I’ve started did or not.

The nature of creative work: art, fiction, and futures

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Georgia O'Keeffe

Artists, writers, musicians, and other creative people muse over what it is that they do. We can learn a lot from their exploration of what their crafts mean, and what they are for. So I try to pay attention to what they have to say.

I recently explored the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which displays quotes from her among the paintings. I liked these thoughts on her work:

Nothing is less real than realism … Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. –1922

If I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.–1976

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is the most definite form for the tangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.–1977

It may surprise some people that I say it, but a futurist’s work to describe the future is just like the painter’s effort to make an idea or an experience, visual. Foresight is not about reproducing something objective for others to see. It’s about changing how and what they see as they look at the future.

The work of writing scenarios, or any analysis called “the future of…” is rooted in what we try to know about the future, but it’s a game of selection, elimination, and emphasis, as O’Keeffe saw her task as a painter.

In fact, when I write a scenario, I work knowing that the world of 2030 or some other future date has much that is the same as our world today, but with plenty of changes showing everywhere. My task is to help people understand those changes, not item by item, but as a part of a whole system. Things need to seem different from today in my scenarios. The important changes need to stand out, but be part of something whole, and partway familiar. Like O’Keeffe, I have to try to put the lines and colors of this future together so that they say something.

When writing fiction, I follow the same goals. I need to know a lot about the story’s background, but what I share with the reader is a selection. The details that matter to what the story is trying to convey. It’s a process of selecting, eliminating, and emphasis.

 

Image: Library of Congress

Pinterest for fiction writers

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I have been experimenting with using a Pinterest pinboard for gathering pictures that I can use to add to my visual sense and ability to describe things, for a fiction project. My novel-in-progress is set in 1916-17 at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s at the earliest years of the rise of Jazz, and that music, including Ragtime and Stride piano play a role in the story.

In my hunger to understand the period, I want to know what things looked like: clothing, hats, shoes, the college campus, phonographs, luggage, dormitories, classrooms, hairstyles, ads in the newspaper, and so on. To my delight, there are lots of images available from online archives and websites. Pinterest lets me “pin” them to a board dedicated to this project.

I don’t know much about how others are using Pinterest, but this use has been much better for me that collecting images in files on my computer, or bookmarks. My collection is all in one place, and I can poke about in it to help me write what I hope is more image-invoking prose, and give my story more reality and concreteness for the reader.

Have a look at my pin board: College circa 1917

Let me know what you think.

Deep insights on writing: Hemingway schools Fitzgerald

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In trying to create good fiction–and I know this only from trying, not succeeding–there’s a purity and sanctity in what a character is all about, what he or she will and will not do. Everything matters. And, of course, the writer has to know much more about the character and what came before, and perhaps what will come after, than is every conveyed to the reader.

In a fascinating letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, from 1934, Ernest Hemingway lays down some truths about this. Fitzgerald has drawn on friends of theirs for characters in a novel, and Hemingway thinks he’s misused and misconstrued their true natures.

The letter is reproduced in full on a post on the blog Letters of Note. It’s a great read, and I recommend the blog highly, they fascinate me almost daily.

The power of fiction in exploring the future

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Mythmakers and LawbreakersA remarkable new book, Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction, came to my attention because its editor, who goes by Margaret Killjoy, is my nephew. I bought the book merely to be supportive. But to be supportive, I also read the book, and was blown away by how many ideas I got from it, and how it stirred my thinking about the work I do as a futurist.
 
The core of the book is about why, and how, anarchist writers and others who have written about anarchism use fiction for exploring and communicating political ideas. Killjoy offers interviews with people in either camp who may or may not say they are anarchists.
 
As a futurist, I have struggled with the place and meaning of art, broadly, and creative writing, more specifically, in exploring and communicating about the future. I’ve learned, as so many of my colleagues in the futures field have, that storytelling is often the most powerful way we can explore, share, and communicate ideas about the future.
 
I use storytelling of several sorts in my work: intently, but imperfectly. I offer stories to make a point in speaking and in workshops on the future. By habit, I use stories and analogies in conversation, in trying to explain my ideas. And in much of our client work at Leading Futurists LLC, we use stories in the form of futures scenarios to deepen our understanding and that of our clients, of future possibilities. As I have written before, I think scenarios are the most powerful tool we have for communicating about change and the future.
 
The writers interviewed in Mythmakers & Lawbreakers clarified for me how fiction is a fundamental force in exploring and promoting ideas—any ideas, but certainly ideas about how the world and societies could be different. In that sense, futurists and anarchists have the same job: to help people understand much more deeply things that do not (yet) exist. So too, both futurists and anarchists have seen the mass of work depicting those different work coming in science fiction, along with some graphic novels, comics, video games, and hard-to-categorize forms of literature.
 
I have learned, and/or conclude some interesting things about fiction from my reading of Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
 
+Some, but not all fiction writers have direct political goals in writing what they write—some are exploring a different society, some are promoting one, and perhaps some aren’t sure, but their art carries them deeply into exploratory 
 
+Fiction does not answer all of the questions it raises—it doesn’t try to. That means a writer can play out a distinct situation without fully understanding it, or its implications.
 
+Political ideas without a deeper (and perhaps fictional) exploration may be simplistic or poorly thought out, and may be driven by a dogma or principle, not tested fully against human realities. Thus we would all be better off, I am quite certain, if futurists developed much more fleshed out scenarios for the worlds we think we want.
 
+Where we want not just to explore, but to convince people about change in our world, the story may be essential. For example, I have found it inadequate to tell consumer product companies that there will be greater demands on them to create more sustainable products. They want to, and need to know, what those products would be like, and how consumers would incorporate those products into their lives.
 
If, as writers believe, fiction shapes our perceptions of ourselves, our surroundings, what is true about our world, then fiction surely can and will shape our view of the future. We can tap into that truth.
 
In our futures work, we may be too often creating scenarios that merely describe the future, but don’t have the power to really bring people to a sharp focus on a different world, because they lack conflict, a hero, a plot. I will ponder that issue some more. Perhaps our “fiction” cannot ever be quite as powerful as the novelist’s.
 
There is clearly lots of work to do here, to better understand what those of us engaged in foresight can learn from fiction writing and from other arts that strive to explore ideas. We won’t become great fiction writers or artists, but we may up our game in using fiction and art to delve deeper and get further, not to mention to communicate about the future better.
 
Some interesting thoughts from the Mythmaker interviews:
 
“Art is not a mirror with which to reflect life, but rather a hammer with which to shape it.” Bertolt Brecht [Mythmakers and Lawbreakers, p. 20, quoted by Derrick Jensen]
 
 “Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call consciousness-raising.” [Mythmakers and Lawbreakers, p. 10, Ursula k. Le Guin]
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