Keegan Milano is a creative writing student at Columbia College, Chicago. His interests are within fiction and game/narrative design for tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Genres that interest him are Horror, Fantasy, Sci-fi, and everything in between. To connect with Keegan, follow him on Instagram (@keegz_mgee).
FEATURED EXTRA!
We loved CRIMSON SAP and had to know more about the poem and its creator. So, we asked Keegan Milano some quick questions to learn more about his writing and creative process.
TDS:What was your inspiration for writing this piece?
Keegan Milano: The original idea came from a subreddit prompt simply put as “monster,” but you couldn’t use the word monster, you had to convey the idea. I thought about having a monster in a forest and eventually transitioned to the idea of having the monster be the forest. From there, I thought about how each individual plant and their parts could be used to assemble a monster.
TDS:What was the writing process you used when creating this poem?
Keegan Milano: I tend to throw all of my thoughts out at once. If the idea comes to my head, I put it on paper as soon as possible, so I don’t lose the original concept. After that, I move everything around to where I think it fits best and adjust accordingly. I originally was going to have a specific person in mind fall victim to the forest. While moving stuff around however, I found it more compelling to have the victim remain anonymous to allow the reader more freedom with the scene.
TDS:Who influenced you as a writer?
Keegan Milano: I take huge amounts of inspiration from the games I play. When it comes to horror, I specifically take inspiration from games like Bloodborne and Darkest Dungeon. I hope to achieve the heights of Hidetaka Miyazaki in FromSoftware with my own writing. The sense of horrific awe from Bloodborne has always stuck with me, and I aim to get that same feeling across with my own work.
What do you think of Keegan Milano’s poem? Let us know in the comments below.
As always, if you’d like your gothic, horror, fantasy, or psychological realism work featured, be sure to SUBMIT to us.
SHOULD I SCREAM? by Logan McConnell appeared in The Dark Forest on April 13. I loved the exquisite and poignant twist of this story’s climax. Thankfully, Logan was willing to speak with me in a more in-depth interview. I learned so much more about this fascinating and amazing author.
TDS:Do you remember the moment when you wanted to become a writer? Did a particular book, movie, or experience inspire you?
LoganMcConnell: I don’t have one specific moment. I loved reading as a kid, and writing my own stories felt natural. There was no particular book or movie; it was the act of reading itself that inspired me to write. In some ways I think of reading and writing as two sides of the same coin.
TDS:What attracted you to the Gothic and Horror genres, and what would you say are your favorite books and movies amongst them?
LoganMcConnell: Horror takes all the things you were told to avoid in life (murder, violence, death, monsters, danger) and puts those all in one place for you to experience at a safe distance. I think we all have a morbid curiosity, and horror fiction presents these themes in a way to satisfy our curiosity, sometimes with a visceral reaction, without overwhelming us like the real experience would. That is what attracted me to horror.
For books, I’ve always liked the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, Shirley Jackson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Other contemporary short story horror authors: Thomas Ligotti, Christopher Slatsky, and Philip Fracassi.
Honestly, no horror movies inspire me. I do not enjoy most horror movies. That said, there are movies that are not labeled horror that still terrify me and served as inspiration for my stories. Those include Being John Malkovich, Requiem for a Dream, and anything by David Lynch.
TDS:What do you find to be the most difficult task when approaching a new project?
LoganMcConnell: Logistics. As a writer I enjoy coming up with a premise and a powerful ending, but hammering out the details, such as how the character gets from the start to the end of the story and making sure there are no plot holes, is a challenge. Even having a character walk from one end of a hall to another can be more challenging than writing their abstract thoughts. Writing the stage direction of characters is a weakness I’m still working on improving.
TDS:What’s the best advice you’ve ever received about writing?
LoganMcConnell: When you finish a first draft, put it away for a long time, at least 2 weeks for short stories. Then come back to it. You’ll see your own writing with a fresh pair of eyes that helps you polish the story in a way you couldn’t have done immediately after finishing your first draft.
I will also give a shout out to two books that have immensely helped my writing: On Writing, by Stephen King, great for writing any genre of fiction, and Writing in the Dark by Tim Waggoner, essential for any beginning horror writer.
TDS:How do you feel your personal beliefs influence your creative projects? Any fascinating experiences or ideas that become infused in your creative work?
LoganMcConnell: One belief that drives my writing is to find some universal notion (existential dread, identity crisis, loneliness in a crowd, questioning the existence of God or free will) and turn those abstract experiences into stories that will resonate with people now and in the future. That is the one belief I try to adhere to for every story I write. That is why I will never reference political beliefs (may exclude some readers) or mention pop culture (may not be relatable in the future). We’re all suffering in some way, and I aim to write a story that can touch as many readers as possible.
TDS:Do you believe in writer’s block and, if so, what methods do you use to combat it?
Logan McConnell: Yes, I very much believe in writer’s block. When I have time to write but can’t decide what, I’ll open a blank word doc and write the first sentence that comes to mind. I never know where the sentence will lead, but if I write four or five beginning sentences with an unusual premise, one is bound to inspire my imagination, and I go where the story takes me. That is how I try to beat writer’s block.
TDS:Other than writing short stories, what other creative outlets do you enjoy? What are some of your other interests and hobbies?
LoganMcConnell: Running and hiking. Especially hiking in forests. Sometimes when I’m burned out from writing or my day job, I’ll go on a hike with my fiancé to clear my head.
TDS:Thank you so much for your time. One last question: Do you have anything new you’re working on right now? Would you like to give us a teaser?
LoganMcConnell: I always have four to six short stories ready to submit; it’s just a matter of finding a good home for them. I don’t want to give away what they are about, so I’ll just list one word from each story:
Also, I can be found on twitter, where I’ll tweet/ celebrate any time a story of mine is accepted and published.
Logan McConnell is a 30-year-old health care worker. He is a lifelong reader but is new to writing fiction. He has upcoming short stories for the webzines Schlock! and Yellow Mama. He is influenced by the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia E. Butler, and Thomas Ligotti. He currently lives with his boyfriend in Tennessee. To connect with Logan McConnell, find him on Twitter (@LMwriter91).
TDS is always seeking talented creatives to uplift and promote. If you craft fiction, poetry, art, or screenplays in the subgenres of gothic, horror, fantasy, or psychological realism, don’t hesitate toSUBMIT to us.
The sunrays were so intense they stung the farmer’s eyes, and for moments the daylight was as blinding as pitch black. Long sleeves and a wide brim hat shielded his skin from the brutal sun, growing wet and sticky with sweat by noon. Looking out on land this flat and remote, the farmer felt abandoned and isolated. Nobody to threaten him, nobody to aid him. He toiled alone.
The farmer caught sight of nothing but his home, which was really a large gardening shed, and land that disappeared beyond the horizon, dipped beneath the curvature of the planet. That and haze from suffocating heat that had lingered for days.
Only a week ago, the farmer had collapsed from a heat stroke, later waking up face down in the dirt, stinging with sunburn. He was naked with no memory of removing his clothes. Delirious ramblings had wheezed out through his cracked lips. He used his remaining strength to crawl to the water pump to avoid death. Never again. Never again would he allow that to happen, and he wouldn’t begin farming without being fully hydrated and protected from the sun.
He wiped sweat from his brow and pondered how farming provided a precarious kind of freedom that only seemed glamorous until you tasted it. Until he actually started farming, he couldn’t fathom the crushing hardship of watching his plants wither. Now it’s all he knew. These barley-living plants haunted him night and day.
Dull. That’s what his crops were. Dull green, bordering on brown colored, languishing in the hardening dirt. A few were bright green though, managing to look healthy. He felt a kinship with the vibrant hue, as if nature noticed and appreciated his hard work.
He crouched down to hold one of the few green leaves between his fingers, the reedy texture, so different from the unhealthy flaky crackle of the other plants, could be felt through his thick gardening gloves. The farmer tugged upwards a little on the stem and saw…white. White. That shouldn’t be. He wasn’t growing anything white. He yanked a little harder, lifting up the plant to reveal that the stem and roots were made of something round with firm turgor pressure. This was soft, fresh bone…
Logan McConnell is a health care worker. He is a lifelong reader and new to writing fiction. He has upcoming short stories for the webzines Schlock! and Yellow Mama. He is influenced by the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia E. Butler, and Thomas Ligotti. He currently lives with his boyfriend in Tennessee. To keep up with Logan, follow him on Twitter.
FEATURED EXTRA!
We loved SHOULD I SCREAM? and had to know more about the story and its creator. So, we asked Logan McConnell some quick questions to learn more about his writing and creative process.
TDS: What was your inspiration for writing this piece?
Logan McConnell: Skulls. I was coming up with ideas for a story premise, and the image of a skull popped into my head. I knew I wanted a story where multiple skulls were featured.
TDS: What was the writing process you used when creating this story?
Logan McConnell: I came up with the first half of this story spontaneously, but I didn’t know the ending when I started Should I Scream? When I got half-way through, I took a break and spent hours thinking of the most obvious/likely endings, then ruling them out. I wanted something unexpected, and eventually came up with an ending I liked.
TDS: Who influenced you as a writer?
Logan McConnell: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladamir Nabokov are my two favorite authors. I discovered them in high school and have been reading them ever since. They aren’t horror writers, but they do explore the darker side of human nature using creative narratives.
As far as horror influences, I would list Mary Shelly and Thomas Ligotti. I think Shelly tapped into the relationship of man/monster really well in her writing, and I admire Ligotti’s creative out-of-the-box thinking in crafting stories.
What do you think of Logan McConnell’s story? Let us know in the comments below.
As always, if you’d like your gothic, horror, fantasy, or psychological realism work featured, be sure to SUBMIT to us.
Samir Sirk Morató’s story STAND NOT AT YOUR GRAVE was featured in The Dark Forest on April 6. I was enthralled from the start by this story’s bleak, harsh atmosphere. The climactic moment was so intimate and disturbing. I wanted to learn more about Mx. Morató’s creative process, influences, and other works, so I requested an interview. Join me as I delve even deeper into the fascinating world of this amazing author.
TDS: Do you remember the particular moment when you realized you wanted to become a writer? Did a particular book or movie inspire you? Or something you experienced or observed?
Samir Sirk Morató: I don’t think I ever had the realization “hey, I want to be a writer.” That desire overtook me the same way boiling water overtakes a frog. I was a voracious reader and scribbler from day one; as a child, I littered countless composition notebooks with plagiarized retellings of stories I had just read. Horror story anthologies, science fiction, and dark swashbucklers – escapist fiction that embraced horrific outcomes without flinching – were lifeboats for me. I wanted to create those for someone else too.
TDS: What attracted you to the Gothic and Horror genres, and what would you say are your favorite books amongst them?
Samir Sirk Morató: Moody atmospheres, monsters, body horror, and the layered decadence of decay all attracted me to the Gothic and Horror genres at an early age, though I was a B-roll creature feature fan before I was anything else. Full disclosure: I prefer short stories to novels. Peter Watts’ “The Things,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation,” and Alan Moore’s 1980s “Swamp Thing” are all favorites of mine. If we started getting into my favorite movies we’d be here all day.
TDS: What do you find to be the most difficult task when approaching a new project?
Samir Sirk Morató: Figuring out how to turn ideas and a handful of notes into a fully realized, fleshed out story is always the hardest part for me. Without fail, every time I start a project, I overwhelm myself by imagining all the themes / threads in the final product, then despair over how complicated it seems. The solution to this is always simple: just write the damn rough draft. Worry about editing in finesse later.
TDS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received about writing?
Samir Sirk Morató: Few pieces of writing, or sentences, are irreplaceable. Learn to let go. Don’t be afraid to reframe or restart if something isn’t working. In ceramics, there’s a tradition of taking failed works outside and shattering them before zealously trying again. That’s the attitude to have here too.
TDS: How do you feel your personal beliefs influence your creative projects? Any fascinating experiences or ideas that become infused in your creative work?
Samir Sirk Morató: For better or worse, who I am permeates my writing. My rural upbringing and longtime fascination with death influence everything. As a nonbinary person who has suffered from Depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDR), I also have strong feelings – and questions! – about what it means to perceive and inhabit a body. What scares you when you spend every day longing to crawl out of your own skin? What is flesh, really?
My DPDR in particular influences my approach to Gothic and Horror. Mental illness is a staple in both genres. Sometimes its inclusion is compelling; oftentimes, it’s cruel. Disorders that include hallucinations or disconnection from reality tend to be portrayed with malignant ignorance. I’ve become numb to these depictions, but in my own projects, I reject them.
I aim to create horror that viscerally discomforts readers without mocking them. If they feel uncomfortable but understood, that’s even better.
TDS: Do you believe in writer’s block and, if so, what methods do you use to combat it?
Samir Sirk Morató: To me, writer’s block is all too real. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to getting around it. If I’m facing writer’s block I’ll designate time to write something, anything, and see if that helps. Sometimes, in severe cases, I abstain from writing and focus on other hobbies to let myself recharge. When I feel rested, I’ll buckle down and try to write again. There’s no point in looking for water in a dry well. You need to let it replenish itself. I remind myself that it’s also impossible to write if I haven’t been consuming new material or absorbing new experiences to write about. There’s a life outside the rough drafts.
TDS: Other than writing short stories, what other creative outlets do you enjoy? What are some of your other interests and hobbies?
Samir Sirk Morató: I love to embroider, create collage art, hike, and send postcards. I’m also a casual birder. That being said, fellow birders, please don’t ask me to identify any bird via calls. If it’s not a Red-winged Blackbird, a Red-tail, or a nuthatch I won’t know it.
TDS: Thank you so much for your time. One last question: What stories have you published since appearing in TDS?
Samir Sirk Morató: I haven’t been too active this year, but I have a forthcoming short story in Cuir Kitchen Brigade’s queer ecology anthology, which I’m thrilled about. Thanks for having me!
Samir Sirk Morató is a scientist and an artist. They draw much of their inspiration from their love of horror movies and their experiences in rural landscapes. Some of Samir’s work can be found in The Hellebore Issue #5, Color Bloq’s RED collection, and Somos En Escrito’s 2021 Extra Fiction Contest honorable mentions. To connect with Samir, visit them on Twitter (@bolivibird) and Instagram (@spicycloaca).
TDS is always seeking talented creatives to uplift and promote. If you craft fiction, poetry, art, or screenplays in the subgenres of gothic, horror, fantasy, or psychological realism, don’t hesitate toSUBMIT to us.
You have always been close to your youngest sister. Whether that is through love or duty is questionable, but the closeness itself cannot be denied. As the eldest, it was you who pressed balls of pemmican into her maw during the wintertime, you who let her watch the pouring of lead into blinding bullet crucibles during summer, you who cleaved her favorite hound’s skull in half with an ax when he began slavering and staggering in the spring.
Your mother made Carolina, but make no mistake: you crafted her. Not the plump, melancholic woman who thrust Carolina’s care upon you so she could tend to the six other children and the farm. Not the sow who rolls over for men’s advances between waves of sorrow and deep pits of torpor. Not the soiled damsel who wallpapered your father’s darker skin on you in the womb, then took it as proof you are a caretaker, or a grown thing in a girl-body.
Though eleven-year-old Carolina lies in a coffin two feet beneath the brittle soil, you tend to her still. Is that not devotion rivaling love?
You run short of breath as you lug a water pail across the yard. The sunbeams that stroke your sweaty locks and thinning, trembling hands are almost autumnal in their capacity for coolness, for bloodletting life while they pretend to grant it. It’s strange to feel their sucking warmth in early winter, when death has already homed itself in the landscape. Your lungs seize. You set your pail on the frosty mud.
When you cough into your handkerchief, no pearly molars come this time. No blood—though there is never blood. Despite what your watching mother fears, despite all the moments she spends searching your handkerchiefs for red splotches, no tuberculosis afflicts you. You feel her gaze as you seize the pail again, as you limp another half of the yard before you must begin your coughing anew.
It takes grace not to smile at your mother with the handful of teeth you have left. You sense her presence in the window of your crooked, creaking miscarriage of a home. Newborn guilt grants you restraint. After all your shared loss, it is difficult to continue despising the woman before you. She cannot escape the purgatory she knows she inhabits. That is a punishment greater than anything you could inflict. Forgiveness still stays difficult. Fondness, too.
I am not sick, you want to tell her. I am paying penance for my sin of destroying you. You taught me to do that.
Samir Sirk Morató is a scientist and an artist. They draw much of their inspiration from their love of horror movies and their experiences in rural landscapes. Some of Samir’s work can be found in The Hellebore Issue #5, Color Bloq’s RED collection, and Somos En Escrito’s 2021 Extra Fiction Contest honorable mentions.
FEATURED EXTRA!
We loved STAND NOT AT YOUR GRAVE so much that we had to interview the talented Samir Sirk Morató to learn more about their inspirations for this story and who has influenced their writing.
TDS:What was your inspiration for writing this piece?
Samir Sirk Morató: “Stand Not At Your Grave” is inspired by Mercy Brown, a teenager whose ritual exhumation was one of the New England vampire panic’s most famous cases. Mercy was a nineteen-year-old who lost her mother and sister to tuberculosis before following in their footsteps, yet due to coincidence, ignorance, and superstition, her town labeled her a vampire. Mercy’s older brother Edgar – the last tuberculosis-afflicted Brown child left – consumed a tonic made of her cremated liver and heart in an effort to break his sister’s purported spell on him. He died two months later.
There’s something terrible and intimate about the concept of consuming a sibling’s organs to survive, especially if you consider the old belief of one’s soul being in their blood, and the vampire’s tendency to pray on their family once reanimated. The questions of what hungry intimacy (or lack thereof) would lead someone to protect their sibling’s remains sparked the creation of this story.
TDS: What was the writing process you used when creating this story?
Samir Sirk Morató: I’m a planner, so I wrote an outline detailing scene breakdowns and emotional beats before going back and filling in details. Then I wrote out any dialogue exchanges and key moments that I could visualize regardless of when they happened in the plot. After I had the rough draft of this story written, I spent time considering its themes and incomplete character interactions, then went back and added in details related to the new development I was thinking of. There was a lot of rinse and repeat here, but it kept me organized, thinking, and excited to finish writing, which is the most I can ask for.
TDS: Who has influenced you as a writer?
Samir Sirk Morató: R.L. Stine, Susan Power, and Dario Argento have all influenced me. I also want to give credit to the scriptwriters of all the schlocky horror movies I consumed as a kid. I would not be the same without having watched Squirm (1976) and The Killer Shrews (1959) at a formative age.
What did you think of Samir Sirk Morató’s story? Let us know in the comments below.
As always, if you’d like your gothic, horror, fantasy, or psychological realism work featured, be sure to SUBMIT.
“When she hires you, you’ll wish you were dead” is the tagline for Fiona’s Guardians by Dan Klefstad. After following the main character, Daniel, through his day-to-day life as a guardian for the vampire Fiona, the sentiment of the tagline is certainly understandable. Life has changed for vampires in the modern world. Now that modern policing includes far more sophisticated means of detection, vampires can’t so easily hunt down people like they used to. Humans nowadays have become their partners in crime, hired on as guardians to not only protect the vampires they serve, but they also must supply the blood, using an investment portfolio to buy the blood from secret suppliers who steal from hospitals. Fiona is a 250-year-old vampire. She requires 10 pints of blood every night, otherwise she begins to waste away, shriveling into a hideous, monstrous shell of her former self: “…her hair starts to fall out on the second. Then her skin wrinkles and begins to smell, and her eyes harden to the point where I think she’d eat an entire schoolyard of children. I work very hard to make sure I never see that look again” (234).
The one who makes the tremendous commitment as a vampire guardian must be willing to give up any connection with their family and friends and say goodbye to vacations. The plus sides of the job: recreation with the finest wines and Cuban cigars. Oh, and how about a frocking great retirement settlement, somewhere in the realm of 10 million dollars. When we are introduced to Daniel, he is in the process of retiring. He’s given his all to Fiona, even lost an arm in his service to her. Daniel is a man nearly stripped of all his sense of humor; the rosy tint has completely faded from his view of life, and it’s easy to understand why. Enter Wolf, Daniel’s upcoming replacement for the job, who’s ignorant and arrogant, though not necessarily stupid. Daniel hopes to quickly get him trained and hand over the reins for good, though there’s a little complication that gets in the way. Yes, little is an understatement. How about a complication hundreds of years in the making?
Mors Strigae is an order of monks existing within the Catholic church. The full name for this group is a mouthful: “The Prefect for the Sacred Congregation for the Inquiry into all Things Preternatural.” Back in 1900 they battled the vampires, and now they’re on the rise again, also adapting to the modern world with more sophisticated weapons and technology for hunting down vampires, and their devotion to the mission has been deepened by hundreds of years of tradition. Both vampires and guardians alike are being hunted down and executed.
The novel jumps between the point-of-view of those in the vampire clan and those serving within Mors Strigae with quite a balanced approach throughout the narrative, meaning the reader attains a very in-depth understanding of the intentions of both sides. This produces an intriguing effect. It never becomes clear who the good or bad guys are. The reader can easily sympathize with either side for various reasons. The vampires are hell-bent on surviving. Obtaining blood is their only purpose in life, and they will reach to any extreme to attain it. Many of those sired to become vampires become so without a choice. They are victims in the purest sense, damned to their state of endless lust and done so completely against their will. The reader can easily sympathize with this wretched state. Yet, one can easily sympathize with those who serve Mors Strigae. They are the protective force surrounding humans, preventing us from falling to either death by the vampire or the worse state of becoming a vampire. It should be obvious that we root for them. Right? It’s not, because the novel shows the contradictions that exist within Mors Strigae, their own moments of ignorance, moments when their own lust for power destroys them. One of the great strengths of this novel is its ability to explore with depth the contradictions between both sides.
Well-executed dialogue is another strength. The dialogue crackles with life and feels genuine to the characters. One of my favorite passages involves a conversation between Daniel and Wolf during their first meeting:
I grab my fresh drink. “And how do we pay for all this bloo—”
“The product?” Daniel’s voice drowns me out, and he scolds me with a look. “You invest her money.” Then he swirls the dark, heavy liquid under his nose before sipping “Lately we’re staying away from tech stocks. New admini- stration, playing it safe. We’re in toothpaste, deodorant— stuff people use every day.”
“So they smell good if we experience a ‘hang-up.’”
“Very funny.”
“Tell me: How often will I… disappear people?” (pg. 27)
This exchange between Daniel and Wolf depicts their personalities well. Daniel’s sense of humor is all dried up; he’s all business and knows the serious cost if things aren’t done right. Wolf is ignorant and arrogant; he’s still not sure if he believes any of it or not. The dialogue flows so naturally and reveals so much about the characters. The reader will find that Klefstad’s deft touch with dialogue drives the narrative along. Much of the time the wonderful dialogue keeps the reader turning pages.
The narrative is told in the first-person form, jumping from different characters’ point-of-views. One chapter in particular, titled “Epistles,” utilizes an epistolary method, taking us back to 1900 when the order of monks Mors Strigae first battled the mysterious vampires near a small village called Campoleone. This chapter is pivotal, lending a sense of depth and intrigue to the story as a whole. Letters between Abbot Martinez and Cardinal Soriano tell the story, unveiling much of the folklore surrounding the vampires. We learn of the origins of Mors Strigae as well as the meaning of the vampire name— “striga”—meaning “evil spirit” or “witch.” The vampire hunters come to learn during encounters with the strigae that much of their folklore is debunked. For instance, crucifixes and holy water do nothing but make the vampires angry. Yet silver does have an effect on them, prompting the monks to produce armor made of silver. Also, the old practice of stabbing the heart and removing the head before cremation is unnecessary to those who are victims of a vampire attack, for it takes more than mere exsanguination to transform someone into a vampire. The old conflict between science and religion comes up as well, when Abbot Martinez mentions the continued rise of diarrheal diseases due to the haphazard disposal of waste amongst the men of the camp. The Abbot had been reading scientific journals and realizes better hygiene practices such as providing shovels in the brethren’s travel kits for the purpose of waste disposal could protect the men from the growing plague of dysentery. We well know that the standard-bearer for the vampire genre—Bram Stoker’s Dracula—is suffused with themes about advancing technology prevailing and/or conflicting with age-old superstitions, and that’s the other reason this chapter in the book is so entertaining—it lends depth and intrigue and serves as a homage to Bram Stoker’s vampire tale.
Fiona’s Guardians by Dan Klefstad displays the full entertainment package. Some moments are dark, gritty, and disturbing. Others are lightened by fun, comedic timing. And still other moments are titillating and lustful. All of it resonates with a strong sense of adventure. You will find unexpected plot twists and complex characters wrestling the contradictions within themselves. I strongly recommend reading this book.
You can find Dan Klefstad’s Fiona’s Guardians on AMAZON.
RATINGS: TDS rates all books based on the dark content and how well the reading experience lends itself. Of course, author craft, storytelling, and mechanics are considered, as well. For this purpose, we use skulls (💀💀💀💀💀). And explanation of the skull system follows.
RATING: 💀 Boring, not dark, not interesting. Do not recommend.
RATING: 💀💀 Fair plot, not too dark, fairly interesting. Read at own risk.
RATING: 💀💀💀 Good plot and mild darkness, good reading experience. Encouraged read.
RATING: 💀💀💀💀 Great reading experience with heaps of dark tone. Strong recommend.
RATING: 💀💀💀💀💀 Excellent prose, tons of dark tone. A MUST READ!
Do you have a short story, piece of art, poem, or screenplay that you think might be a good fit for Dark Sire? If so, visit darksiremag.com/submissions.html.
Line editing, by nature, requires the structure of your story to be solid and complete. Finish developmental edits first. It is not an efficient use of your time to perfect sentences that you may not need later. We’ve just wrapped up our series on developmental edits of short fiction. You can find them here:
We defined line editing in our initial post as working on a sentence level. It is digging into your craft to improve the clarity and reception of your manuscript.
These are some of the many questions line editing will ask:
Do the sentences make sense to a reader?
Did you use the right word for that scene’s mood, or does a different one have more impact? Do you need to make sure that you didn’t use overly long sentences in your fast-paced fight scene?
Everyone has a different writing and editing process. Some elements may cross over, but at the end of the day, use whatever method works for you. Let’s start off with some format elements that can benefit your line editing before we dive deeper into the process.
Change the format:
Some may suggest you even print the story out. However, if you are looking for zero cost to low budget ways to elevate your writing you can work around that.
If you have been looking at your manuscript on the standard 8.5in x 11in page that comes with word documents, and 12pt Times New Roman font, it may become difficult for you to start seeing any mistakes. This is specifically because the writer of the manuscript can go story-blind.
Story blindness is when you miss obvious mistakes, or subtle ones, in your own writing because you are overexposed to the material.
Change it up.
Use a smaller page size. Example: 5 in x 8 in.
Use a different font. Georgia, Courier New, even the oft-dreaded Comic Sans can make the manuscript look new.
It may also help to change the page color and font color.
For example:
When I write I use white font on a black page.
When I edit I use black font on a white page.
Read the story aloud:
This age-old advice comes in handy for a reason. When the material is read to you by another person or a device, you can’t add in the tonal changes to help push your meaning to the reader. And while you may miss a double word, the computer will read it it aloud. Notice the previous sentence used it twice.
If you aren’t comfortable reading aloud or listening to the computer speakers blaring your manuscript, there are options–and they come with headphones.
Microsoft Word and Google Docs both have text-to-speech features that can read your MS to you. There are also online programs such as naturalreaders.com, and ttsreader.com
Common Mistakes (and how to fix them):
While the above is a way to see your manuscript differently, let’s look at some line editing examples and how you can apply that to your own work.
Please note: This list will not be comprehensive. You may or may not come across these depending on the strengths and weaknesses of your own manuscript.
Too many words:
For example, this is the process of using entirely too many words than the manuscript calls for at any given time, in a way that can cause run-ons.
Cut the fluff.
How many ways can you find to rewrite the above sentence? There is no one right or best answer. Use the version that best suits your manuscript and *relevant era.
*Relevant era: Some line editors and copy editors will take the setting into account when marking up a manuscript. Certain time periods have slightly different grammar rules for authenticity.
Pronouns for clarity:
You may have come across a sentence like the following either in your own work or in another’s.
He plunged the stake into his chest, and he screamed as black smoke poured from his gaping maw.
Bare with the lack of imagination, but can you see how the reader may not understand that there is both a vampire and a vampire hunter in this sentence?
Bonus! Did you also notice that this sentence needed to be split? There is simply too much happening…
Hunter plunged the stake into the vampire’s chest. The creature screamed, black smoke poured from his gaping maw.
Gerunds and when they hinder plausibility:
While the advice may be met with staunch resistance, let me show you what editors mean when they say gerunds and past participle phrases.
Action scenes, or when speed is necessary, the past participle phrase seems an easy answer to make things happen quickly.
This is, by far, one of the most common errors I see when working with authors.
Jumping up, he ran down the stairs and flipped the breaker.
Our brains are hardwired to see these as chronological events. First this, then that. However, that is not what has been written. In the above example, the character is running down the stairs while jumping up–something that the author clearly intended to be two separate actions.
A quick fix:
He ran down the stairs and flipped the breaker.
Unless the character’s jumping is relevant, it’s not an important word. The reader will know that in order to run down the stairs he stood in some manner. Keeping or cutting the phrase in the sentence is a matter of personal taste.
Make sure that, if you are using a gerund (an -ing word) to start a sentence, it makes sense.
The right emotional word:
The character and their emotions are how a reader experiences a story. It is true that you can show emotions by describing the way a character feels, and how it affects their body and mind, but you also have to make sure that you have utilized your narration properly. This is not to say that you should be using telling words like “angry,” “happy,” or “sad.” The right emotional word means, to ask yourself “Is this the best descriptor word for my character’s, or my scene’s mood?”.
Which of the following examples sounds more like the creature is dangerous?
Example 1:
Snow crunched under the weight of the creature as he trudged through the ice-laden briar patch. Wispy flakes of magic fell from his scaled skin and swirled in the air like campfire embers.
Example 2:
Snow crunched under the weight of the creature as he trudged through the iced-over thicket. Wispy flakes of magic fell from his scaled skin and swirled in the air like little fairy lights.
We covered some common problems and solutions for line editing, however, you may have a more specific manuscript problem to address. Do you have any specific line editing questions that we missed? Drop them in the comments below.
Next Self-Editing Topic:
Next time we’ll continue our dive into prose and cover the big one everyone thinks about when they hear editing. How do you copy edit your own work?
Self-Editing Your Manuscript: Revitalizing Your Setting
The setting should be as essential to the manuscript as the character and plot. Without the setting, your characters would meander around an abyss of nothing with no discernible life, just floating people and an occasional pop of something like a dagger in their hands, or even a staircase. Have you noticed that that happens as you read back over your manuscript?
The setting should be intrinsic to the world. If characters appear in a place, there needs to be a reason for it, and if the characters are in a setting they need to interact with it. Otherwise, they have become floating bodies in an abyss of white with nothing to help ground the readers in their reality. The setting is more than what we see with our eyes. It should involve all the senses: sight, touch, sound, taste, and scent. Word count is precious in short fiction; do not let the eyes have it all.
Note: if your character is missing any of these senses, simply skip over it and think of how you can use the others to better let your reader imagine the world as the characters are experiencing it.
As you work through your manuscript, also ask yourself if you are using the right words to describe your character’s senses. A character’s personality and emotion will heavily impact the words used to describe the setting. Imagine coming upon a pond in the forest. That little bit of water is going to have a different description to a group of friends on a nature hike than it would to stranded travelers who are lost and dehydrated. In the same way, it would be different to someone who is afraid of the water as opposed to someone who loves it. The character(s) should help you define the word choice for setting your scenes.
Sight:
This is one not often forgotten when working through a manuscript. Many writers find themselves hacking away the words ‘see’, ‘saw’, and ‘seen’ like thorny brambles around a golden treasure chest. You are free to simply describe things that the characters are observing because it is your description that lets us follow the camera pan of their eyes.
Did you have a quick blanket-style description to start the scene before you focused on the more intricate details? This establishing shot is a quick view to place the main elements of your story so that the reader understands what to imagine. This makes it less confusing when your characters start interacting, as you’ve already established certain things were present.
Touch:
It can be easy to forget to include what things feel like when writing, as most of the feeling goes into the emotions. Rough bark on a tree scratching against someone’s hand, or how hot or cold something is as it touches the skin. That blade may be cold when pressed to your character’s neck by an enemy, or it could still be warm with the previous victim’s blood.
Did you make sure that your character was able to touch/feel things in the physical world of their setting? Patting someone on a shoulder in congratulations will feel different if they’ve freshly bathed, or they’ve just been covered in monster entrails.
This is not always another character, but their surroundings. If they do not interact with where they are, it may be time to consider why they are even in that particular place.
Sound:
Whether hearing the trilling of monsters closing in, the groaning of another character, a babbling brook, or the scratch of pencils on paper… Sound is just another way to breathe more life and immersion into your character’s world.
A note on filters. Heard and hear, while valid at times, do not always need to be used to describe the sound in one’s fiction. Simply being told that a piano played softly, or nails scratched against wood is more than enough for the reader.
Did you incorporate sound into your manuscript, in more than just dialogue?
Taste:
This is where food is always fun to play with in a manuscript, but with short fiction, what if you don’t have a scene where the characters eat? You don’t have to add those kinds of scenes just to fulfill this sensory element.
Maybe you have a character just wanting to get through the story so they can have a delectable piece of pie that they may or may not get by the end. If a character has their face pushed into the dirt, dirt has a taste. The grainy texture can make them overly aware of their tongue, and even bring bile–which also has a taste–to their mouth. Blood can leave a metallic flavor, and there’s a powdery substance on gloves.
Have you included taste in your manuscript, either through action or memory?
Scent:
Much like with taste, it’s not hard to want to toss in every delicious sounding word to describe the way food smells, or even someone–sandalwood is quite popular. However, scent goes beyond food and even people when it comes to setting a scene.
An unused and dusty room can smell musty, or if there is something old and decaying in the cellar, rot and death can choke your character. It is also easy to flip the script, as they say, and include appealing scents, a common one being the cleanliness of lemon, or freshly baked cookies, and have it at war with the scene–more disturbing for your reader.
Bonus Setting Tip: Weather.
One of the easiest ways to set the mood and even speak for a story’s theme is the weather. By nature, humans–readers–take cues from their surroundings. Dark clouds gathering in the distance can be an omen, and a storm with a torrential downpour when you finally enact your vengeance can be a visual theme of washing the old version of the character away. In that same way, your character can have a happy, shining day, with no clouds and blue sky when something tragic happens–the weather helps the irony of the concept of a perfect day hit a bit harder.
How have you used the weather to set the mood in your manuscript? You may notice that you placed everything organically. If you didn’t, consider ways to pull more depth of the world up for the reader. Is there an interesting way to play with the weather of your setting to make the story mood have more impact?
Next Self-Editing Topic: Next time we’ll start diving into your prose. How can you line edit your own work?
There’s no doubt that the origins of Gothic literature came from England, rich in medieval history. Not surprisingly, then, that American Gothic differs from the old world, especially since it grew from the New England tradition, with its own unique twist on the genre. When the Gothic genre crossed the ocean and appeared on American shores, it was championed by Edgar Allan Poe, whose Gothic tales of horror set the standard for American authors. It is interesting to note that Poe’s Gothic tales are virtually all set in New England, the oldest part of America (1850s), with the kind of places that paralleled the dark and haunted places in which the English authors set their Gothic tales. Hardly anyone stops to think that Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher is actually set in Boston.
But then something happened: The Civil War, and a once grand and pastoral part of America was reduced to ruins, destruction heaped upon it by the conquering Northern Armies. Plantation houses were abandoned; dark forests reclaimed the land. Places once bright and sunny became grotesque and macabre. It became the perfect milieu for the birth of a literary sub-genre: AMERICAN SOUTHERN GOTHIC.
Unlike its predecessor, American Southern Gothic uses the tropes of the Gothic not only for the sake of suspense, but also to explore the social issues besetting the country. There is a realism in the American Southern Gothic that makes it unique. Disturbing rural communities replace the magnificent plantations of an earlier age. Madness, decay and despair are common themes as is the blurred line between victim and villain. You find these themes developed in the works of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote.
The roots of Southern Gothic can be traced back to such authors as Henry Clay Lewis and Mark Twain in portions of their works. Originally “Southern Gothic” was used as a dismissive way to pan an author’s works. Many early critics were not fond of the style. One early critic panned William Faulkner’s novels as being filled with aimless violence and fantastic nightmares. Obviously, the Nobel Committee did not feel that way when it awarded Faulkner the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.
In Faulkner, the clash between Old South and New South becomes uniquely Gothic as it explores the suppressed sins of slavery, patriarchy, and class strife. And all this takes place in a landscape of swamps, deep woods, and decaying plantations. Add to this the language of Faulkner’s works, which creates a singularly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation.
A perfect example of Faulkner’s Southern Gothic genius is A Rose for Emily. Narrated from multiple viewpoints, the story tells of the spinster Emily Grierson, who after her father’s death scandalizes the community when she takes up with the northern carpetbagger Homer Barron. Homer disappears shortly after Emily has purchased arsenic making her the talk of the town. Decades later, after living a reclusive life, Emily dies, and when the townspeople break open the door to an upstairs room, they discover a man’s “fleshless” corpse on the bed, the remains of him “rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt.” Next to the corpse is a pillow, with “the indentation of a head” and “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” The story’s themes of necrophilia, sin, repression, revenge, and secrecy mark it as Gothic, yet the locale mark it as uniquely Southern Gothic.
American theater of the 1940s and 1950s was infused with a heavy dose of Southern Gothic thanks to the plays of Tennessee Williams. Characters with varying degrees of illness populate his works, and his own sexual orientation (socially unacceptable at the time) found its way into plays such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In other plays, Williams created Gothic spaces in which familiar tropes of the Southern Gothic, such as disintegrating southern families, alienation, loneliness, alcoholism, and physical and psychological violence abounded.
Is Southern Gothic here to stay? You only have to look at your TV guide or movie selection to discover that Southern Gothic has become a staple of the entertainment industry. Even in music, Southern Gothic has influenced a genre called Dark Country, which is an acoustic-based alternative rock with songs featuring themes of poverty, criminal behavior, religious imagery, death, ghosts, family, lost love, alcohol, murder, the devil and betrayal.
Yes, I would say that American Southern Gothic is here to stay.
When you are satisfied, share your setting with us in the comments below. We would love to read about the setting of your next Gothic piece. And, if you turn your setting into a full short story, poem, piece of art, screenplay, or novella, don’t forget to submit it to us by visiting darksiremag.com/submissions.html.
At THE DARK SIRE we are incredible fans of the Gothic genre. Our go to author is Edgar Allan Poe. Who can deny the dark, eerie settings in stories like The Fall of the House of Usher or The Pit and the Pendulum? His critics at the time accused him of being too heavily influenced by German authors. But if that were the case, who influenced the German writers? Now, for me, all of this begs the question: Where did the Gothic genre come from? Someone had to write the first story, and succeeding authors had to build on that. So, I did the research (just in case there were other fans of the genre like me out there) and, with the sources of John Mullan, the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the other researchers at the British Library, I discovered:
Gothic fiction began as a sophisticated joke. Horace Walpole first applied the word Gothic in The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, published in 1764. When he used the word, it meant something like barbarous, having devolved from a word used in the Middle Ages. Walpole pretended that the story itself was an antique relic – complete with a preface that claims a translator discovered the tale – and was published in Italian in 1529. According to this origin story, the book was discovered “in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.” The story itself, “founded on truth,” was written three or four centuries earlier still. Some readers were duly deceived by this fiction and aggrieved when it was revealed to be a modern fake.
The novel itself tells a supernatural tale in which Manfred, the gloomy Prince of Otranto, develops an irresistible passion for the beautiful young woman who was to have married his son and heir. The novel opens memorably with this son being crushed to death by the huge helmet from a statue of a previous Prince of Otranto, and throughout the novel the very fabric of the castle comes to supernatural life until villainy is defeated. Walpole, who made his own house at Strawberry Hill into a mock-Gothic building, had discovered a fictional territory that has been exploited ever since. According to Professor Mullan, Gothic involves the supernatural (or the promise of the supernatural), and it often involves the discovery of mysterious elements of antiquity, and it usually takes its protagonists into strange or frightening old buildings. With this imagery in mind, Walpole was trying to recreate the visual and physicality of the Gothic in real life.
In the 1790s, novelists rediscovered the world that Walpole had imagined. The queen of Gothic novelists at that time was Ann Radcliffe. Her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) took its title from the name of a fictional Italian castle where much of the action is set. Like Walpole, she created a brooding aristocratic villain, Montoni, to threaten her resourceful virgin heroine, Emily, with an unspeakable fate. All of Radcliffe’s other novels are set in foreign lands, often with lengthy descriptions of sublime scenery. Udolpho is set amongst the dark and looming Apennine Mountains. Radcliffe was known to derive her settings from travel books. While other authors of the time chose Gothic for their subtitle, Radcliffe chose a different word to accompany the title on the front cover: Romance. Around this time, Minerva Press was providing reading material to the eager public who was hungry for this new kind of fiction.
Gothic then soon leaned toward natural, if complicated, explanations. Gothic truly came alive in the thoughts and anxieties of the characters. Gothic showcased the fear of the supernatural rather than the supernatural itself. And some authors, like Matthew Lewis, strove to go to the extreme – experimenting the outrageous of the Gothic tale. In his The Monk (1796), Lewis wrote a plethora of supernatural occurrences, including ghosts, demons, and Satan himself.
A second wave of Gothic novels in the 2nd and 3rd decades of the 19th-Century established new conventions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) gave a scientific form to the supernatural formula. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) featured a Byronic anti-hero who had sold his soul for a prolonged life. And James Hogg’s elaborately titled The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is the story of a man pursued by his own double. A character’s sense of encountering a double of him- or herself, also essential to Frankenstein, was established as a powerful new Gothic motif. Doubles crop up throughout Gothic fiction, the most famous example being the late 19th-Century Gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This motif is one of the reasons why Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny (or unheimlich, as it is in German) is often applied to Gothic fiction. In his 1919 paper “The Uncanny,” Freud drew his examples from the Gothic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann in order to account for the special feeling of disquiet – the sense of the uncanny – that they aroused. He argued that the making strange of what should be familiar is essential to this, and that it is disturbing and fascinating because it recalls us to our original infantile separation from our origin in the womb.
And this brings us to our favorite author Edgar Allan Poe. He used many of the standard properties of Gothic (medieval settings, castles and ancient houses, aristocratic corruption) but turned these into an exploration of extreme psychological states. He was attracted to the genre because he was fascinated by fear. In his hands Gothic was becoming horror, a term properly applied to the most famous late-Victorian example of Gothic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The opening section of Dracula uses some familiar Gothic properties: the castle whose chambers contain the mystery that the protagonist must solve; the sublime scenery that emphasizes his isolation. Stoker learned from the vampire stories that had appeared earlier in the 19th century (notably Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu, who was his friend and collaborator) and exploited the narrative methods of Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction. Dracula is written in the form of journal entries and letters by various characters, caught up in the horror of events. The fear and uncertainty on which Gothic had always relied is enacted in the narration.
Meanwhile, Gothic had become so influential that we can detect its elements in much mainstream Victorian fiction. Both Emily and Charlotte Bronte included intimations of the supernatural within narratives that were otherwise attentive to the realities of time, place and material constraint. In the opening episode of Wuthering Heights, the narrator, Lockwood, has to stay the night at Heathcliff’s house because of heavy snow. He finds Cathy’s diary, written as a child, and nods off while reading it. There follows a powerfully narrated nightmare in which an icy hand reaches to him through the window, and the voice of Catherine Linton calls to be let in. The vision seems to prefigure what he will later discover about the history of Cathy and Heathcliff. Half in jest, Lockwood tells Heathcliff that Wuthering Heights is haunted; the novel, centered as it is on a house, seems to exploit in a new way the Gothic idea that entering an old building means entering the stories of those who have lived in it before.
Two of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, Jane Eyre and Villette, feature old buildings that appear to be haunted. As in the Gothic fiction of Ann Radliffe, the apparition seen by Jane Eyre in Thornfield Hall, where she is a governess, and the ghostly nun glimpsed by Lucy Snowe in the attic of the old Pensionnat where she teaches, have rational explanations. But Charlotte Brontë likes to raise the fears of her protagonists as to the presence of the supernatural, as if they were Gothic heroines. Gothic still provides the vocabulary of apprehensiveness. Similarly, Wilkie Collins may have introduced into fiction, as Henry James said, “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors,” but he liked his reminders of traditional Gothic plots. In The Woman in White, all events turn out to be humanly contrived, yet the sudden appearance to the night-time walker of the figure of “a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments” haunts the reader as it does the narrator. The Moonstone is a detective story with a scientific explanation, but we never forget the legend that surrounds the diamond of the title, and the curse on those who steal it – a curse that seems to come true. The final triumph of Gothic is to become, as in these examples, a vital thread within novels that otherwise take pains to convince us of what is probable and rational.
As I pointed out earlier, one really useful term for thinking about Gothic writing is uncanny. Gothic fiction often strives to reach those uncanny moments in which the reader suddenly recognized somebody who seems unfamiliar and strange or has an identity that the reader already knows but is not quite human.
Now, this whole concept of the uncanny leads me to examine how American Exceptionalism took the Gothic genre and turned it into something truly unique. In another blog, I will examine the rise of American Southern Gothic stories.
THE DARK SIRE is always looking for Gothic fiction, art, and screenplays to add to our issues. If you have something that delves into psyche, traverses the dark and twisted, and has the eeriness of Poe, we’re waiting for you to submit to us.
Self-Editing Your Manuscript: How to Assess World-building in short fiction
When most writers hear the term world-building, the first thing that generally comes to mind are sprawling epics, i.e., A Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time. However, world-building applies to any type of fiction, even contemporary pieces.
Magic and royalty are just as important as knowing how to ride a subway and how an elevator works in others.
Suspension of disbelief is how well you have suspended, portrayed, and consumed the reader with your story. Do they accept the well-written world and its characters as they are, or have small things snuck into the manuscript that makes them pause within their reading and tilt their heads, questioning “but why?”
This is especially true when writing fantastical fiction with supernatural or paranormal elements where the reader needs to accept the implausible as plausible.
Not everyone believes in ghosts, but in your story they need to be real.
Not everyone believes in magic, but in your story it should be as much the truth as breathing.
For the theme, it is perfectly fine to give the reader a reason to think, a thing to dwell on long after the story has ended. That is valid and intentional. A writer should never want the reader to question if something was necessary to include. Questioning the intention can break the suspension of disbelief or seem outright illogical.
These inconsistencies with world-building can make it look as though the writer didn’t quite have the grasp on their world and their characters.
Real World World-building:
Notice, this was not titled Contemporary World-building, and that’s because our world spans so many things and time periods. It is making sure that you aren’t using a type of car before it was made. It is writing real-world places based on actual maps, or even creating a fictional town and remembering where you put city hall.
For example, your 1920s mafia will not have cell phones. If your character is ever on the phone, you will need to know how early landlines and rotary phones work.
What if you have a character with a snake bite and want to inject them with antivenom? The story should take place from the late 1890s to the present day. There are some exceptions, as present-day may not have access to everything. For example,a dystopian short story may have characters that don’t have access to anti-venom.
If your characters have traveled in your manuscript, to help keep your world-building consistent with your Real World stories, you can use basic tools like Google Maps to physically visit places you may not have access to.
If you are editing a form of a historical piece, it can help to jot down relevant notes on a Google Doc, Word file, or even in a physical notebook so that you can keep to the facts of the time. If you are a plotter, someone who writes things down to varying degrees beforehand, you might do the research before you write. However, a panster, someone who likes the freedom to just write as it comes to them, then jotting down this information can be targeted research after the draft has made it onto paper.
Whatever era you have written in, research is going to be your best friend, and if you aren’t entirely sure how to flesh out this research, reach out to fellow writers. The #writingcommunity on Twitter is fabulously supportive!
Secondary World World-Building:
This is most likely what you think of with world-building. Creating an entire world from scratch, or loosely based on our own, is what many fantasy authors love to do. The religion, the culture, the people… events, days of the week, and maybe a touch of conlanging (creating a new language).
Short fiction, unlike those sprawling epic sagas mentioned above, doesn’t have the time to build up the world to the same degree and dive into all the details. While you can still have a beautifully thought out world, sometimes the little details you can slip into longer pieces don’t have a place in your story.
Any secondary world-building detail needs to be as precise as the other elements, completely owned by the characters and the world without leaving unexplained sections. If the reader has to question the inclusion of any part of the story, particularly with short fiction, then you have not held their suspension of disbelief.
Was (this element) necessary to this particular story?
Fantasy is a particular beast on its own, given that the worlds can be entirely made up, and with short fiction we may only explore the smallest parts of it at a time.
It may help you keep your world consistent and be extra fun for your future readers if you dabble in map-making. However, you do not have to be a cartographer to put together a basic map (especially if it’s just for you). You can find easy-to-use tools here at inkarnate, which will let you work as small as a city/town. As a bonus, they have both a free and paid version based on your needs.
Helpful Tip! Even if you only have one planned story in a particular secondary world, it never hurts to write down the world-building information either before you’ve penned the story, or after, so that you can revisit it without making mistakes on your own creation.
Magical Systems (if applicable):
In fantasy worlds, be it on our earth or a secondary one, you may have a magical system in place. Whether your character actually casts spells or uses more intuitive skills, there are some rules it would benefit your manuscript for you to know. The best part about those rules is that you create them.
Magic aspects come in many forms and are sometimes spiritual or energy-based. To see the vast differences in magical systems, compare the differences and similarities in Naruto and their chakra energy and Dragon Ball Z’s chi. You can also compare the differences and similarities in Elise Kova’s Air Awakens series and the TV show Avatar the Last Airbender.
The rules that you created for your character’s magic system should answer some very basic questions:
What can they do with their abilities?
What supplies/feeds their ability?
What can’t they do with their abilities?
Does this differ from person to person, or is it universal?
When you go through your manuscript to self-edit, make sure that you worked these answers in when applicable. For example, did you have your character using multiple high-energy types of magic and forget to add in the corresponding consequence? Shortness of breath, feeling dizzy or potentially needing to rework a battle so that they had the ability for their climactic hit to the antagonist. Understanding your magic system can help you figure out if you’ve created realistic magic, or if you’ve got Mary Sue/Gary Stu magic running around in a *god-mod mode.
*god-mod mode for anyone unfamiliar with the terminology is when you have essentially removed all consequences and obstacles from your character and they have no true opposition. This is the opposite of what readers want. Readers want someone to cheer for, someone whose journey they are excited to see, because they actually have something to overcome, unlike a god-mod mode character.
Bonus Tip on World-building: Remember, if it hurts your writer’s heart to cut aspects of world-building that you put so much thought into, you are allowed to write another story in that world where that aspect of the world-building is more relevant to the story! You have that freedom. Go forth and create!
Next Week’s Topic:
We’ll dive into the setting and discuss how your self-edits can create a more immersive experience for future readers!
Pacing is an important part of a functioning manuscript.
Good prose, great characters, even a working plot can all be in place, but if the story is rushed or too slow… readers will lose attention.
There are two ways to check the pacing of your story. To simplify the process, we are going to use the terms Macro Pacing for the large scale pacing on the manuscript as a whole unit and Micro Pacing for the smaller scale page level edits.
NOTE: Part of today’s self-editing topic requires familiarity with plotting techniques that are heavily used in the process for outliners. However, checking the pacing of your novel does not require you to have one. It merely requires the manuscript.
For your convenience, we have provided worksheets that will make this process easier. You will find them below the next section.
Macro Pacing:
Do you know where the First Pillar of your story should fall? The Midpoint? And what in the world are pinch points?
It is true that some writers don’t like feeling like their story must fit into a ‘write by numbers’ formula, but this is a guide. It’s meant to help you. It does not exist to stifle your creativity.
For example: If you have Critique Partners or Beta Readers telling you that your story is dragging, or moving so fast they simply couldn’t keep up…etc. the structure is the special key to fix that!
These points mainly apply to writers who are using general narrative formats. While there are many, let’s focus on the most popular style guide for short stories (and western fiction in general): Three-Act Structure. (As a graphic you can save for your referencing ease.)
You can use the above points to check your manuscript’s pacing by applying a few percentages. These percentages are not made up but found from delving into screen-writing and literature to mark the perfect places for the above-mentioned points/moments to fall for impactful stories. There is math involved, but I promise you it’s just plugging stuff into a formula, getting the answer, and then scrolling (if you are on a digital device) through your manuscript.
Act One is the first 25%.
Act Two is 26%-75%.
Act Three is 75%-100%
To check your pacing, simply plug your overall page count (or word count) into the following formula.
If my short story is fifteen pages long, and I need to check that my Act One ends in the proper place, all I have to do is the following:
OverallCount x 0.25 = End of Act One
15 x 0.25 = 3.75
That means my Act One should conclude, meaning that I have everything set up and ready to roll into the next act, on/around page 4 of the manuscript.
If by page 4 everything is set up and my two main points are in place, then I know that Act One’s pacing is good. However, if there is an issue, then I will know what needs my attention.
If the section is too long, I can search back over the elements to see if I have included any superfluous information.
If the section is too short, then I will know that I need to make sure that I have included all necessary information.
Here are the worksheets we have created to make this process easier for you:
In what we are going to call “micro pacing,” we are going to cover a few “small” aspects of a manuscript that can hinder the pacing. Hooks, sentence length, and point-of-view.
Hooks:
Tasty points of intrigue that are intended to have the reader salivating. They are unable to put the story down because they have to know what comes next. These are not things that are contrived or made up; they should already be in the story.
Think of these visually. Have you noticed in TV shows that something intentionally vague or surprising happens before the commercial rolls in? Scriptwriters do this on purpose! You should too. Control your readers’ experiences by planting hooks before your scene breaks. If your scene has ended on a note that feels like a present with a prettily tied bow, the manuscript should be ending.
Dwight Swain, an Oklahoma Writing Hall of Fame inductee, screenwriting documentary pioneer, and author explained the format of a scene as follows: Goal, conflict, disaster.
Goal: The character wants something.
Conflict: Something is pushing back against the character from achieving their goal.
Disaster: Something happens to stop the character from achieving their goal.
Disaster does not mean an apocalypse, or death, per se, but it does mean that if the story hasn’t been resolved the character should still have a need.
Ex: Maybe the protagonists succeeded in getting the silver to stop the werewolves, but all that was available was a silver dagger…and now they’ve got to decide who is going to be the lamb that allows the others a chance at escape.
Without a hook, the pacing, tension, and the story overall can drag because the character wasn’t in a state of ‘need’. If your character is always supplied with everything easily and has no hard choices to make, go back to the lesson on Character to better assess the internal and external conflict.
Bonus Tip: Giving your story a hook does NOT mean that you should be giving the story over-maxed conflict. There are definitely times that a character should be allowed to breathe, or else, your story may come across as angsty and melodramatic.
Sentence Length:
Beware of purple prose, or excessive detail, where you can wax on a bit too long of the seemingly more poetic aspects of your story. Even if more dramatic language might be serviceable in a particular scene, try to contain it. Use it wisely. The writer can easily, and subconsciously, drag on with consecutive long sentences, and these run-ons can slow the pacing down because they simply take forever to read.
In other words, use varying lengths of sentences, not just long, drug out one. Short sentences are okay; short paragraphs are also a nice way to break up consecutive long ones. By varying your sentence length, you create unique pacing and keep reader interest.
The details may seem pretty, but tightening a story can be one of the hardest parts next to actually writing it. Do you need that adjective, adverb, prepositional phrase? Your pacing of the events themselves may be spot on if you cut unnecessary words, which in turn can create varying lengths of sentences – sometimes, quickening the pace where, otherwise, it was too slow.
Point of view:
How can Point of View hinder your pacing? Easily. It’s actually a concept known as ‘navel gazing’. With this pace-hindering element, the manuscript spends too much time in the narrator’s head and thoughts and feelings.
It is easiest to do this in certain deep POVs such as Third Limited, or First.
If you are using a deep POV, make sure each thought and feeling is necessary and fits with the cause and effect, or the action and reaction of the story. If the internal narration does not advance the plot, cut it.
It is also possible to do the exact opposite of this and forget to include enough detail on the character’s thoughts/feelings to rationalize why they are making certain decisions. This lack of detail can lead to a story that reads as plot-plot-plot with no emotional pull to keep your readers grounded in the story.
Here is a worksheet we have created to help you work through the macro and micro pacing elements in your manuscript.
World-building is not just for long epics. It’s for any story you write – in any genre. Place, which is setting and thus world, should have an impact on your characters. However, putting too much (or too little!) can be detrimental to the success of your story. We’ll be covering how to make sure that you haven’t put too many details in your descriptions while ensuring you’ve included enough. See you next week!
The plot of your story, boiled down to the basics, is what happens.
If you are a plotter, you may have created a general idea or detailed idea of this in your outlining stage. If you are not a plotter, or you were a plotter who deviated from their outline, now would be the time to create an outline. Not because you need it to write your story, but because it’s a helpful tool for self-editing.
NOTE: Today’s self-editing topic revolves around creating an outline. For those authors who do not use outlines, we have created a worksheet to use instead. Feel free to download the worksheet with our compliments:
This is a helpful tool for a more cohesive story edit because it allows you to see your story at a glance. The one you actually put onto paper. That’s why the idea for this type of post-outline method is relies on what happened/happens.
If you haven’t created this yet, make a note to create your post-outline. With short fiction, this should be fairly simple.
Ideally, this method will work the best if you can break your manuscript down into scenes, the small sections of the overall story. By doing so, you can give yourself a comprehensive self-edit that can save you editing frustrations later on.
Can you already see some issues in either version of the outlines?
What is Your Dramatic Question?
The dramatic question is a way to ask your story’s goal. What did you want to happen in your story? What was the conflict presented that the character had to overcome?
Story Goal Example: Character A must defeat Character B.
Dramatic Question: Will Character A defeat Character B?
The dramatic question should be present in every scene of a short fiction piece. The reader should not have to ask what the goal of the story is, or why certain parts are there. This spans from chapters to sentences to word-level cuts.
As you work through the outline you made, do you notice any sections of story that don’t serve your dramatic question? If so, time to cut it from the manuscript.
“But I hate cutting my work to pieces! I worked really hard on that scene/chapter…”
I have a special story for you, completely and utterly from a reader’s perspective. When you cut those sections of the story out… save them. Yes, it’s true, you put a lot of work into those scenes, but sometimes they just don’t have a place in this story. The information may not apply to the overall actions, or there was no real movement forward, or you may write it with the wrong POV Character… so cut them from your story with pride. Then use them as Bonus Scenes that are story-related but separate pieces of the story. These bonus scenes are really fun ways to connect with your readers who adore your universe. You can also revise the scenes to create another part of your world, a continuation or prequel for yet another standalone adventure.
Challenges and Trials: External Conflict
We covered this in our post on 6 Elements of Characterization, but now we are going to step back and look at the external conflicts overall.
Do you have one too many scenes where the character doesn’t have a setback or a breakthrough?
Short stories, unlike longer fiction forms, are an important artform with specific external conflict needs, one that does not allow for long story lulls. A few lackluster pages/scenes in a short story can easily sink the story. That is why, when you are writing them, you are slowly conquering kingdoms to earn your crown in tight and concise stories.
Check through your outline, be as subjective as you can to the plot itself. Ask yourself if the scene/section serves the overall dramatic question. Also, did you notice any overdone conflict, or trials and challenges that have nothing – or very little to do with – the dramatic question of the story? It’s easy to get so focused on creating conflict, you can accidentally over-create. If your plot flows smoothly and your characters are solid, the conflict will write itself.
This is just one of the infinite options for how you can format an outline. Use whatever works best for you.
Self-Editing Technique: The Backward Plot
You’ve checked it forward – now check it backward. Open a new file on your computer, or get a blank sheet of paper out. We’re going to make sure it functions from end to beginning.
With a backward plot, you start from your last scene. Sometimes, you learn you caught everything in the first check, but other times, you may see added bits of detail missed or things that needed foreshadowing.
Cause and effect are so important to a backward plot, especially since you’ll be reading it as effect and cause. Did everything you wanted to happen have a motivation? Did it have a reason to be there? Or did was an effect/cause desired?
Even if your plot is perfect, this is also an easy and fun way to check your foreshadowing! Break down a ‘big reveal’ in the story like you are an episode of What’s New Scooby-Doo, and the gang is doing a tell-all for the villain they’ve just captured. Did all the subtle, or not-so-subtle, hints make it onto the page?
This only needs to be done in a way that you can read it. Below, I’ve shown a minor example of just a brain-map style that connects the dots in a backward plot. You may do this in your regular plot outline and feel you’ve captured all the points. The backward plot is just another option to see your plot differently.
What’s Next Week’s Topic?
Pacing is huge in short fiction! So huge, in fact, that it will make a story soar high – or burn as it falls from the sky. It’s that important. Next week, we’ll cover the different plotting structures and how knowing those structure can improve your manuscript’s pacing. Don’t miss it!
This story took Honorable Mention at The Jon Meyers Dark Humour Prize for Gothic Literature, which was hosted by TDS.
The ham house was ceilinged with hundreds of hooks and its soot-coated walls, even after fifty years, smelled sweet and burnt. But it was not the scent of summer bonfires on the beach or the warmth of a winter hearth, rather it was the reminder of long-dead animals that even now might be creeping back to the place of their cure.
How could something from so many years ago linger so strongly in the present?
Of the six outbuildings on my dad’s property, the ham house alone had haunted my dreams since I was a child. Nothing happened to me inside those smoky walls. Instead, I suffered from the certainty that what lay in wait for me inside was the same thing that pursued me into my dreams.
Today I felt like a child again as I set about doing one of the most adult things of all—preparing Dad’s farm for sale. Could a forty-year-old be an orphan? Now when the beast visited my dreams and the door bulged with the force of its struggle to escape, I would have only my own strength to rely on. My feet would plant on grass slippery with nighttime dew as my arms strained to hold the door closed. Each morning, I would awake to aching limbs and splinters in my hands. If it ever truly did break free, I no longer had a parent to come to my aid, an extra pair of arms to hold the door closed.
Not everything about the beast turned my legs to jelly. No, there was one feature alone, a pointed reminder that I was made of meat and sinew and easily punctured. Its tusks.
My fear of sharp objects was a rational worry with an irrational horror that somehow a passing knife might leap from its owner’s hand and plunge into my gut, my heart, my neck, as if I could draw pain like a magnet. I froze at the sight of a gleaming point, so all the implements in my kitchen were dull. When I was gifted a new set, I threw away the paring knife curved like a claw, unwilling to keep something so obviously meant to…
Mary Sloat is a writer who feels most alive when writing twisted tales of magic, horror, and death. She has written short stories and is now working on her debut novel.
This story took 3rd place in The Jon Meyers Dark Humour Prize for Gothic Literature, which was hosted by TDS.
Whitely believed in speaking to the point of pain, and that a raw throat had no better remedy than a bottle of red. He feared God and loved humankind and believed God’s greatest gift to man was not life, but freewill. This, he knew, made us opinionated. And if opinions were part of the Great Plan, then Whitely would no sooner hold his tongue than commit heresy.
“Vampires are poetic creatures,” he declared to the people of the pub. “And like many lovers of poetry, they are sticklers for the language.”
“It makes sense enough to me, sir,” said Whitely’s dearest friend Ted, being the only one paying active attention to the words. Ted had developed a callus for Whitely’s lengthy rants, or as Whitely fondly considered, Ted had fortified his mind to radical insights.
“Because vampires, ya see, claim to have great strengths and weaknesses. They’ve the power of ten Grizzlies yet are killed by harmless things. Garlic. Water. Sunlight? These are undamaging things. But it’s been written, and being lovers of poetry, and sticklers for language, they must honor and obey these weaknesses to the letter of the law for the simple reason that they honor and obey the language!”
Ted scratched the hairs peppering his chin rolls and nodded.
“Then by any means and measures, a person should be able to defeat a vampire using their language solely. Because, again, they are so compliant to the rules that had been created, which have been inscribed using language most beautiful and revered. You see?”
“Of course, sir,” said Ted, who didn’t really see, or understand the rules of vampires, other than a stake through the heart made them dead.
“I say, if I had the gumption, I’d march out to Thinberry Castle with only a flask to free my inhibitions and give that vamp a tongue lashing that would leave him skinless!”
This declaration was followed by silence, which was rare. Silence signaled that one had been listened to, which was all Whitely wanted and seldom received, yet this quiet communicated something more. Something uncomfortable. It came accompanied by a man standing near the entrance, whose brooding presence captured the pub’s drunken attention.
He was tall and dark, with various knives and teeth slung along his waist…
Steven Lombardi is an award-winning short fiction writer. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Air and Nothingness Press, Ghost Orchid Press, The Common Tongue, 365 Tomorrows, Ab Terra, Theme of Absence and elsewhere. He won The Dark Sire Award for Best Fiction in February 2021. You can find Steven on Twitter (@_sl_) and learn more about his work at: stevenlombardi.nyc.
This story took 2nd Place at The Jon Meyers Dark Humour Prize for Gothic Literature, which was hosted by TDS.
Alchemy, with its penchant for exotic materials and custom glassware, is alas never going to be a cheap pursuit, even if the knowledge and security it will bring can prove priceless. You will need to become a Grand Mistress3 to even attempt to transmute lead into gold, and so, until that exciting and often explosive day, here are some cost-saving measures you may like to consider.
The rare and expensive Hermetical writings you may be tempted to purchase in your eagerness to embark on the Great Work, were largely scribed by male practitioners towards the senile and embittered ends of their alchemical careers. They are a hodgepodge of over-elaboration and even deliberate obfuscation, such that the excuse for an experiment to fail is often already baked in.
Our home study packs are designed to cut away the frippery, to identify the nuggets of genuine knowledge, and to provide substances with guaranteed potency. You will find following our instructions cheaper and more efficacious than anything available elsewhere…
Liam Hogan is an award-winning short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction and in Best of British Fantasy (NewCon Press). He’s been published by Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and Flame Tree Press, among others. He helps host Liars’ League London, volunteers at the creative writing charity Ministry of Stories, and lives and avoids work in London. Follow him on Twitter (@LiamJHogan) and learn more about his work at: http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk
This story took 1st Place at The Jon Meyers Dark Humour Prize for Gothic Literature, which was hosted by TDS.
Of all the theatrical ghosts appearing that season in the seaside town of Trippingly-on-the-Tongue, most were in agreement that the spirit hovering about the wings of the Repertory Theatre was fast becoming the biggest nuisance.
It began by appearing very briefly, always shortly before the interval. The more observant theatre-goers took its hint to rise from their seats and get in early at the queue for ice-creams. At this point the ghost seemed harmless enough, even benign.
The proprietor of the Trippingly Rep did not mind the theatre ghost at first, convincing herself a momentary flicker at the end of the first act brought some character to the place. But very quickly this was exactly the problem.
‘Did you see it?’ she would hear the punters asking each other as they left of the theatre. ‘Best thing of the night, I’d say!’
Its appearances became sporadic, unpredictable: ‘It flashed across the stage exactly at the point the detective revealed the murderer! I almost missed who did it.’
Soon it was on stage for whole scenes at a time: ‘My aunt thought it was part of the plot, a character everyone was ignoring.’
And as the snow fell: ‘Was the back half of the horse more see-through than usual to you?’
This wouldn’t do. Mrs Pepper had successfully navigated the Trippingly Rep through many a disastrous season. There had been the year of the actors’ strike, when she had played many of the parts herself; there had been the heatwave summer, when nobody had wanted to sit in hot darkness and watch a play. (Discounted ices had come to the rescue there.) There had been box-office flops, last-minute replacements, emergency closures and deadly rivalries with other theatres. These Mrs Pepper was particularly proud of seeing off. She had even, with her vivid and varied programme of entertainment, overtaken the town’s most prestigious theatre, the Trippingly Grand in all its gilt-and-velvet splendour, in popularity. She was certainly not about to lose her Rep to so insubstantial a problem as a ghost.
She could not deny that audiences seemed more interested in the ghost than the plays themselves. To counter this, Mrs Pepper decided to put on a very famous play, a classic they would definitely want to pay attention to, and chose the great tragedy Tarquin of Rome. She spent a lengthy tea-time convincing a local legendary actor to leave retirement and play the main role. Rehearsals went well, the rest of the company honoured to be playing alongside such a celebrity and spurred on to do their best, and expectations were high — until opening night, when the ghost appeared during Act One Scene One, in the guise of the legendary actor’s younger self…
Rose Biggin is a writer and theatre artist based in London, UK. Her short fiction has been published in anthologies by Jurassic London, Abaddon Books, Mango, NewCon Press and Egaeus Press. She’s the author of Immersive Theatre & Audience Experience (Palgrave) and Shakespearean novel Wild Time (Surface Press). You can find Rose on Twitter (@RoseBiggin) and learn more about her work at https://www.rosebiggin.uk/
Characters are a pinnacle of storytelling. The way writers can bring them to life on a page is fascinating! They are also one of the hardest parts of storytelling to get right.
Characters are a deep subject that I could go on for multiple posts about, but for this purpose, I’m going to delve into Characters for shorter fiction. When you are writing a novel, you have much more space and time to break down different aspects of characterization to slowly breathe life into your characters. Shorter fiction does not have that luxury or the writer has risked dull characters and with that a dull story.
Our focus will be the protagonist (the main character) of your story. However, feel free to have your extra files with the backstories of your side characters fleshed out in more detail. The more you know your character, the better you can write them!
For teaching purposes, I’m going to be using this short story snippet to help illustrate ways to apply the six elements. Below is the original copy. We’ll take another look at the end to see how all of the changes look on the page.
Please note: There are plenty of other aspects of editing that could be adjusted, but I am only going to be looking at this snippet for elements of Character.
Original Version: First Draft
6 Elements of Character:
1) Goal
A character without a goal has nothing for the story to grab onto. They simply have no stakes in the story or a purpose if they do not have a want that means something to them. Some may even suggest that, without a goal, you simply have no story.
For self-editing, this comes into play when you look back through each scene.
Did your character have a goal?
If not, the scene may need to be revised or rewritten. All scenes should involve a character trying to achieve a goal on some level.
Does the goal come across strongly?
Short stories have ONE major goal, and the entire story is about reaching it. Every small scene level goal will be a step closer to the major one. If a scene or two seems out of place with the major goal, revise or cut it for a stronger manuscript.
Opening scenes may be an exception depending on the manuscript. Many characters start out with their ‘normal’ world for a reason, with the story catalyst not having happened yet that gives them the story goal.
To see this in action, we’ll take the original first draft at the top of the post and we’ll add notes to help make it stronger.
Below, you may notice the story snippet has gotten a bit longer. Adding in a motivation involved reworking the first chunk of the story to include the ‘why’ and gave the character a definable goal.
2) Strengths and Skills
A character should know how to do things and have a way of handling their environment. There are always exceptions to this, but more often than not, your character will have some type of strength or skill that helps define them. It could be the reason they work in a certain field, or why they are needed for the story.
Does your character have a strength?
Strength is internal. Example characteristics: confident, intelligent, determined or charming.
Did they use it?
They should always use their strength. It is integral to the way a character acts and reacts. A confident character will not approach a situation the same way as an intelligent one.
If your character has more than one strength, the key is in how you write them. A purely confident character may just trust themselves to barge into a situation. However, an intelligent and confident character could break down their adversaries before having a proper plan and then barge into the situation confident that they have the upper hand.
It helps to write out character strengths because it goes hand-in-hand with their flaw.
Does your character have a skill?
They could be good thieves, liars, mages. Or perhaps they have a degree in archeology or mortuary science.
Did they use it?
Sometimes a skill is just to get the character into a certain setting for tone/mood. Maybe you needed someone who could logically get trapped in a zoo at night, or perhaps you needed someone who could fight that monster plaguing the village on the other side of town.
When writing short stories, it’s important that skills apply to the story. We don’t need to know that the protagonist is good at baseball unless those particular skills are going to come into play in the story, or explain why they are in a particular setting.
If you notice you piled on strengths, or gave your character two-too-many talents, cut them down in revisions to only the necessary ones. Relevancy is key!
As you can see in my mark-up below, the character skills weren’t particularly strong, so I’ve made notes to add more in the skills category.
Below is the edited version with a punch given to the protagonist’s skills.
3) Flaws
If the goal is the starting issue with developing characters, I think flaws come in a close second. Most authors don’t have an issue at all with giving their character strengths and skills that can help them. Flaws, however, are more complex and are an important part of creating a relatable character. They are the key to not writing a Mary Sue/Gary Stu typology (aka: bland character).
Readers want to cheer for your characters, but when characters are too perfect (no flaws), there’s isn’t much to cheer about. The character will succeed, and readers won’t have the ‘but what if…’ feeling they get with a successful page turner. Therefore, it’s important to build in natural character flaws for the story.
Does your character have the right flaw?
Do not simply google flaws because you can’t think of where your character falls short and toss them into the story devil-may-care. Their flaw may also be the result of a wound-causing event that happened earlier in their life; though, the full exploration of that is normally found within longer fiction like novellas and novels. If you are writing a short story, it may not be imperative for the reader to know why the character has the flaw that they do, just that it exists.
A proper flaw will compliment your character’s strength. It is a mirror of their strength. Some examples of this tension and conflict in a character are:
Confident → Arrogant or Presumptuous
Intelligent → Lacking Empathy or Patience
Determined → Stubborn or Aggressive
Charming → Manipulative or Non-committal
When reading back over your manuscript, did you stay consistent with your character’s flaw? Humans on the whole have to be pushed to change, and even then, it does not come easy.
An introverted, low confident character does not have to become extroverted and filled with confidence. You can have confident introverts and low-confidence extroverts.
If your character’s flaw properly compliments their strength, that’s great! If not, reassess the strengths you’ve given to your character and find their flaw. Writing it down will help as you go through revisions to be sure you are sticking to your established characterization.
Let’s take another look at our developing snippet for character flaws:
As you can see in the mark up, the character actually had a conflict with her flaw description that needed to be addressed. Let’s see how that looks when her flaw is smoothed out:
4) Internal Conflict
Hand-in-hand with strengths and flaws, the internal conflict your character goes through is how they are going to handle their flaw — and their coming struggles. Character’s handle flaws through one of three ways: Positive, Negative, and Flat.
Positive Arc: The character will overcome their flaw within the story time-frame and become a better version of themselves.
Negative Arc: The character will not overcome their flaw within the story time-frame and will become a worse version of themselves.
Flat Arc: The character will not change within the story time-frame.
Does your character have internal conflict?
Did you capture their struggle on the page? Change is difficult. It requires a lot of self-realization. Sometimes people do not change for the better, and sometimes they don’t change at all. Characters are no different.
Consequences are key here. Your character should have to make hard choices. If a choice is too easy or too simple, you may be missing conflict, or have chosen the wrong one for the story. Therefore, choosing the right flaw that creates conflict is important. The character has to have something to rise against, or succumb to.
If you have written a flat character arc, the conflict will take place outside of the character, with them struggling to understanding their world.
Dig a little deeper into a character’s internal conflict by asking what the character is afraid of. A fear can help drive their internal conflict as much as a flaw can, particularly if they are in a position where they have to overcome it. The reader then gets to see the character fight through that fear on the page and not only will relate to them but will also continue to cheer for them.
Does your character have a fear?
Fears can be negative or positive in nature. For example: fear of the dark and death, or fear of success at work (because they don’t feel deserving of it).
Go back through your manuscript and make sure that you’ve given them chances to both show it overcome it.
Remember: Fears should not be sprinkled on like bad flaws (just for the sake of it). Fears in fiction should be relevant. If your character is afraid of spiders, readers will expect that that fear comes into play in the story; otherwise, there was no reason for it. Whether they are a child who has to pass through empty spider webs, or a burly man about to take on a kaiju-sized arachnid, the fear must be relevant to both the external conflict within the story.
In the example below, after reading through the snippet, there was a huge issue found with characterization. The internal conflict never made it onto the page!
Below you’ll notice that the word count went up again as the character was given some internal struggle to make their journey harder, and drive their character arc forward.
5) External Conflict:
Yes, external conflict is a part of your character and your story. The external conflict needs to challenge your character’s specific strengths and flaws. It needs to dig deep and make the inner conflict come to life.
Do you have external conflict in your manuscript?
Most writers can answer yes to this one. There is almost always something going on around the protagonist. An outside force that acts as a catalyst for change, or a challenge. This may be an event or character. Either way, it is the thing outside your character that they will overcome, or succumb to.
Tip: This may be an actual person, a tornado, or a monster.
Ideally, the external conflict wants the opposite goal of the character, or at least a darker path to achieve the same goal.
To the earlier tip: A tornado doesn’t exactly ‘want’ anything, but its path of destruction could still stand in the protagonist’s way.
Does the external conflict challenge your character’s internal conflict?
For the internal conflict to work, the external conflict needs to challenge and push the character to make hard decisions. Simple choices are just that, easy and lacking in tension.
Tension and conflict, like flaws, should not be randomly selected and sprinkled on. There should be a reason for each external conflict to exist because it’s going to push back against the character in a way that keeps the reader enraptured by the character and their story.
Technically, our snippet had external conflict set up from the start, but let’s look closer to see if there are ways to make that conflict stronger.
After reevaluating, a bird in a tree wasn’t a particularly strong connection to the outside conflict, nor did it set up what could or was going to happen next. Instead, we need to make things harder for the protagonist.
In the sample below, you can see how we knocked her out of the tree.
6) Chemistry
This joyous little factor is about as abstract as they come on the surface level. Chemistry is not just romance. Many times people see the word ‘chemistry’ and automatically think two people must be falling in love, but it’s not. It is the special ‘it’ factor that connects the reader to your characters and the main character to other characters, while also driving the reader to keep reading.
Chemistry is when you are excited for two characters to face off on the page because their interactions are so entertaining or downright horrifying. Maybe they are protagonists/villains, maybe they are best friends. They demand attention when they are in a scene.
It is relatability — not likability — that makes the reader come back to your character.
Special Tip: You can help amp up the chemistry between your character and the reader by not giving the reader a filter or veil they have to dig through to get to the raw emotion of your story. Your character is the catalyst to why the reader stays with them, so be sure you are following the adage of Showing vs Telling (when it applies).
At this point, I’ve already edited out most of the filter words and have the elements a bit stronger than they were at the beginning. Of course, those may change a bit more through the editing process. Editing is what gives you a ‘living’ draft, in that, anything is subject to change while you are bringing it closer to what you want it to be.
Let’s look at the original snippet one more time, just to refresh what we started with. This sample sits at 296 words.
By looking at Elements of character alone (not even addressing deep grammar and line editing) the newest draft of this scene sits at 717 words, and the characterization comes through more clearly than our original.
Character creation?
You’ll note above that I did not mention some elements of character creation, such as appearance or the debate over whether or not to answer questionnaires. If you are in the self-editing stage, creation would have been done already. So it’s not an appropriate editing step.
What’s next week’s topic?
Plot, and thus story, is extremely important to creating a page turner. Plot holes, then, are the ruin of an otherwise interesting story. So how do you find and edit out those sneaky plot holes and story inconsistencies? Find out next week when we dive into Plot. Don’t miss it!
Almost everyone has heard the term doppelgänger. It’s a German word that means double-walker or double-goer. Basically, a doppelgänger is someone who looks, acts, and sounds exactly like another person.
The following creepy tale isn’t fiction. It comes from a paranormal investigation I conducted at a home in Larchmont, New York. The family had a number of bizarre experiences after the father brought a haunted organ home, but Michael coming face-to-face with his doppelgänger-mother was by far the strangest:
Michael burst through the backdoor, snow swirling in after him. He slammed the door shut, threw his book bag on the mudroom floor and pried off his snow-caked sneakers, losing one soggy sock in the process. He pulled off the other drenched sock and threw both on top of his book bag, then threw his wet jacket on top of the pile.
Music was blasting in Michael’s headphones as he headed to the kitchen to grab a snack. School was let out early because of the snow, and with more than a foot predicted by morning, it looked like tomorrow would definitely be a snow day. He riffled through the junk food cabinet and settled on something he considered to be highly nutritious – Strawberry Pop-tarts.
He tore open the two-pack of Pop-Tarts, took a bite, headed out into the living room, making for the staircase. When he was half-way across the room he slowed, took another bite of his Pop-Tart, then stopped and looked at the crucifixes that hung on all four walls of the room. He couldn’t help but wonder what his dad got the family into.
Three months earlier, unexplainable things started happening around the house after the father bought an antique pump-organ he saw while doing a job at a house in Larchmont. The man was an electrician, and a musician on the side. So when he saw the organ, he bought it from the guy, even though it came with a warning. The guy told him that the organ was…
Michael shook the thought away and started walking to the staircase when he slowed and eyed the large wooden crucifix that hung above the front door. To the right of the door hung a string of rosary beads and on the door itself was a picture of Jesus, his eyes lifted to heaven. Michael shook his head and turned up the volume on his headphones. Haunted my ass, he thought as he turned the corner and headed upstairs.
Michael was on the third step when he looked up. He quickly pulled the headphones off of his ears and turned off the music. His mother was standing at the top of the stairs. She was looking down at him, and she didn’t seem very happy. Christ,what did I do wrong now?
“Hey mom! I didn’t know you were home. What’s up?” he asked, making his voice sound just a tad too cheerful. His mother just stood there looking at him. Michael smiled up at her and climbed a few more steps until he was just eight steps down from her.
“We got let out early because of the snow. Kelly should be home soon, too. They let the middle school out a half-hour after the high school. I bet we’ll be off tomorrow. We’re supposed to get a foot of snow!”
His mother only stared at him, nothing more.
“Mom? What’s up?” he said as she continued her accusatory glare. “Oh, sorry I didn’t clean my room this morning. I’ll do it now.” He started to climb the rest of the stairs, but she just stood there on the landing at the top of the stairs looking down at him as if she wanted to confront him about something.
She was holding a dish towel, so he guessed she had just come up from the kitchen for something. But what was her problem? She was literally blocking his way, but she wasn’t saying anything, just holding the towel in one hand, twisting it with the other, and staring at him.
Michael was genuinely getting concerned. Maybe his mom had had a stroke? As his concern grew, he continued to look up at his mother. The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, and she shifted the weight off of one foot and took a step back as if she was about to let him pass. But just as Michael started to climb the stairs again, she slowly took a step forward and twisted the towel tighter.
“Mom? What’s the matter? Did I do something wrong? Talk to me!” he yelled. Then, the corners of her mouth slowly turned upward into a big grin, like she had just been playing some kind of a joke on him. He sighed with relief and smiled back at her. He laughed, “Mom, you really had me fooled there for a minute.” From downstairs, he heard someone walk in from the kitchen and through the living room. “There’s Kelly now,” he said. “Her school bus must have just dropped her off.”
Suddenly, a voice called to him from the bottom of the stairs: “Michael, who are you talking to, Honey? I could hear your voice from all the way in the basement.”
Michael turned around quickly and stared down the stairs in total disbelief. The skin on his scalp crawled, and he began to shake. His mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs, smiling up at him as she held a roll of paper towels in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaner in the other. Michael’s head jerked back to the top of the stairs.
There was no one there, just a twisted dish towel laying limp on the top step.
Stories of doppelgängers have been around for literally thousands of years, and many theories surround these mysterious doubles.
One theory is that a doppelgänger is a duplicate version of ourselves from an alternate reality, or from another dimension. But in their reality, they are living an entirely different life than the one we live in this reality. When both realities line-up, one of us ‘bleeds over’ into the other’s world and we end up seeing each other. The sightings are usually brief, and the doppelgänger usually vanishes when spotted.
Another theory is that a doppelgänger is our exact double, a cell-for-cell duplicate living in the same reality. Some think that it’s impossible for two of the same person to live in the same reality, so when the two meet up, one of them must die.
Several famous people have reported seeing their doppelgängers, and many of them died soon after. Abraham Lincoln saw his double in a mirror. He said that the figure appeared to be around three shades paler than him, and that it hovered several inches above his real body. He saw this same figure once again, and a little over a year later, he was assassinated.
The English poet Percy Shelly saw his doppelgänger numerous times. Once, it even spoke to him. Percy’s friend saw the poet’s double walking on the terrace of his house when he wasn’t at home. Percy’s last sighting of his doppelgänger was when he saw it standing on a beach pointing out to sea. When he approached the figure, it vanished. A few weeks later, Percy Shelly died in a boating accident at sea at the age of twenty-nine.
Seeing a doppelgänger can be a terribly frightening experience. I was recently contacted by a woman named Melanie who was desperate for me to run a paranormal investigation at her house. She and her family had just moved in a month earlier, and she was hoping I would be able to get to the bottom of some mysterious happenings in the house, such as odd sounds in the middle of the night and a feeling of being watched. But those experiences paled in comparison to what she and her daughter witnessed.
One night, Melanie woke up a little after midnight for no particular reason. Looking out of her bedroom door, she could see the front foyer, and the staircase that led to the second floor. Coming down the stairs was her 12-year-old daughter, Sarah.
“Sarah, is everything OK?” Melanie called out to the girl, but she didn’t respond. She just kept walking down the stairs. When Sarah was almost to the bottom step, Melanie quickly got out of bed and walked across the room toward the doorway.
Just as she was about to walk into the foyer, she watched in horror as Sarah turned into a silvery mist. The shimmering fog rose up to the ceiling, then vanished.
Melanie was terrified. She raced upstairs to check on the girl, only to find her fast asleep in her bed. She ran downstairs and woke her husband to tell him what had just happened, but he just wrote it off as a bad dream.
Melanie knew that it was no dream, but she didn’t want to frighten the kids, so she didn’t tell them about it.
Three days later, Sarah woke up at around 2 AM after hearing a sound. The hall light was always left on, so her room was well lit, and as she looked around the room, she saw her father standing about eight feet away from her bed. His back was to her, but she knew it was him because he was wearing a t-shirt that he frequently wore, and that she often poked fun of. It was red with a big picture of a race car on the back.
Sarah watched her father, totally puzzled by what he was doing. He was looking at the framed photos of various family members that hung on her wall. As he looked at each one, he leaned in as if to get a better look, then ran his hand over its surface. Then he moved on to the next photo and did the same thing.
After watching him doing this for a few minutes, Sarah said out loud, “Dad, what are you doing? It’s two in the morning?”
As soon as she said this, her father half turned his face toward her, then turned and bolted out of the room. Sarah was frightened and confused. Why would her father be in her room in the middle of the night? Why was he acting this way, and why did he just run away? She bolted downstairs to her parents’ room, but when she got there she found both of them asleep. Her father wasn’t wearing the shirt she had just seen him in.
Sarah was totally unaware that her mother had seen her doppelgänger walking down the stairs three nights earlier, and yet she too saw a phantom double in the house. How could this be? If the house was haunted, why did the ghost look like family members?
I have a theory about doppelgängers, specifically the type that show up in haunted houses. Spirits need energy to manifest, and they often get it from the living. This is why people often report feeling physically drained after seeing a ghost.
I believe that the doppelgänger Melanie saw used her energy to manifest, and in the process, it unintentionally ‘borrowed’ her memories. This was why it appeared as the image of her daughter. It could have resembled anyone that Melanie knew, but Sarah’s image was probably the strongest in her mind when it pilfered her energy. Likewise, Sarah saw her father because the spirit inadvertently absorbed her memories. When it used her energy to manifest, it took on the appearance of her father.
There are more and more reports of doppelgänger sightings these days. I wonder why. Perhaps the veil between realities is becoming thinner. Or maybe an army of doubles is fleeing their dimension because of some cataclysm that made their world uninhabitable, and now they’re jumping over into ours and replacing us. All I know is that the thought of doppelgängers gives a whole new meaning to the phrase: You look exactly like someone I know! Maybe the person doesn’t really look “exactly” like you or maybe, just maybe, they are “an exact copy” of you, after all. No matter, if anyone asks to introduce you to your look-alike, run – don’t walk! Because if the theories are true and your doppelgänger catches you, you might just disappear into oblivion.
UPDATE: Due to lack of reader interest, this is the final Reality Meets Fiction story by Barry Pirro. Thank you so much for reading!
“Reality Meets Fiction” is a series on non-fiction, real-life stories as experienced through personal accounts and investigations conducted by Barry Pirro, a paranormal investigator known as the Connecticut Ghost Hunter. Barry has over a decade of paranormal investigation experience and shared his stories every 4th Friday of the month from June 2021 to November 2021. To learn more about the Ghost Hunter, visit http://www.connecticutghosthunter.com/.
READERS: Have you ever seen a doppelgänger? If so, tell us about it in the comments. Better yet, write your non-fiction story and send it to us: darksiremag@gmail.com (subject: Doppelgängers). Your story may be picked to appear on our blog as a follow up to Barry’s.
WRITERS: Use Barry’s real-life story to inspire your creativity! Write a story using doppelgängers and then submit it to us for publication consideration at: https://www.darksiremag.com/submissions.html.
As always, thanks for supporting THE DARK SIRE! If you’re not following us, please do. We are on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram under @DarkSireMag. And, of course, you can pick up a digital copy of our issues on the TDS website or paperback copies through Amazon, The Bibliophile Bookstore (Dover, Ohio), and now Poe’s New & Used Bookstore (New Berlin, Pennsylvania).
What is the first thing you need to do once you finish your manuscript? Hint: The answer is not to submit it to all the agents and publishers. Yet.
First, congratulate yourself for reaching “The End.” You should always take the time to celebrate that you accomplished something amazing.
Second, take some time away from your manuscript. You’ve probably worked for weeks or months or even years to finish your work of art. So, it’s time to take a breather. Leave the manuscript untouched for at least a week, maybe even a month.
Once you have distanced yourself from your story, it’s now time to… EDIT. That’s right! Editing is a very important part of the writing process. In fact, a manuscript – though it can be rejected due to subject matter or market value – will be rejected solely due to lack of editing. While writing will never be perfect, it’s important that your craft be presented as best as possible to stand out in the crowd. That’s because authors have a level of professionalism to uphold. This standard is what differentiates an unpublished writer from a published writer.
In today’s publishing market, then, it is more important than ever to send in a polished manuscript. The stronger the manuscript is before it gets to an editor, the better your chances of success.
Types of editing
Editing comes in three forms: developmental, line, and copy editing.
All manuscripts, no matter the length, need all three types of editing throughout the editing process. Even those manuscripts that have been beta read, critiqued, and reviewed multiple times (over and over again!) will still need touch-ups. And it is in your best interest to catch them now – before the publisher sees them.
Let’s break the three types of editing down.
Developmental Editing The overall editing of the manuscript that examines story, plot, and other story-related elements, such as world building, characterization, and even dialogue.
Developmental edits make sure that your story not only has good pacing, but strong plot, purposeful scenes, relatable characters with powerful arcs, consistent world-building, and so on. If you have beautiful, flowery prose, or strong, succinct lines, that’s wonderful, but if the story itself doesn’t flow, has plot holes, or is a structural nightmare, readers will quickly lose interest in reading and then… will put down the story for another one. Developmental Editing, then, is necessary to make sure that your story is functioning and the powerful pillars of storytelling are in place.
Line Editing The sentence-level form of editing that examines word choice and sentence structure.
Line edits strives for clarity, so that readers not only understand the author’s intention and character’s emotions but also the story’s tone and mood. Do the sentences make sense to a reader? Did you use the right word for that scene’s mood, or does a different one carry better impact? Or, do you need to make sure that you didn’t use overly long sentences in your fast-paced fight scene? Line Editing is where you can really manipulate the sentence to work hard for the mood, feel, tone, and impact of your manuscript. It’s what makes readers feel the story.
Copy Editing The nitty-gritty of mechanics that examines grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
This is probably what most people think of when they hear the term “editing.” Copy editing is about checking your story for grammar, spelling, and mechanics (punctuation) issues. For example, you’d check to see if you split an infinitive, used the correct dash (or should it be a hyphen?), and spelled words correctly (color versus colour) according to the English system (American, British, Australian) you chose. Copy Editing, then, is the last phase of editing that fixes the grammar-level issues, spelling errors, and punctuation of your manuscript.
So how do I self-edit my manuscript?
Self-editing takes time and practice because you need to learn how to read your manuscript from a new perspective. When you self-edit, you don’t just read the story from an author’s point-of-view, but, rather, a reader’s point-of-view. Which means: You read it as someone who doesn’t know anything about the story, the world, or the characters. As if you are experiencing it for the first time. And that last sentiment is what makes self-editing difficult – but it can be done!
A few tips:
Distance yourself from the manuscript. Give yourself 7-30 days away from the script so you can look at it with fresh eyes and a new perspective.
Critique chapter by chapter as if reading for another writer. Forget that this is your work and be as honest as you would be with another writer’s work.
Ask questions of the author. Yes, you wrote the story but have a conversation with the author nonetheless. Ask them questions about where the story is going, what isn’t explained yet and why, and what may be hard to understand without background information.
Examine word choice. Did you use very, as in very tired? That choice could be stronger, so you’d want to consider exhausted. Look at word choice to select the most impactful words for the mood you’re trying to create.
Challenge your sentence structure. Is the sentence you’re reading structured the best way? Is it grammatical, spelled correctly, using correct mechanics? If you need to, study punctuation so you can use it more affectively.
If you are preparing your manuscript for publication, you want to catch as many standout errors as you can. The manuscript doesn’t have to be “perfect,” but it does have to flow easily when read – and make sense with no gaps or holes that confuse the reader. So let’s start learning more about self-editing!
Get ready for our new editing series, where we’ll go deep into self-editing tips and tricks over the next several weeks. Headed by our own editor, Courtney Kelly, the series will walk you through all three levels of editing, complete with examples, explanations, and more. By the end, you’ll have all the skills you need to revise your story into a polished manuscript.
What’s next week’s topic?
Next week we’ll start breaking down some elements of Developmental Editing, starting with the pinnacle of storytelling: Characters! If you have any specific questions about characterization, please let us know in the comments so we can cover it in next week’s post.
Get your manuscript ready! Editing begins next week.
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