dannedmind

BEHIND THE SCENES: SPIDERFACE (Short Story)

If you’re a parent, you know sometimes your kids can make you mad.

Thus, SPIDERFACE was born!

I forget the actual circumstances, so let’s assume my youngest was refusing bed or not letting me go to bed after story time. But it was presented for the exact intention to gross out and deliver a moral message.

Or maybe she just wanted me to kill a spider–something I am against.

I don’t like killing spiders. Even if they are in my home. Maybe especially if they are in my home. Spiders serve a nice function, gobbling up the ‘bad’ bugs. Sure, I dislike hiking into a web in the middle of the woods on a hot summer day. I hate finding cobwebs in the corners of ceilings. I’ve even been bitten by a spider (on several occasions) while I slept. So long as it is not a venomous spider, I’m fine with it.

The story was off the cuff. But I enjoyed it, and the reaction so much, that a week or so later, I made sure to retell it. I might’ve even told it a third time at bed time.

But I was never happy with the written story. It’s not the same without the performance: the facial expression and gestures–and of course the listener’s reaction.

So, if you don’t quite ‘feel’ the story, try to tell it to someone else. Try shocking them with it as you walk the line of whimsy and horror.

WRITING TIPS: EDIT A FRIEND’S STORY

Just like the title says . . . One of the best ways to learn is to see other people’s mistakes–and successes.

Although, most of the time, most of us are going to be mostly critical of our own work, but sometimes, more often than not–we actually have BLINDERS on and so, we don’t notice what’s wrong with what we wrote because we clearly wrote it specifically like that for a very important reason and our choice in punctuation or lack thereof can be defended . . . until we see it elsewhere.

I often realize my own bad habits when reading another friend’s story.

There is a difference to being the author reading your own story vs. being the reader expected to be critical of another’s work. By keeping a metaphorical mirror nearby, you can see where your friend’s mistakes are yours as well.

WRITING TIPS: REVISIT

Here’s a tip for when you just can’t get your head in the game. You’ve tried all the tricks that worked for you in the past and you’re just not where you want to be in order to write.

Revisit the rules, tips, tricks that inspired you in the first place. Go back and remember what you might’ve forgotten.

Here’s a link to all the past WRITING TIPS.

FREE STORY: POINT THE FINGER

Dear Potential Reader,

As a parent, we all want our kids to be safe, but things happen. The following story is such a thing that a parent would call unthinkable. And while I’m not all for ‘trigger warnings’ I will preface this by saying POINT THE FINGER is not suitable for all readers . . .

CLICK HERE TO READ

With horror, sometimes subtle is too little, but graphic can be too much. While I am often enamored with subtle horror, creeping up on me, I don’t mind a good splatter fest. At the end of the day, as a writer, I’m not sure I can claim full responsibility when subtleness works or graphic horror lands. The reader has to participate. And sometimes expecting one and receiving the other can lead to disappointment. So I will say this about POINT THE FINGER, it certainly gets graphic.

Hope you Enjoy.

All the best,

DAN JIRE

WRITING TIPS: CONVERSE WITH YOUR STORIES

One of the things I’ve found myself doing lately (mainly because I struggle to write sequels–but that’s another post) is that I’ll write a story and then come back and write the story that happened before it (decades, centuries prior!).

I might even just focus on a small detail like the broken-down truck in a driveway. How did it get to that state?

What this allows me to do is similar to having an ending to my story before I start, in that I know what will happen. But it’s different in that it is a different story–likely even a different tone or genre.

And this informs that story that I already wrote, so that when I go back to edit the first story, I have new details, new threads to weave into the existing story. It becomes a conversation between the two tales that allows the change for additional depth I likely had not considered when I wrote the first story.

Even if one of the stories ends up not being up to par, you’ve accomplished a different way of improving the other story by having the knowledge of one of those stories to help flesh out the other.