Category Archives: Stories

Election Stories

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By “election stories,” I do not mean tales of all the adventures we’ve had on the way to the polls, fighting off pirates and dragons and the like.  Nor do I mean telling young people how good they have it: “When I was your age I had to walk six miles barefoot through snow to vote.” I do not even mean the attack add that shows a local congressional incumbent with a tan and claims he took junkets to Hawaii.  I mean the kind of ideas and national legends or mythologies that can energize large numbers of people for good or ill.

Take “The Domino Theory,” which led a generation of apparently well meaning leaders to conclude that if the communists were not stopped in Viet Nam, they would be knocking on our doors before long.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory

A different story from the same time – that the United States could and should put a man on the moon – led not too indirectly to the technological revolution that has allowed me to earn a living for a quarter of a century and built the remarkable laptop computer I’m typing on now (Intel was founded in 1968, a year before the moon landing).

Strangely enough, it was an interview with a Tea Party spokesman that got me thinking about political stories in the air this election season.  His story was very simple “It’s about fiscal responsibility.  In my household, if debt outgrows income, bankruptcy is sure to follow.  Is it any different for the government?”

I heard Ben Bernanke argue the same week that, yes, the deficits will cause problems eventually if not addressed, but it is too early in the recovery to cut off government spending.  To me, that sounds like a true economic fact, but it doesn’t have the force, the power, the mojo, of a story.  It’s not the kind of thing that is going to hook my imagination the way the effort to balance the family books can do.  It certainly isn’t starting any grassroots movements.

Supposedly, both mainstream political parties are uncomfortable with the Tea Party.  Do mainstream Republicans or Democrats have any coherent stories this election season?  Beyond, “It’s their fault,” I mean.

I honestly cannot think of any at the moment.

Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards

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Here is a Popular Fiction competition from Writer’s Digest for stories of 4000 words or less in the categories of:

  • Romance
  • Mystery/Crime
  • Science Fiction/Fantasy
  • Thriller/Suspense
  • Horror

Entries are due November 1 with a $20 fee.  Multiple entries are allowed, online or by snail mail.  Prizes are:

Grand Prize: a trip to the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City, $2,500 cash, $100 worth of Writer’s Digest Books and the 2011 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market.

First Prize: The First Place-Winner in each of the five categories receives $500 cash, $100 worth of Writer’s Digest Books and the 2011 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market.

Honorable Mention: Honorable Mentions will receive promotion in Writer’s Digest and the 2011 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market.

Full details are available here: http://www.writersdigest.com/popularfictionawards

The Peddler of Swaffham

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A comment here on a post about ghost stories put me in mind of certain tales that everyone has seen or heard in one variation or another.  Show of hands – how many heard “The Hook Man,” around the time they started to date?  How many variations of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” have been made into TV movies or episodes of The Twilight Zone?

A much older tale that is widely distributed tells of a poor man who becomes rich by paying attention to a dream.

I first heard “The Peddler of Swaffham” told by Robert Bela Wilhelm, who, with his wife Kelly, has devoted his life to inspiring people to tell stories and explore the spirituality of stories.  Be sure to check out some of the riches on the Wilhelm’s website: http://www.storyfest.com.

Carving of the Peddler in a Swaffham church

Bob told “The Peddler of Swaffham” on one of his “Storyfest Journeys.”  More about the journeys soon when I dig out some of the pictures.

The gist of the story is, a peddler from a village in Norfolk dreams that he will find gold if he travels to London bridge.  He makes the journey with his dog, spends three days and nights on the street waiting, and is wondering what went wrong when a merchant asks what he is about.  The peddler says he dreamed of the riches he would discover at London Bridge.  The merchant laughs and says dreams are just foolishness:  “Why just last night I dreamed of a bag of gold under the peddlar’s oak in the village of Swaffham, wherever that is, but you don’t see me running all over the countryside, do you?”

According to Wikepedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedlar_of_Swaffham) the first version of this story was a poem by Rumi, In Cairo Dreaming of Baghdad; In Baghdad Dreaming of Cairo, that later became a story in The Arabian Nights. I know I have seen a Jewish version of the story where the city is jerusalem. The story more recently was incorporated into the plot of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

Monument to the Peddler in Swaffham

What the Peddler of Swaffham or Cairo or Jerusalem has in common with countless folktales all over the world is it’s lesson that it is voice of the small, the despised, the overlooked, the ignored – the dream, the third son, the dwarf, the old woman, the child, the animal beside the road, that points the way toward the riches of a more awakened existence.

I once heard a psychology professor say that the way to get moving again if we are stuck in our lives is to listen for the small hunch, the little impulse, the passing thought that, “Oh, this might me interesting to try.”

The same teacher, on another occasion said that in his study of folklore, the greatest predictor of success, bar none, was the hero or heroine winning the help of a talking animal – but that is a story for another occasion.

Genre Soup

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Genre bending and blending has gone mainstream. (Vampire-romance-coming of age tales anyone?).  It’s really not anything new (Think of The Odyssey:  paranormal-action adventure-romance), but lately it it seems to be the golden road to standing apart from the crowd, and to blockbuster sales, action figures, and movie deals – except when it doesn’t work.

I once heard a literary agent explain that one reason the first Harry Potter book was rejected 23 times was because J.K. Rowling mixed the conventions of middle-grade and young adult fiction, which was a no-no at the time.

So if you feel the urge to cross the boundaries, whaddya do?

First, realize you are in good company.  In his introduction to Stories, Neil Gaiman says: I realized that I was not alone in finding myself increasingly frustrated with the boundaries of genre:  the idea that categories which existed only go guide people around bookshops now seemed to be dictating the kind of stories that were being written.

Literary agent, Joanna Stampfel-Volpe discusses the question with advice and cooking metaphors: http://www.writersdigest.com/article/dos-and-donts-of-combining-genres.  She boils it down to some common sense guidelines.

1) Write the stories you’re dying to tell.
2) Don’t try to please everyone.
3) Know your story and intended audience well enough to identify your “base genre.”

I’d add one more, based on something I saw the first time I told a story from a stage. Almost twenty years ago, our local storytelling guild was preparing a show for “Tellabration,” a day in November set aside by storytellers around the world to bring this most ancient art form to as many people as possible. http://www.tellabration.org/

It was the first Tellabration for a young woman and me. The old timers had coached us thoroughly. My inner-ham emerged and mine went pretty well. Then it was my fellow newbie’s turn. She was telling a spooky Eskimo story called, “The Skeleton Woman,” but when she got to the first chilling moment, everyone started to laugh! The hero of the tale, a young fisherman, was out in his kayak and managed to hook a skeleton which rose to the surface and pursued him as he paddled like hell, and that image struck the audience as funny.

With no indication of how nervous she was (she’d confided to the group before we started), the woman turned on a dime, and played the story for laughs, making it up as she went along. She finished with a well-deserved round of thunderous applause.

Horror and comedy genres are not “natural” companions but ever since I saw that switch,  my fourth rule for genre – and maybe my first rule for everything else would have to be:

4) Flexibility and a sense of humor are highly recommended!

A Twenty-Five Word Short Story Contest

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How about a contest that is free to enter and offers prizes for your cleverest twenty-five words?  I received this announcement recently for the Gotham Writer’s Workshop, “Hint Fiction Writing Contest.”

http://www.writingclasses.com/ContestPages/hintfiction.php?utm_content=12455257?utm_campaign=Early%20Enrollment%20Offer%20-%20Save%20$30?utm_source=streamsend?utm_medium=email

As they define it, “hint fiction” is a complete story of no more than twenty-five words that hints “at a larger chain of events.” The word limit does not include the title. Here is an example given in the announcement:

Corrections & Clarifications

It was Fredrick Miller, not his murdered son Matthew, who was executed Monday night at Henshaw Prison.

The deadline for entries is October 11, one entry per person. It’s anything but easy, of course, but the interesting thing is, one can begin with almost any image or phrase that comes to mind, and create something complete from it in one sitting – who knows, perhaps the seed of something larger. After reading the announcement, the phrase, “ends of the earth” popped to mind and I sat down with a cup of coffee and a pencil and came up with a credible first draft. Beats crosswords any day IMO.

One caution: last fall I entered a “first hundred and fifty word” contest from these folks (you would already know if I’d won) and I continue to get periodic announcements from them. I’m sure there is a way to opt out, but I haven’t looked for it, since additional interesting tidbits like this come along, and there is a delete key for the rest.

LATE BREAKING NEWS:

While we’re at it, this arrived in my inbox this morning, an announcement for a more traditional (5000 word) short story contest from Writer’s Digest:

http://www.writersdigest.com/popularfictionawards

For those who delight in short fiction, why not?

Inception

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Is all that we see and all that we seem but a dream within a dream?
– Edgar Allen Poe

Romantic poets, surrealists, Freudians, Jungians, mystics of all stripes, and popular culture at least from the time of “Twilight Zone,” have questioned the solidity of the world of consensus reality, and in some cases, asserted the primacy of the dream.  Twenty-six hundred years ago, in the Lankavatara Sutra, the Buddha said:

All things, external and internal,
are imputed by the mind,
Apart from the mind nothing else exists.

Now Inception bursts on the scene with a multi, multi, multi layered texture that makes The Matrix look like linear storytelling.

Once I heard author John Barth read his story, “The Menelaid,” a frame tale with characters from The Odyssey ,  that was eight – as in “”””””””eight”””””””” layers deep.  It was something of an academic exercise but the key image that sticks was the main character meeting Proteus, the shape-changer, and afterwards, never being quite sure of the “reality” of his experience again.

Imagine that kind of concept playing through a two and a half hour action adventure epic that is five layers deep (is that right – the plane, the van, the hotel, the fortress, limbo – yep) with thrills and chills, surround sound, and computer generated stuff flying at you…whew.

There is absolutely no way I can say much about the content of the film itself after just one viewing – I’m still in the – “Oh wow, man,” phase, but one among many things that really interest me is the sophistication of current movie going audiences.  We have come to accept, ponder, and even revel in multi-dimensional ambiguity that wasn’t part of movie going when I was young.  Along with the recent success of a similar fractured reality novel The Time Traveler’s Wife (I’m not sure if the movie did as well), it’s clear that the age-old tradition of of linear storytelling, much as I love it, is only one of several options these days.

A Family Ghost Story

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I heard this from the time I was very little, a story told by my great-grandmother, Hannah Outwater, ne Shook. I was twelve when she died at the age of 88. Her gift of an animal hand puppet for my third Christmas was a huge catalyst in sparking my lifelong love of making and telling stories, but that is a tale for another time.

Hannah Outwater in her 20’s

When she was seven, Hannah, the seventh of eight children, rode with her family in a covered wagon from Ohio to Michigan. Her younger brother, Freddy, age two, didn’t survive the trip. They say he was flat on his back in the wagon with fever, but the evening he died, he sat up with a beatific smile and reached out his arm to angels no one else could see.  At least that’s the family legend, but it is a story for another time.

When they reached Kalamazoo, Hannah’s father, Isiah, rented a farm, and that is when the strange incidents began. Hannah’s older sister was of the age to go courting. The family would hear the wagon drive up bringing her home, open the door and find no one there. Sometimes during the night there was such a commotion in the barn it sounded like the horses were going to kick down their stalls, but when they went out to investigate, the family found the animals asleep.  And a reddish stain on a guest room floor could not be cleaned with any amount of elbow grease.

You have to imagine my great grandmother pausing to look around the room.  She knew how to build suspense.  It might be halloween – it was certainly winter, with the lights turned low.  Those were the days before the SciFi channel and Freddy Kreuger.  Before CSI and the horrendous headlines that have become all to common.

The old lady would lean forward and speak in a low voice so we would have to lean in too.  “Once we needed to move a big old chest in the cellar.  That’s when we found it.  Mind you, those were the days of dirt cellars, but in the far corner was a single patch of cement about six feet long.”

She would let that sink in, and then say, “We had been there about six months when my father heard the story.  The neighbors said a wealthy horse dealer came through town and spent the night with the people who lived there before you.  No one ever saw him again.  The couple who lived there said he left before dawn.  Funny that they moved away two months later.  We never understood where they got the money to up and go so suddenly.”

AFTERWARD

My sister and I and our friends grew up with that story, and after Hannah was gone, my mother told it.  Some ten years ago, however, while spending the night in a vacation cabin, I found a stack of American Heritage magazines, and one of them had an article on legends common in rural America a century ago – and there was the family ghost story!   Or so I think, because I didn’t have the sense to write down the magazine date, and later attempts to find it again in libraries or used bookstores never panned out.

Was it pure legend?  Was it born of a scandalous crime that was the talk of the midwest in the era before TV and tabloids?  Was it like certain crimes that became the stuff of ballads that are still sung hundreds of years later?

When I first found that copy of American Heritage, I thought it was very important to find out what kind of story it really was – exactly how true.  Now I don’t think it matters very much at all.  For me the story will always be true, whether it happened or not.

Our Heroes Have No Shame

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For some time I’ve been mulling over the qualities that make fictional characters unforgettable.  Among other things, they seem to like themselves and champion themselves unconditionally.  They are comfortable in their own skins.   Even when they mess up badly, they are in their own corner.  We want to be like them, be our own best friends.

Something else came to mind recently in a writing critique group, when a member’s character felt “a sense of shame.”  The phrase did not ring true.  The characters we love  do not experience shame. That goes along with being their own best friends.

The most common definition of “guilt” I have heard is remorse for something I’ve done, while “shame” is remorse for what I am.  If I feel guilty about a particular act, I can make amends, vow to change, and eventually move on.  Not so when the voices of shame tell me that is how I am.  No one growing up in our shame based culture can escape it altogether (at least not without a lot of inner work), but our heroes do.

When Frodo Baggins says, “I will take the ring, but I do not know the way,” he does not then tell himself, “I should know the way.  Why don’t I know the way?  These people do.  What is the matter with me?”

Police detective, Alex Cross,  in James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider, is supposed to exchange a ten million dollar ransom for a kidnapped girl.  He’s been set up in a complex double-cross and loses both the money and the girl.  The national media trumpet his failure.  Reporters hound him.  His superiors pull him from the case, but he maintains his internal compass:

If I had screwed up the ransom exchange in anyay, I would have taken the criticism.  I can take heat okay.  But I hadn’t screwed up.  I’d put my life on the line in Florida.

Cross, whose character is so well portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the movie, battles politics, FBI secrecy, beaurocratic red tape, and betrayal by the woman he loves to stay on the case for two years to rescue the girl after everyone else has given up.  What keeps him going?  What allows him to believe in himself in the face of repeated missteps and the worst knd of notoriety?  Whatever it is we, the readers, want some!!

One thing our special characters all seem to have is someone who believes in them unconditionally. Frodo has Sam.  Alex has his partner, Sampson, and his grandmother, Nana Mama, who lets him know when she thinks he is wrong, but is always his supporter.

Kellen, the heroine of Sharon Shinn’s young adult masterpiece, The Dream-Maker’s Magic was raised by a mother who is convinced that she is truly a boy who was somehow bewitched into the shape of a girl:

…my mother watched me with a famished attention, greedy for clues.  I had changed once; might I change again?  Into what else might I transform, what other character might I assume…She never did learn to trust me…or accept me for who I was.  It was my first lesson in failure, and it stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Even through her painful fumbling for who and what she really is, Kellen somehow keeps her balance, learns to trust her own council, and on the way, finds her ally in Gryffin, a crippled boy:

…he always greeted me with a smile and my name.  I did not bewilder or surprise him.  He did not think I as trying to be something I was not, as my mother did; he did not think I was trying to break a chrysalis and become something I was meant to be, as Betsy and Sara surely believed.  He just thought I was Kellen.
I found this the most comforting thing that had ever happened to me. At times, when I lay awake at night, confused myself about what role I should take and what direction I should try to follow, all that kept me from slipping into tears was knowing that I was not completely lost if Gryffin knew how to find me.

Something in us longs to be brave, longs to be heroic.  We want to be true to ourselves, right wrongs, bring down the forces of evil, or simply learn how to live a happy life.

As the Buddha lay dying, his disciple, Ananda, asked who would be the teacher when he was gone.  Buddha replied:

…be a lamp unto yourself, be a refuge to yourself.  Take yourself to no external refuge. Hold fast to the Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the Truth as a refuge.

Whatever our philosopy, this is the way I think we want to live.  The charaters in the stories we love give us hope that it is possible.