Post #140 October 1 2018

“Water Clans of Seome: Writing about Alien Cultures”

One of the greatest challenges as a writer of science fiction, and at the same time, one of the joys, is writing about alien cultures.  In my own recent series of sf novels The Farpool Stories, I describe a marine civilization of intelligent, sentient creatures who have created an entire civilization below the waves of the ocean planet Seome.  The series involves stories of how the Seomish people interact with each other and with humans.

Every sf writer approaches worldbuilding a slightly different way.    In my case, I wrote a novel called The Shores of Seome many years ago (which mutated into The Farpool) and in the process created a lot of background for this world and its inhabitants.  In fact, I created an Appendix containing much of this material and stuck it at the end of The Farpool.

Writing a story about aliens and setting it on an alien world is a real juggling act.  You want to convey a true sense of alienness without turning off the reader.  You don’t want to write an encyclopedia or something like National Geographic.  You still have to have a compelling story and somehow work in enough alien details to transport the reader to this other world and its people and bring them to life for the reader.

In my case, I created background encompassing the following areas and then wrote extensive notes to give my background some depth.  When and where I could, I worked this background bit by bit into the story.  I even hit on the plot device of having a sort of universal translator called an echopod, which had some encyclopedia functions.  When the human characters needed to know something and an info dump was unavoidable, I had the aliens tell them to trigger the echopod and it would spit out material from my background.  As long as I didn’t overdo this, it seemed to work pretty well.  I tried to keep these passages to less than half a page.

Here are the categories I tried to develop pretty extensive background for:

1. The language with key words and concepts and a few notes about grammar
2. Maps (entire globe and by quadrant)
3. Description of the world itself as a planet
4. The major cities and settlements and their key features
5. The physiology of the Seomish (remember, these are talking fish)
6.  The biology of Seome (other plants and animals)
7. Theology and First Things of the Seomish people
8. The Hierarchies: Government, Politics and Organizations
9. Commerce, Industry, Crafts, Trades, Science and Technology
10. Communications and formal relations between the Kels (tribes or clans)
11. Education and training
12. Entertainment and recreation, diversions and amusements
13. Home life and intra-kel relations
14. The Kels (tribes or water clans): their history, key details, etc
15. More detailed description of one kel including cuisine, history, architecture
16. A brief chronology of Seomish civilization
17. An historical timeline and key events, notes on timekeeping
18. Seomish rituals and customs
     
    Was this a lot of work?  It was and most of it was done 40 years ago.  I never tried, in writing the actual stories, to get all of this into the story.  But by having it as background, the detail dictates some aspects of the story, such as how events might unfold one way versus another way, always in keeping with the background.  This kind of detail is like a crutch in that I can always look up how one of my characters might do something and I can be consistent across a number of stories in how I describe things.  An echopod in The Farpool works the same as an echopod in The Farpool: Convergence.  And sometimes having this level of background will suggest obvious plot developments and natural conflicts that can be used.
     
    One of the greatest mistakes as an author is to try to get all of your background into the story, at the expense of the story. Story comes before everything else.  I have found that a little background goes a long way.  If you do your job right as a storyteller, you’ll find the reader more than willing to help out by filling in some details with their own imaginations, even if you didn’t supply the details.  In fact, many readers prefer that since it engages their faculties even more…adding to their enjoyment of the story. 
     
    Give your readers enough detail, well described, believable and internally consistent, to transport them to your alien world and then let the natural conflicts and the characters carry the story.  You’ll even find that once in a while, something will crop up in the story that you never expected, something lurking just below the surface of your feverish brain, that is triggered by a background detail you worked out months before.  At that point, you say wow! And then put it in and pat yourself on the back for having thought that up.
     
    It was all because you were steeped in the alien culture from the beginning.  Maybe it is like working for National Geographic. 
     
    The Word Shed will take a one-week hiatus so I can attend a writers’ conference. The next post to The Word Shed will come on October 15, 2018.
     
    See you then.
     
    Phil B.

 

Post #139  September 24, 2018

“He Said What?  Effective Dialogue for a Good Story”

 

Every writer of fiction, every story-teller, must deal with fictional dialogue.  Writing dialogue is a true art.  That’s because dialogue has to serve many masters in any story.

Here’s snatch of dialogue that opens my sf novel The Farpool, from the very first page…

 

Angie Gilliam squirmed a bit more but it was no use.  Something sharp was pinching her butt.  The weight of Chase Meyer on top of her made it hurt like crazy. 

“Ouch…that hurts like hell…what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry…just trying to…it’s the Cove.  Water’s choppy today—“

Angie twisted and contorted herself to ease the pressure.  That was better.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, huh?”

They had packed a meal and grabbed a boat from Turtle Key Surf and Board—that was Mack Meyer’s shop, Chase’s Dad.  They had puttered along the coast off Shelley Beach until they came to Half Moon Cove—they always did it in Half Moon Cove—and found a secluded spot a few dozen meters off shore…right under some cypress trees.  Always smelled great there.

Then Chase and Angie wolfed down their sandwiches, dialed up the right music on Chase’s wristpad so they could slam some jam properly and settled down to business.

That’s when the wind fetched up and the Cove got way choppier than it usually did.  Most of the time, you could lay a place setting on top of the water and have dinner like home, it was so placid.  But not today.

“Ouch…look…let’s give it a rest, okay…something’s not quite right…”

Chase groaned and pulled out of her, cinching up his shorts as he did so.  He lay back against the side of the boat, and turned the volume down on his pad…whoever it was screeching on that go-tone needed a few more lessons.  He checked the growing waves beyond the Cove and that’s when he spied the waterspout.

“Jeez…look at that!” 

Angie pulled up her own shorts, ran fingers through her dark brown page-boy hair and sucked in a breath.

“Wow---that’s so wicked--“

There was a strange, wave-like agitation on the horizon just beyond the Cove, maybe a few kilometers out to sea, past Shell Key, easily.  For a few moments, a slender multi-hued waterspout danced just above the waves, like a gray-green rope writhing and hissing on the horizon.  It only lasted a few moments, then it collapsed.  There was a calm period, then the ocean began seething again and became more agitated than before.  Waves piled into the Cove, nearly upending the little boat.  Before long, another spout had formed, all in an odd sort of rhythm. 

 

In the dialogue above, notice that I’ve thrown in some colloquial sounding words, some slang, chopped it up a bit, yet you can tell what’s going on and how the characters feel about what’s going on.

Okay, so what’s going on here?  Dialogue serves many purposes…

1. Dialogue has to sound real, without being real.

Think about the speech you hear around you all the time.  It’s filled with ums, uhs, fits and starts and circuitous, poorly constructed, often grammatically incorrect sentences.  That’s the way real people talk…in any language.  Dialogue has to sound like that, without actually being like that.  That’s why it’s an art.  A few selected ums and ahs goes a long way in fictional dialogue.  It leads the reader’s inner ear to hear something that sounds real but it also performs other fictional duties as well.

1. Dialogue has to advance the story.

Look again at the passage above.  What do you know about the story: two lovers are getting it on in a canoe in some kind of cove.  Their little tryst isn’t turning out so well, so they stop.  They see a water spout.  The ocean starts heaving.  Strange things are happening.  All this on one page.  All dialogue has to do something to move the story along and it has to do this through the words of the characters.  They see and experience things.  They report and comment on what they see or hear or experience.  They respond verbally to what’s happening: “…ouch, that hurts, stop doing that….”  The reader lives vicariously through the characters so dialogue is really important….it has to sound real.  You want the reader to empathize with your characters.  Dialogue helps make the connection.

1. Dialogue has to reveal character and convey feelings and emotions.

There are ways other than dialogue to do this, narrative ways.  The writer could just say: “Jane felt sad and wished the pain would stop.”  But in general, it’s always better to show rather than tell.  Show Jane reacting in a way that conveys sadness.  “Tears flowed down Jane’s cheeks and she sighed, ‘I wish I was dead…I can’t take this anymore.’”  This reads a lot more powerfully and dramatic.  The dialogue, when done well, puts the reader in the character’s shoes and practically compels sympathy, empathy, all those things a writer or story-teller wants.  Now we want to know more about why Jane wishes she were dead, what’s driven her to this point.  Hopefully, the writer and the story will reveal that.  Done well, dialogue can really establish a strong emotional bond between fictional characters and the reader.

Fictional dialogue carries a lot of weight.  It’s not easy to do well.  You don’t normally talk in stilted, formal phrases (unless the story requires it) so your characters shouldn’t either.  Write dialogue like you talk and like you hear other people talking.  Then clean it up a little and bend it to the story’s needs.  As for me, whenever I hear a particularly colorful word or phrase, I write it down.  Usually it’ll turn up somewhere later in a story.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on October 1.  In this post, we’ll look at a few tips and do’s and don’ts about describing and writing about alien cultures.

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #138 September 17 2018

“Audiobooks and the Oral Traditions of Storytelling”

Before there was writing, there were stories.  Storytelling began with an oral tradition thousands of years ago, even before the written word.  Wikipedia says this about the beginnings of storytelling:

“Early storytelling probably originated in simple chants. People sang chants as they worked at grinding corn or sharpening tools. Our early ancestors created myths to explain natural occurrences. They assigned superhuman qualities to ordinary people, thus originating the hero tale.

“Early storytelling combined stories, poetry, music, and dance. Those who excelled at storytelling became entertainers, educators, cultural advisors, and historians for the community. Through storytellers, the history of a culture was handed down from generation to generation.

“The importance of stories and storytellers throughout human history can be seen in the respect afforded to professional storytellers.

“The 9th century fictional storyteller Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights, who saves herself from execution by telling tales, is one example illustrating the value placed on storytelling in days of old. Centuries before Scheherazade, the power of storytelling is reflected by Vyasa at the beginning of the Indian epic Mahabharata. Vyasa says, "If you listen carefully, at the end you'll be someone else."

In recent months, my online publisher Smashwords has begun to offer authors a new feature, the chance to upload audio files toward creating a new market for their works as audiobooks.  This has intrigued me enough to look back into the oral beginnings of storytelling for insights.  In fact, the rapid growth of audiobooks has rekindled my interest in old-time radio, including such favorites as the 70s’ CBS Radio Mystery Theater…a kind of theater of the mind.

It seems like the human voice is perfect for telling stories, something that writers of the printed word seem to have forgotten.

What can we learn about storytelling from the oral traditions of our ancestors?

1. The human voice can have a strong impact on a story.  As writers of the printed word, we don’t (or didn’t before audiobooks) have this medium available to us.  But there is such a thing as narrative voice.  Whether your story is told with the immediacy of 1^st person (offering a single individual’s perspective…the narrator) or from 3^rd person, which provides a broader omniscient perspective, narrative voice defines how the story is told and received by the audience.  Your choice as a writer depends on what kind of story you have.  In my novel Final Victory, I used the old technique of a story within a story.  The narrator tells the story in first person, within a greater frame of 3^rd person.  The inside story is also 3^rd person, but we know as readers that it’s really being told by a narrator.
2. Choose words with emotional power.  Recall that storytelling probably began as chants or even songs while people worked in the fields.  The words chanted or sung would be selected to resonate with the audience, and be easy to remember, perhaps even rhyming.  Originally storytelling was a communal experience, emphasizing words and techniques that psychically bonded the tribe, clan or community.  Writers of the written word should make the same choices.  Now with audiobooks, we can go back to the simple power of the spoken word, providing writers and authors with new possibilities. 
3. Rhythm, meter, cadence and pacing are important.  You can see this clearly in songs and chants today.  It’s likely that songs were our first stories.  Words were chosen for their ability to aid in memorizing and recall.  Sometimes, audiences even responded in refrains, like the responsive reading we see in many churches today.  While audiobook authors don’t really have this option (since listening to audiobooks isn’t necessarily a communal experience), the same word and pacing choices can be applied, now that audio gives us back the power of the spoken word.
4. Early stories were stripped down to their essentials.  This was necessary to keep everybody focused on the storyline and to aid the storyteller in recalling and repeating the story.  Certain narrative plots have endured for thousands of years: a hero is involved in a chase, a hero must slay a monster, or save a damsel in distress.  Complications build to some kind of climax.  The hero’s plight looks grim but he triumphs in the end, through cunning, guile, strength, etc. and is changed or grows or learns something about himself in the process.

 

Some things never change.  Now audiobooks give writers a vehicle to go back to some of the earliest traditions and practices of storytelling and recapture the power that captivated so many of our ancestors.

I’m planning on giving it a try and converting some of my own works to audio as soon as I can get the equipment together.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on September 24, 2018

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

Post #137 September 10 2018

“Start Your Story With a Bang!”

Every story needs to start quickly, ideally with a bang.  This is especially true for short stories, where every word counts.  Why should stories start quickly?  Here are 3 reasons I can think of:

1. Hook the reader.  Intrigue, mystery, a sense of foreboding and a notion that bad things are about to happen…these are all ways to hook a reader right into the story and keep him there.  Before investing the time it takes to read a story, the reader wants to know its worth his time.  We all lead busy lives.  If I’m going to take time off from my busy schedule and read a story, I want a sense that I’ll at least be entertained, learn something I didn’t know, be transported to a far away place or maybe encounter strange and menacing people and live vicariously through them without bleeding or dying.
2. Set the pace.  For better or worse, the start of your story, like any good race, sets the tone and pace of the tale.  It could be fast.  It could be slow.  It could be bang-bang.  This is critical in short stories.  If I start reading your story, I want to know in the first few paragraphs what I’m getting myself into.  Am I in the future?  Am I in danger?  Am I being stalked?  Should I be looking over my shoulder?   What’s going to happen next?  The start of the story sets the pace and provides the reader with some kind of guidance about what to expect next.
3. Make ‘em care.  The start of your story introduces at least one or more characters.  You want your reader to care about the characters, to imagine being in their shoes, to live vicariously through them.  I want my readers to care what happens to these people.  How do I do that?  In a short story, by giving my characters a life, a history and a personality.  Plus I need to do this with just a few well-chosen words.  Even in short fiction, it pays to develop at least a brief bio about your main characters. Making the reader care about your people is easier when the reader can see himself in your fictional people; “Yeah, I’ve done that too.  I’ve gone through that.  Hmmm….”
    
   Below is an excerpt from a recent science fiction story of mine called ‘Cloudchasers.’  I wrote this story earlier in the summer and it’s being shopped around the sf magazine world right now.  See if I’ve followed my own advice in this excerpt….
    

 Cloudchasers

“A delusion is something that people believe in, despite a total lack of evidence.”  Richard Dawkins

 

Aboard FCS Geronimo

High Altitude Venus Operational Cruise

Fifty-two kilometers above the surface of Venus

August 15, 2186 (EUT)

0400 hours (local)

 

On Venus, there are only clouds…to the naked eye.  Cloud cliffs and cloud valleys.  Cloud ravines and cloud canyons.  Cloud bergs, buttes, badlands.  Cloud continents.  Above the clouds is the vacuum of space.  Below the clouds is Hell itself, an inferno of heat and sulfuric acid rain.  And don’t forget the occasional storm.

In the late summer of 2186, as people on Earth reckon time, Geronimo had been on auto-cruise for several days when Doug Fremont and Win Blakely were both startled out of their sleepy daze by the insistent beeping of the wind shear alarm. 

“Emily named this one Estelle,” Blakely noted from his anemometer display.  “Sisters are like that.  Properly known as VS-8…looks like this one’s going to be a doozy.”

“Hey, your sister lives for these clouds…what an imagination.  Unicorns and castles everywhere. Any chance we can steer clear?’ Fremont proposed.  “The last one turned my insides into scrambled eggs.”

“Checking Doppler now…”  Blakely scanned his instruments.  “Jeez, this is one big sucker…covers almost all of Theia and Rhea Mons.  I’ll try to steer around it.”

Blakely grasped the joystick and swiveled Geronimo’s props to starboard.  The huge airship responded sluggishly, buffeted and shuddering from stiff cross-winds.  “It’s like driving into a hurricane.”

Fremont nodded grimly.  Outside, sulfuric yellow clouds were thick and impenetrable. “It’s worse than that…anemometer shows wind speed nearly a hundred meters per second.  I can feel the cross winds.”

A bright flash lit up the tiny cabin, followed by a crescendo of roaring, rolling thunder.  Veins of lightning arced across clefts and gaps in the clouds dead ahead. 

“Are we turning?” Fremont asked.  “I don’t feel anything.  I don’t like the looks of that cloud bank up ahead.”

“Not enough to make a difference.  Estelle’s a monster, and she’s sucking us right in…I’ve got no yaw and not much pitch either.  We’re caught in her outer bands…but I think we can ride her out.  We did it before.”

“Yeah but not with lightning like this.  Every time we pass over Theia Mons, those volcanoes light up the clouds like a Christmas tree.”

“Hang on…I’m going to try to—”

But Blakely’s words were interrupted by a terrific flash, bright enough to blind both crewmen.  The thunder came an instant later, followed by the smell of rotten eggs…sulfur…and the cabin was quickly thick with smoke and electrical arcs and discharges.  The shock wave knocked Fremont and Blakely out for a few seconds.

It was Fremont who came to first.  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, thankful for the seat harness that had kept him upright, then his blood ran cold. 

It was clear, viscerally as well as by instrument, that Geronimo was in trouble.  The whole cabin was canted down, at the wrong angle.  Displays flashed nonsense and garbage right in front of his eyes.  He sat up abruptly, ascertained the panel was safe to touch and shook his commander roughly.

“Win…Win, wake up!”

Blakely sniffed groggily.  “What…what happened?”

“We got struck…lightning.  Direct hit.  Look—” He pointed to the panel.  “Main bus A and B undervolt.  Caution and warnings all over the place.  Master alarm going off.  It was a direct hit, Win.”

Blakely was mission commander for HAVOC 1 but he felt like someone had just slammed the side of his head with a sledgehammer.  “What’s with our attitude…we got no instruments.  Everything dropped out at once?”

“Most of the instruments are fried.  Why are we in downpitch like this?”

Blakely released his harness and pressed his nose against the forward porthole.  Outside, he didn’t have to watch for long to notice the outer fabric skin of the balloon envelope flapping like mad, torn, shredded like so much confetti, shedding swatches of Teflon and polypropylene and blackened gear off into the wind. 

“Here’s your answer.”  He indicated the massive and expanding tear.  “Looks like starboard cells A and B, maybe C.  We’re holed.  Lightning ripped a big gash.  Can you check helium pressure?”

“I got nothing on the panel, Win,” Fremont complained.

Blakely sat back in his seat.  “We’re going down.  Can’t you feel it?  I don’t need instruments to feel it.  Butt logic tells me we’re in a descent…and it’s picking up.  We can’t go below forty kilometers.  She won’t hold up.”

Fremont and Blakely stared at each other for a long moment.  Fremont reached for the comm button first, praying that it hadn’t been fried.  He selected High-Band A and keyed the mike on his helmet.

“Fort Bliss, Geronimo…do you copy?  Fort Bliss, Geronimo, do you copy.  We’ve got a major emergency here…Emily, Alicia, come back!”

There was a staticky crackle, followed by chirps and whistles—“whistler waves,” mouthed Blakely.  A clear indicator of lightning in the area.  More gusty crackles, then a faint, scratchy voice came through.  It was Emily Blakely, station crewperson aboard Fort Bliss, several hundred kilometers above them in orbit.

“Copy, Geronimo…say status again.  I couldn’t…copy …last trans—”

Fremont explained, carefully, word for word, what had happened.  “We’re hit by lightning…holed bad.  Maybe more than once.  Everything’s toast down here.  And the envelope’s leaking…big tear starboard side forward.  I can see the shredded fabric.”

Now Win Blakely got on the comm.  “Em, we’re going down.  I’m pulling the plug…we’ll have to powerup Pinocchio and abandon ship.  Fast.  We’ve got no instruments but my sense tells me we’re headed down in a hurry.”

Emily Blakely, safely ensconced in her couch aboard Fort Bliss swallowed hard.  “Copy that.  Win, get out of there.  Light off Pinocchio and get the hell away now.  Don’t waste any more time.  Grab what you can, squirt the rest up to me and get your thick skull out of there.”

“Already underway,” Win came back.  “We’ll re-contact when we’re away on ascent.”

“Copy that.”

Blakely motioned for Fremont to grab whatever data he could, tapes, drives, disks, Geronimo was packed with instruments for research: spectrometers, nephelometers, radiometers, thermocouples galore.

“Here,” he pushed Fremont aside, as the Mission Pilot fumbled with some gear.  “I’ll do it.  Get your butt into Pinocchio and start powering up.  I don’t know what our altitude is but it feels like we’re dropping fast.  Crush depth may not be too far off.”

Fremont acknowledged and squeezed past the Mission Commander, then into the narrow access tunnel leading aft to the ascent vehicle, nicknamed Pinocchio.  Once powered up and checked out, she would detach from the gondola and drop away, then her LOX/RP-1 rocket engine would fire and the ship would arc upward out of the deep troposphere and into a low-altitude orbit around the planet.  A few hours’ maneuvering would put the small ship into position to dock with Fort Bliss.

Fremont was deep into his switch settings and system startups when more lightning flashed outside. 

“Wow,” he muttered.  “That was close.”  He called up to the habitat.  “Win, better get buttoned up quick.  That lightning’s getting worse.”

A voice came back through the short tunnel.  “Almost done here.  Just a few—”

The flash was blindingly bright and it seemed to last for an eternity.  Fremont felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up.  Pinocchio’s cabin glowed an unearthly spectral blue-white for a split second, then the shock wave hit, battering the entire airship like a rogue ocean wave.

That’s when Fremont heard something he hoped he would never hear.

It was a sound of tortured metal, a screeching, groaning, wrenching, scraping sound of metal being rent and torn.  Pinocchio shimmied and shook like a wet dog.  Then Fremont’s blood ran cold.  He stared at the smoking rim of the access tunnel, seeing the first puffs of yellow sulfuric acid fog seeping into the cabin.  He craned forward to inspect the adapter and held his breath, sucking his teeth.

The inside of the transfer tunnel was a smoldering pile of wreckage.  Completely blocked from Geronimo.  Worse, the outer skin of the tunnel was ripped open butterfly style in multiple places, still smoking and the air of Venus’ deadly atmosphere was already filling in…a deadly toxic mist of sulfuric acid and hydrogen chloride.

Instinctively and by training, Fremont slammed the hatch shut and fired the latches.  Then he got on comms back to Blakely.

“Win…listen.  That last bolt…it was bad.  The transfer tunnel was hit.  I just checked inside…it’s wrecked.  Impassable.  Worse, it’s tearing away from Geronimo.  The atmosphere’s leaking in at a high rate.”

For a few moments, Blakely said nothing.  Fremont’s heart skipped a few beats. 

“Win…Commander Blakely--?”

“I heard, I heard.  Okay, Doug…listen up carefully.  We drilled on this.  We trained for this.  Make sure the hatch is secure.  Once you’re sure, separate Pinocchio.  Do you understand me?  Press the SEP button, light off the rocket and get out of here.”

“What?  Are you nuts?  I’m not leaving you up there!”

“Doug, don’t argue—” He stopped when a fierce wind gust yawed them roughly to one side, then whipped the ship hard to the opposite side.  More groaning metal.  More screeching in the tunnel between them.  “Doug, we can’t have this argument.  You know what Mission Rules say.  If one crewman can’t make into the ascent vehicle—”

“I don’t care!  I’m not leaving you behind?”

“Hey, I can ride this out.  I’ve still got some lift to maneuver with.” 

“Bullshit!”

After a few agonizing moments, with lightning and storm conditions getting steadily worse, Blakely practically yelled into his mike. “Doug, we can’t lose both of us.  You’ve got the data with you.  Now GO! Leave!  Get away!  At least one of us has to survive.  Launch now…that’s an order!”

Fremont planned to argue more…we can make this work, I can clear the wreckage away, I think there’s enough room…but a click on his comm made up his mind for him.  Blakely had cut off comms. 

“Bastard!” he muttered.  He dove into the last of his checklist, ripping through the startup sequence, flipping switches and stabbing buttons angrily.  “Always got to be a hero!”  Just for good measure, he opened his own mike again, not knowing if Blakely was still on line and yelled. “I’m not giving up, you know!  I’m coming back…one way or another, I’m coming back and rescuing your sorry heroic ass in spite of you.”

Then, when the whole panel in front of him was green and there were no more caution and warning flags, he blinked and shrank back from another flash of lightning, waited for the shock waves to dampen out, sank back in his seat, eyeing the fierce swirling gusts of yellow and orange outside, and reached out for the SEP button.

His stomach lurched up into his throat when Pinocchio dropped.  Automatically, after two seconds, the rocket lit off.  Doug Fremont was slammed back into his seat by the five-g acceleration and closed his eyes.

In his mind, while all around Pinocchio, the massive cyclone churned and heaved and the rocket bore him upward toward the relative safety of space, he could still see Win Blakely’s grizzled face, full of week-old stubble, his big dog ears sticking out like airplane flaps, grabbing data tapes and disks left and right, eyes blazing with determination as Geronimo’s porthole glass cracked and burst inward in a shower of splinters and shards.

He was never sure if that had really happened or if he had just imagined it.

 

So how did I do, according to my own list of key points in starting a story fast?  Give me a grade.  And remember, the start of your story—literally the first page of your story—is your best (maybe only) chance to grab a reader and pull them into your imaginary world.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on September 17.  In this post, we'll look at audiobooks and the oral traditions of storytelling.

See you then.

Phil B.