Save the Cat

Big Summer Storm or Creative Inspiration?

About Creative Writing
The more I write, the more I’ve come to believe that many of the things they taught us in high school and college, except for the whole “earth is round” thing, was nonsense. Particularly everything they had to say about creative writing.

My home office is full of books on writing from that time (and quite a few from now) and those books are literally full of useless garbage about either (a) dangling participles, (b) misplaced modifiers, (c) the correct placement of semi-colons, or (d) finding a happy place in which to write.

Stephen King was much closer to the truth of creative writing in his excellent book ON WRITING. It is, by far, the best book I’ve ever read on the writing process. I’ve already gone through it, cover to cover, at least four times … and I will read it again.

Whatever you may think of the subject matter of his books, King hasn’t written nearly 50 novels, all of them best-sellers, by being the only guy in town to write horror stories or fantasy. He didn’t do it by strict adherence to Strunk & White’s ELEMENTS OF STYLE or the AP HANDBOOK, either.

He did it by being one hell of a good storyteller.

King could set a story in a sleepy town in Maine, put the guts of that same story into an enchanted car, write about an obsessive book reader rescuing her favorite author, tell it all in a story about a rabid dog, or set it around a struggling writer and his family in a nearly deserted snowed-in summer resort.

For that matter, so can you.

Because any way you look at it, it’s the same story. You can even add elves and dragons and trolls, or talking animals in the world just beyond the closet. It’s still the same story. And, surprise, surprise, it’s all about the story.

Be a Good Storyteller
I had the pleasant surprise the other day of discovering Guy Bergstrom and his fantastically witty blog about writing: THE RED PEN OF DOOM. I’m going to have to write and thank him … and I definitely think he’s a blogger to follow. In one of his many posts I was introduced to the late Blake Snyder. Blake was another one who took time to cut through all the classroom-taught traditions and nonsense.

In his SAVE THE CAT book Blake pointed out that it’s patently stupid to call FATAL ATTRACTION a domestic drama and ALIEN a sci-fi movie and JAWS a horror flick, because they are all the same basic, primal story: there’s a monster in the house.

I bought Blake’s book, but I won’t summarize it here and give away all its secrets. Even though it’s ostensibly about screenwriting, if you’re a fiction writer of any kind I would suggest you get the book and read it. It’s that good.

The First Three Hundred Words

Dawn on the River

On my last post I spoke about the need to get back to my writing, and for the past 18 days I’ve been true to my plans. I’ve completed six chapters of my Reichold Street sequel, and even got started on another story. It’s been a productive time.

I’m pretty comfortable with where the sequel is going, but the other one … the new one … has me in a quandary. I originally wanted to write a suspense story, a la Dean Koontz or Stephen King but, like most of my stories, it seems to have a mind of its own.

Conventional wisdom say you have to hook your reader within the first three hundred words, or you’ll never get them to turn the page, yet alone finish reading. Part of me believes that to be true … not because “conventional wisdom” says so, but because I often decide on a book purchase myself after scanning the first couple of pages.

I’ve actually got several thousand words down already, but none of them seem quite right as the start of the story. So, it’s the second story I need some feedback about, and I decided to put the (current) beginning of it here:

————
Untitled

The sky was somewhere between indigo and black when the motley family crew we had assembled set out for the lake. Uncle Luther always insisted on an early start. As he rousted me out of my comfortable dreams with a chuckle and a resounding thwack on the soles of my bare feet, he had conveniently beaten the sunrise by a good hour, as if that was the way such days were always supposed to begin.

“Get your city-boy ass outta bed, Roy, or all the fish gonna be napping under the brush line by the time we get to the water.” Luther was smiling as he clumped around the bedroom in his thick work boots gathering up the clothes I had strewn over the bedpost the night before.

“Here’s your duds,” he laughed, “Bacon and eggs will be ready in five.” He tossed my loafers at me with a look of distaste. “These the best shoes you brought?”

“They’re the only ones I brought,” I said, as I wiped the sleep out of the corners of my eyes.

“Gonna need new ones to go home in then,” he snickered. “They’s gonna be soaked and coated in shit before we get the boat launched. So’s your feet.” He lifted his leg to show me his mud covered Timberlands, laced halfway to his knee.

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

Luther smiled and winked as he went back out the door. “I already got the gear in the truck,” he said. “All you gotta do is dress and eat. Piss if you want to.”

“Lovely.”

“Don’t take too long city-boy or I’ll eat your breakfast, too,” he shouted down the hall. “It’s a mighty long time to lunch. You get hungry you might have to munch on the bait.”

The birds hadn’t yet begun to sing their herald to the returning morning, but as I dressed the air was already hot with the promise of a sticky, damp kind of day. A day with the air so miserably thick it seemed to suck all the ambition out of a man just to inhale.

© Ron Herron

————

What Do You Think?
Is this something likely to grab your interest and make you want to know what happens next? Leave a comment.

Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I once sold encyclopedias door-to-door. What can you possibly say to me I haven’t already heard?