Author: sdgibson

“What She Asks of Me”

I’m proud to have my story “What She Asks of Me” included in Tumbled Tales, an anthology just published by Wandering Wave Press. It includes so much excellent genre-blurring fiction: “Said the Moonlit Moth to the Horse Half-Dead,” “The Walrus Whistles at Midnight,” “Just Right,” all the other stories. Fascinating prose. I learned something from each story in the collection.

The politics of world-building

You can use world-building to distract yourself during a never-ending catastrophe. But that same process can also help you (and others) imagine a path to liberation.

The best world-building contains the seeds of change, and allows us to see how things could be different. And conversely, a lot of mediocre world building contains the unspoken message that “This is the way things are, just because. And there’s no point in questioning any of it.” How things work is often not as interesting as how they don’t work. And the ways that they should work, if things were better. And the way things used to work, until something went wrong (or right).

Charlie Jane Anders in Never Say You Can’t Survive

Intentionality

My best stories are usually the ones where I had a clear idea in my head of what I was exploring. Those are the stories where the plot and the story, and the concerns of the characters, are tightly bound up with the narrative’s thematic concerns. Likewise, as a reader, I get more wrapped up in a story that seems to have something specific on its mind.

Conversely, stories that I can tell were written without much introspection on the part of the author often feel mechanistic to me – things happen because they happen. The characters go through the motions, but none of it has much weight beyond the stakes of the plot.

Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can’t Survive

Learning from Jackson and Bradbury

First sentences receive lots of attention when reading like a writer. They should.

Endings are harder to study because they are more dependent on the rest of the story. (One way to address this is to read much shorter stories and while that can have its own complications, I like it.)

Consider the ending of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” (Spoilers ahead.)

The children had stones already, and someone gave Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed and they they were upon her.

The first two paragraphs of the story give this ending its power because they present an mundane town gathering with two slightly odd, but not too troubling exceptions: a lottery is being held and stones are being gathered. Readers discover the connection between the stones and the lottery as the story ends. So, one strategy for an effective ending is a return to earlier elements that shows a connection readers might not expect.

Ray Bradbury’s “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” does something similar. It starts with a house making an announcement to occupants who are no longer there. The story follows the house through the process of its day and through a fire that destroys it. Here is the ending:

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is . . .”

This last sentence also returns to earlier story elements. It shows that a process begun in the first paragraph continues but under changed/broken conditions, rather than showing a connection as Jackson’s ending did.

If you are worried about writing an ending, consider drafting a return to something earlier, but with a difference. The difference might show a change like Bradbury’s or a connection like Jackson’s.

What beauty does

[B]eauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In “The Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

David Brooks

CHILDREN OF THE WITCH in a paragraph

Children of the Witch is a 71,000-word fantasy that imagines an American West where misfits and marshals in an arms race with Rasputin seek to weaponize demons. Peter Slips Noose just wants to escape his brother and the blimp-borne pirate crew of The New Delight, reconcile with his grandmother, and have some good friends. Instead, after a visit to the gallows, he finds the Three Sisters and their many, many husbands, Henry Johnson and his hammer, and pentagram wearing United Americas’ marshals. And the demons they are summoning. So many demons. To finally find a family, he must pick between his estranged grandmother and his hostile brother, each trying to exploit the conjuring.

FRIENDS OF THE CLAM in a paragraph

FRIENDS OF THE CLAM is a 71,000-word literary novel. Neurodivergent and obsessive, mid-twenty-year-old Curtis Love has a tricky life. A perfect honeymoon leads to a less than perfect marriage, a demanding boss, and a mysterious job. And now, his marriage is over. Determined to change himself and find an ideal social life somewhere between loneliness and social anxiety, he faces an employer who will only meet in video games, drunk runners, and angry churchgoers. Curtis sees his chance to balance between too many friends and too few evaporate. Then he meets June and Donnabella. Changing himself becomes his only option as he tries to find and fit into a family. 

Twelve Reasons You Should Keep Writing

by Sarah Ruhl and from the Jan/Feb 2023 Poets & Writers.

Sometime I forget why I should keep writing. I hope you make a list of your own. Here is mine.

Write for God. The cave. The envelope.

Write for your mother. Your father. Your friend who is sick.

Write for the future. Write for the past. Write for the present, but sideways.

Write for the child who saw cruelty, and for those dispossessed of language.

Write for your daughter. Write for your son. If they don’t exist, write for the dream of them.

Write for your uncle to weep, for your aunt to laugh. For your babysitter to cover her face with recognition.

Write for the church you walked past with a sign that read: THEATER AT SACRAMENT. And you misread it as: THEATER AS SACRAMENT.

Write for the accountants whose eyes are too tired at night for numbers. For the farmers who grow your corn.

Write for your teachers. Write for every single hour they left off writing their own sentences so that they could read yours.

Write to thank the books you love.

Write for yourself.

Write for God. The cave. And the envelope.