For this activity, you need a group (a group of 6 works pretty well). Each person has about a minute to write the beginning to a story. Then, the stories get passed around from one person to the next after a set limit of time (that gradually increases so as to allow people to read what has already been written). Finally, the original story starter gets their paper back and they get to finish the story.

See the story, after the break.

So, here it is, in all its amazing glory (I’ve used colors to indicate the different authors):

Fluffy (titled afterward)

The old man stood up shakily, slowly, at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing seemed to be broken. He smiled at his good fortune. Really, he felt better after the fall than before.

Then he looked down.

He said a very bad word.

The Nothing had come. In front of him was a void of infinite emptiness. And of course, back at the top of the flight of stairs waited Auntie Marge. It was a tough decision as to which was worse.

“I think there’s room for Fluffy down here,” he offered. Fluffy snarled from behind Marge. The beast’s claws were at least as big as the old man’s fingers. He wasn’t sure what Fluffy even was.

“I can’t see much. You sure? He doesn’t like to be confined.”

The void was perfect. “Send him down.”

The sound of large claws could be heard on the stairs as Fluffy made his way down. His wings beat against the sides of the stairwell, feathers against ancient wood. He was a terrifying, albeit handsome, creature, and the old man couldn’t wait for him to die.

But when Fluffy saw the void, he stopped short. “C’mon, boy,” the old man said. Or was it a girl? “C’mon, Fluffy,” he tried.

Responding to his sympathetic tone, Fluffy nipped at his hand, almost taking off a finger. “Go in,” he gestured toward the void. “It won’t hurt, I promise.” Go and die, he thought.

Fluffy stared blankly at him.

The old man walked over closer to the void and snapped his fingers to get Fluffy’s attention.

Fluffy slowly padded over closer and came up beside the old man. He meowed once and then pushed the old man into the void.

As he looked back from the suffocating, squeezing darkness, he saw Fluffy bouncing up the stairs.

“Good girl,” said Auntie Marge.

In any case, I started by rereading the beginning, and editing as I went. I tightened up the prose by making it more immediate and action-y. I also decided to just do it from one point of view. I think two POVs is a bit of a stretch for this story. I liked the idea at the time, but the only reason was so I could get the reader in the head of the love interest so they’d fall in love with him too. I can do this by showing it from Liza’s (the protagonist) POV, just as well. The other reason I had done it is because I believe that you should tell the scene from the POV of the person in the most pain (or happiest, depending on mood being set) at that point. But, I think this works better for novels.

I didn’t have to throw away much, though, because it was easy to switch his POV over to Liza’s. Which is also how I really figured out that it would be OK.

It’s going to get a bit dicey towards the end of the story, but I’ll just have to have him tell her what happened.

I just got back from teaching my Writing for Digital Media class, and I went through Orson Scott Card’s 1001 ideas in an hour with them. It worked out really well. I’m not nearly as good as OSC at pulling more and more ideas out, but we came up with some doozies. Very cool ideas.

The main one was about an alien coming to earth to desroy it since she is the last surviving member of her species and world. But she falls in love with the president of the world, who is 96, but she gives him a treatment that makes him look 30. Then, they must contend with the destroyer alien coming to finish the job he started with her planet.

Yeah, they were in a weird mood today. But, it was fun, and we got out some good ideas as we learned about brainstorming and loglines.

I am really enjoying learning all this new lingo and style in the digital media world.

It went very well, especially in the early morning class (they are just better, more engaged students overall).

We did it because we were talking about informative writing, speciifically instructions. It seemed like an easy way to bring the idea home to them that it is harder than you think and you really have to know who your audience is.

The fun part is when they switch papers with someone and then have to actually literally follow the instructions and make a sandwich for real (I went through a couple loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter and a jar of grape jelly).

Most people were really nice about interpreting the instructions, but I had a few who kept it real and did follow the instructions exactly, ending up with one slice of bread with jelly on top and then another slice of bread and then peanut butter on top of that, and such.

I’ll definitely use it again in future classes. But, what struck me was how important it is to define audience from the very beginning. I knew this, intellectually, from my study of rhetoric, but it never really hit home for me before.

As a writer of technical documents or of stories or novels, my very first step should be to define who I am writing for so I meet their needs. I think that is why poor writing like in Eragon, Eclipse, and Harry Potter have succeeded so well as books - because they are meeting a need with a specific audience (OK, so maybe not with Eragon, it’s just his publisher parents).

Codex Writer’s Workshop.

I anticipated this event for a long time.

The first few days were for critiques of novels and short stories, as well as some class sessions on writing and being a writer. We had the famous Ellen Datlow critique our short stories. She was very insightful and gave lots of comments to everyone. We also had David Coe come for dinner one night; after which we picked his brain with questions.

The last week or so was just a retreat time where we could relax and write and explore Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I’ll post more later about what happened and what I learned.

But first, I think you need a little background on how I wrote it in the first place.

I wrote the story as part of Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp. This means that I had to come up with an idea, stew on it a bit, and write the story all pretty much within one day.

For ideas, Card had us go to a bookstore and look for something we would never write about and then get an idea, interview a person, and watch people doing something.

I got the idea for this story by watching some kids play on a fake tree-thing where they would crawl through from one side to the other. And, ZING, I thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could use trees to teleport from one location to the next?

Then, we had to figure out a beginning and ending for the story using Card’s MICE quotient (milieu, idea, character, event - read Characters and Viewpoint for more information). I decided this was more of an Event story, with some Character stuff as well. Therefore, that meant that I had to start the story where something was wrong and then end it where it got fixed (or accepted). I did just that, but then I thought I needed to add a bunch of stuff in about the guy’s relationship with his wife, and it got really weird (I had been reading Heinlein, that is my excuse).

Then, I spent most of the day I had goofing around, thinking about what I wanted to have happen in the story. I also spent way too much time creating a map with a cool Mapping program (AutoRealm) that I had recently installed. I guess that was my way of doing a bit of background research. When I actually got down to writing, I wrote the entire 38 pages (double-spaced) in about 4 hours.

Then, we workshopped the stories and I got lots of great feedback on it from all the other students and from Card.

So, when I went to revise, I reread all the comments from people (I had consolidated them all onto one copy of the draft), especially Card’s, and thought again about what I wanted to accomplish here.

Then, I basically started from scratch (I had the original draft in the new document, but I only used about 2 pages of it). I stripped off the first 4 pages and started where the event began to be known and worried about. I added in more characters and conflicts (3 disaster structure). And, I made the mechanism of transfer more consistent and rule-based.

Based on the comments I got back on this from Ellen Datlow and the other Codexians, I still have a lot of work to do, but I didn’t get the same kinds of comments I did the first time, so I feel like I’m making good progress on both the story and my skill as a writer.

I have decided that I am going to change around how I do the book reviews, as well. On Goodreads I’ll continue to give my general thoughts and opinions, but here I am going to start analyzing the stories for how well they make use of Setting, Plot, Character, Conflict, and Text (style and word choice). After all, these are the things that John Brown taught me about for creating Zing, so I should be paying closer attention to them.

Of course, this won’t work perfectly for every book I read. I read lots of non-fiction as well, so that should be analyzed differently. From the non-fiction, I hope to get most of the same kinds of Zing, but only indirectly as they give me ideas or research notes.

So, be on the lookout for these new reviews within the next week of any book I finish (after all, I’m in the middle of 10 books right now).

It was a great event.

Jessica emailed me the next day and said she had a great time, and Brandon stayed so long he missed his writing group meeting.

We had about 50 people there (adults and children). Each of them talked for about 20 minutes on their books and how they got the ideas and why they wrote them. Interestingly, the girls were more interested in Jessica’s work (she has female protagonists) and the boys were more interested in Brandon’s (his youth book has a male protag). I guess it is true about boys not wanting to read female protags. I must have really been a weird kid, because I didn’t mind at all when I was that age. I loved to read anything.

Interestingly, Brandon talked about how he hated to read, up until about the 8th grade because all the books he was given to read all seemed to be about boys who have dogs or moms who die at the end. And he just didn’t want to read that stuff. Then, he was given a nice fat epic fantasy and he loved it.

Jessica talked about how here parents didn’t let her have a really big dog, a sword, or a horse, and those are the things she likes and wants to read, so she writes about them.

The kids asked them some good questions, like how they get their ideas and how to make characters more interesting and real. I’ve heard the answers before (they are the basic stuff we all know already), but it was good for the young’uns.

Several people bought books and had them signed, so I think they both found it to be well worth their time (or at least, I hope they did).

I got this email from Edmund, and wanted to share. IGMS is a great online magazine with incredible stories (one of my favorites so far is Tabloid Reporter to the Stars):

To Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy everywhere,

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories - for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale — as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It?s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com