The Story Behind the Stories

Takeaways and lessons learned from GWC’24

Well, folks, it was a busy April, and the Gibberish Writing Competition is over. I managed to crank out three short stories, each written over the course of five days… and I’m tired. 

So this week’s post is a little breather for me. I want to share “the story behind the stories” as well as a few lessons I learned from this whole experience. 

One thing first: you might’ve noticed a new name for this newsletter up top! The old one was only ever a placeholder, something to put into the box until I got my first few dozen subscribers, but that happened so quickly that I wasn’t able to come up with something fun in time (a good problem to have).

Well, now I have:

Welcome to the forge. Where I hammer out stories for all of you.

I hope “Falden’s Forge” captures the spirit of my sword-and-monsters, magic-and-realism fantasy setting more than the amorphous and lame “Falden Spot.” Plus, I’m kinda proud to have imagined and created the logo myself (with help from a friend to smooth it out).

Speaking of Stories… 

… I wrote three of ‘em. 

In case you missed it, I spent the month of April taking part in the Gibberish Writing Competition, where the judges laid out three challenges for me and my fellow competitors. 

Since I ought to mention it somewhere: no, I didn’t win. That honor deservedly went to

E.B. Howard

(I tied for third). But as I said over on Notes: I feel no shame to have finished behind my competitors. The competition was always about pushing our boundaries and challenging ourselves to create fiction we were proud of. In that, I have succeeded.

And I did have some other wins along the way! 

Here’s how it all went for me, behind the scenes. (spoilers for those stories ahead, by the way. If you want to read them first, they’re linked below, but you can also go to my site).

Challenge 1: Chase Scene

In the first round we had to write a chase scene. To find inspiration, I delved into the nameless world I’ve built as a setting for all my stories, and found there an old story idea of a young lordling on a quest to retrieve the head of a giant. He ventures north, away from home and into the bleak mountains, hoping to return with renown for his monster-slaying, but then finds himself overwhelmed by the task. 

I took this idea and upped the adrenaline factor, removing fight and adding flight, and wound up with my story “One Head as Tribute”:

This is certainly a “who’s the real monster?” story, but one in which I tried not to make the hunter-protagonist too despicable. I created that tightrope walk for myself because I also wanted to explore the theme of cyclical violence and the hostilities that can exist on geographic and cultural borders. The protagonist, Taurin, isn’t driven because he hates giants or has some vow of vengeance against them. Nonetheless, he kills one and carries around its severed head because he needs to fulfill an official, lawful, civil duty: bring one head as tribute to the king, so he can inherit his father’s titles. It’s barbarism blended with cultural and civil expectations. His motives are also wrapped up in his fears of failure, his father’s over-high expectations, and a huge dose of ostracization towards the giants, whom he does consider to be animals. 

The story ends not with a heroic triumph, but with the continuation of violence, now going in the other direction. My intention was that this wouldn’t be a comeuppance story where you hope the anti-hero fails, but more a general tragedy, with characters put into intractable conflict by the setting in ways they don’t fully understand (even if we can), a tragedy that doesn’t feel like one until you see the whole thing in retrospect. 

… I have no idea if I pulled any of that off, mind you. But a lot of you seemed to like the story, so I’ll take it. 

Challenge 2: Bottle Episode

We then had to tell a “Bottle Episode” story, with a single character trapped in a single setting, with the stipulation that they had to make it out in the end. 

I wrote:

This story came together a bit like a puzzle. Once I looked at what I needed to have, and the few elements I wanted to have, I could only find a limited number of ways to fit these pieces together. 

With only one character to work with, and one setting, and the need to get that character out of the setting at the end, the conflict wrote itself: it was a milieu story. The main goal is “Get Out.” The setting was the problem. That’s how those pieces fit together for me. 

Then the other piece: I wanted a magical component. It was an easy fit for magic to be the thing that solves the milieu problem. So then I had to tinker with ideas about why my character would be trapped and how I can prevent them from easily casting the “Solve-the-Story’s-Problem” spell. 

More pieces clicked: monsters provided the reason for being trapped, and having the spell involve ringing a big bell helped fit a few things together and gave me my exact “bottle” setting: a belltower’s attic. 

For a while I toyed with the idea of a young wizard trapped moments after his mentor is killed by the monsters, and he has to learn, on his own, how to cast the spell. But I couldn’t get the pieces to fit. 

So I highlighted the “one character” piece and made it an old hermit, and then connected his solitude directly to his inability to cast this spell: he’d forgotten how to do it. This also provided a handy character-arc, he would need to learn the value of community, relationships, and ritual if he was to escape. 

Even once I had the pieces, it was a hard task. I think this story went through six or seven drafts. I had trouble with his characterization at the story’s beginning, trouble with tension and urgency, and as a result most drafts were simply boring. I did major revisions less than 24 hours before publication, where all the pieces finally fit. Not that I could see it: by the end I was just so sick of this story, and hated it.

But looking back, I’m immensely proud of it. And I’m very happy to report it got the highest score in round 2. 

Challenge 3: Expand Microfiction

Upon applying to be a competitor in the competition, we applicants had to create a 250-word microfiction featuring an argument and send it in to the judges prior to selection; the devious third challenge was to expand this pre-existing microfiction into a fuller 2,000-word story and (more or less) retain the original. 

The result was For Want of Safe Harbor, and based on reader feedback and my eventual score, this one’s the best of the three. 

You can read the original story in that post, by the way. The original was an argument between two men in a fishing boat; a mother and her infant are with them, and they’ve been driven to sea by monsters who have “raided” many coastal villagers. They’ve been at sea for days. One man wants to land to find food, another wants to stay at sea. Eventually, the mother pleads to land because her infant has died. The helmsman relents and they land, where, I imply, they fall prey to monsters. Whether or not it’s clear in the 250-word version, this is a story of an apocalypse, and it’s not a happy tale. 

Expanding it really pushed my boundaries and, to borrow a phrase, “opened creative doors” for me. 

My initial gut instinct was to simply expand the story and keep a tight narrative distance and point-of-view: show the village being attacked, use what I learned in the “bottle episode” to create a sense of claustrophobia in the boat over the course of several days, ratchet up the arguments and make it vicious, and then lead into the micro-story, but expanded and continued. Three scenes? Maybe four?

I wrote eight. 

What changed? It started when I realized that I wanted the mother’s words—“I want to bury my child”—to remain the climax of the story, the fulcrum for my characters’ emotions. I liked the lop-sided dialogue, and wanted to keep that line as the mother’s only words of the story. More importantly, I wanted the helmsman’s decision to go to shore to be as emotional as possible. 

That meant I had to create a character—Fjómar—that could never refuse that mother’s request, even to the point of death. And I wanted the reader to understand his decision. If possible, I wanted them to see it as heroic, tragic, and inevitable, all at once. 

That meant I had to double-down on the style of “micro-fiction,” with sparse descriptions and almost no set-dressing. I took the advice  of “in late, out early” as drastically as possible, partly for wordcount but partly to keep everything unresolved and uncertain. The zoomed-out narrative distance and constant jumping allowed me to basically tell Fjómar’s entire life story. The cuts allowed me to go in alternating timelines—another new device for me—and to juxtapose themes more closely. 

Here’s something I wrote as I plotted out my scenes:

• (past 1)— While at sea, Fjómar’s father tells him that fear is a gift.

• (present 1)— Fear keeps Fjómar alive during the attack.

• (past 2)— Fjómar’s sister tells him that generosity in adversity is the key to a good life, and a good death. And she dies proving it.

• (present 2)— We meet the characters in the boat more fully, and begin to see what they’ve already lost.

• (past 3)— Fjómar’s mother is paralyzed in her life and grief, because she was too afraid to attend her daughter’s funeral.

• (present 3)— Fjómar refuses to land, holding onto fear.

• (past 4)— Fjómar’s father succumbs to his own despair and throws himself overboard in a reversal of his attitudes and physical state in scene 1. 

• (present 4)— Fjómar decides to land in spite of danger in order to help Olgetha bury her child. He offers one moment of peace at the end.

Lastly—and this matters a great deal to me—expanding the scope of the story also allowed me to insert moments of hope and sacrifice. My initial story was dark and this one had to remain the same (I doubled-down on that, too), but the far distance created space for introspection and contrasting themes, and allowed me to inject something higher than a slog of misfortune and suffering.

I tried a lot of new things, and I think my risks paid off.

And, if you can allow me to brag, I’m chuffed¹ that only one story out of the fifteen in the competition outscored For Want of Safe Harbor.² And now to counter my brag, I’ll also point out that literally every other story in the competition outscored “One Head as Tribute”; a perfect marksman I am not! Gotta share the bad with the good, right? 

Lessons & Takeaways

At risk of going on too long, I’ll share some overall thoughts of the competition and specific takeaways for me creatively. 

GWC was an incredibly worthwhile experience for me. Even before the challenges kicked off, I got to meet and chat with my fellow “gladiators,”

Hyun Woo Kim

,

Alice Meredith

,

Hanna Delaney

, and

E.B. Howard

. They are all generous, kind people, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know each of them better. Every single one of them is a talented writer—something I don’t say lightly. 

The experience also reaffirmed for me, in a big way, just how supportive and welcoming writers on Substack generally are towards one another. I distrust the word “community” when applied to digital spaces, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the genuine hype, encouragement, and welcome given to me and my fellow competitors. Not to mention the spirit of the competition itself, which was remarkably positive and good-natured.

Judges

Scoot

and

Sara Dietz

did a great job building hype and maintaining the momentum of excitement, and I’m hitting growth milestones way faster than I thought I would when I launched this newsletter only 75 days ago. Huge thanks yet again to both of them for their hosting, their feedback, and their support. 

What did I learn about myself? 

1. I can be way more concise than I thought. I love epic fantasy. I measure my to-be-read list in cubic feet. I aspire to write good, worthwhile, and yes, long fiction. In March I would have joked that 2,000 words was basically micro-fiction. But now I am reconsidering the possibilities of my own works (in a good way). If I can do this with 2,000 words, what can I do with 20,000 words? 

2. I can write fiction on a deadline. I’ve never had to before, and I was worried. 

3. I’m not reliant on moments of inspiration. I had a bit of the muse on story #3, but story #2 was all problem-solving and craft. 

4. I still struggle with ideation. I wanted to come up with at least 3-4 story ideas for each challenge in order to pick the best one, but usually I simply couldn’t, and had to instead focus brainstorming 3-4 ways to tell the story and then pick the best one. I’m better at improving an idea than I am at coming up with the idea. 

5. My stories, and by inference my creative impulses, were darker than I would have guessed two months ago. I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised by this—there were earlier signs—but nonetheless, I was.

6. I’m hopelessly addicted to writing. I got to disappear into the headspace of writing for about 120 hours three different times in a month, and boy did I love it. 

I’ll wrap it up there. Thanks again to everyone involved in the competition, and most of all to each of you, my readers and subscribers. In the end, the whole effort was for you. As always: thank you for reading. See you next week.

-Eric

☙—❧

1. Interactions with fellow competitor Hanna Delaney have made me resolve to use more Britishisms.

2. This was E.B. Howard’s perfect-score for “Should You Choose to Accept It,” so check that out. Also fair play to Alice Meredith’s “In Search of A Friend,” which tied with my own story using a blessedly lighter, happier tone. If my story depressed you, go read that one to feel better.