Ding dong!

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 1

This wicked summer is now officially dead (good riddance to triple-digit temperatures), and that means it’s changeover time for the writing contests. Final tally on entries for the Best Short-Short Story Contest: 197. We just barely beat last year’s number, but at least we did exceed it!

Here they are--our reading materials for the next few weeks:


Oh, and I apologize if I sounded harsh about early Best First Chapter entries last week. I didn’t mean you or your entry were disqualified forever and ever as part of some weird grudge against earlybirds, I just mean if you submitted before September 1, you need to resubmit during the submission period in order to qualify (9/1/07-3/1/08).

A note about anonymity

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 165

As is the practice with most writing contests, we judge entries anonymously. Since ours is a fee-free online contest, we have the luxury of requiring that very little identifying information be attached to each entry.

But what if that one piece of information—your email address—compromises your anonymity? If your real name is embedded in your email address, should you open up a new Hotmail account and go incognito?

Of course you can, but you really needn’t bother. That is, unless you’re someone we know—a friend, relative, or former student, say. That’s the point of anonymity, to keep us from being biased in case anyone we know should ever enter.

Rest assured, if your name appears in your email address, we don’t Google you, or keep track of whether you’ve emailed us a question, or keep up with whether you’ve entered before, or really pay much attention to the address at all.

Like I’ve said before, I record the addresses when the entries come in, but when our reading period begins, we honestly don’t pay attention to the address on the entry. So don’t worry about going to a lot of trouble to establish a secret identity. At least not for our sakes.

Deadline is approaching

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 141

Consider this your friendly reminder that the deadline for this year's short-short story contest is Saturday night at 11:59 p.m., EST.

I was hoping we'd get more entries than last year (194) but at this point it doesn't look like that's going to happen. There's usually a last-minute rush, though, so who knows. C'mon and get those puppies sent in! Anybody out there have 50 pieces of flash fiction lying around? ;) Or one will do.

This also means if you're chomping at the bit to enter the InnermoonLit Contest for Best First Chapter of a Novel contest, you will soon be able to do so. And yes, if you've snuck in your first chapter early, it has been disqualified. We begin accepting entries for that contest on September 1.

Plot versus story

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 132

In Technique in Fiction, Macauley and Lanning make what I think is a helpful distinction between story and plot. (Others have made this distinction too--I just thought I’d cite this book because it gives a pretty comprehensive overview on the subject.)

A story is a sequence of events prompted by the question, “And then what happened?” whereas a plot contains events causally linked to each other, prompting the question, “Why?”

Story, of course, is the primitive granddaddy of the two. The slice-of-life fiction I referred to last week would fall under the story category. Plot is an artifice and a much more recent invention. It’s a story structured into a basic pyramid shape, consisting of establishment of characters and situation, rising action, climax, and falling action (the names of these elements vary, but this is the simplest example). Real life doesn’t have a single plot in which events build upon each other neatly, causing other events, which bring about a dramatic moment of change or crisis, after which everyone dies or lives happily ever after, depending on whether the tale is a tragedy or comedy.

In real life, it is difficult if not impossible to establish causation. In fact, if you study logical fallacies, you know that one of the most common is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or mistakenly assuming that one event caused another merely because it happened beforehand. Maybe that’s part of what makes fiction so satisfying: we can replay the chain of events and see exactly what caused everything to go to hell in a hand basket. Sure, we guess about the causes of the things that happen to us in our real lives, but when it comes down to it, it’s always just that: a guess.

As a writer, you may rail against the practice of following any plot model and think it’s formulaic, but I know when I think back over my favorite books, they all have some kind of discernible plot structure. Sometimes it’s better to use the tried and true guidelines of your predecessors than to try to completely reinvent the wheel.

A dachshund digression that’s probably TMI

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 124

Forgive me. It’s the first week of school, and I’m having trouble focusing on anything other than surviving the madness. Thankfully the dogs' shenanigans never cease to provide fodder for the blog....

If you give it much thought at all, you probably think of urination as a simple means of emptying the bladder. Kasay would concur, but not brother Brodsky.

To him, peeing is a way of laying claim to what he believes is rightfully his. And he has his own bizarre sense of manifest destiny, firmly believing that once his stubby legs have trodden any given piece of dirt, it becomes his private property. On walks, he stores up his urine, strategically parsing it out on a shrub here, a sprig of monkey grass there. Hydrants and fence posts are his favorites. When Kasay relieves himself, Brodsky swoops in after to cover Kasay’s scent with his own.

So I had to laugh a few days ago when the karma gods paid Brodsky a visit. Our next door neighbors have a large shepherd mix named Jacob whom Brodsky can’t stand and who is often allowed to roam around off the leash on his walks.

Jacob happened to be out for his early morning potty break right when we were headed back into the house from ours. As soon as the boys saw Jacob, it was the usual mayhem: Kasay whining and straining at the leash, wanting to go make friends, Brodsky whipped into a fierce barking frenzy, straining just as hard (being considerate dogs, they want to make sure both my biceps get an equal workout), wanting to go attack. Jacob ran over and nuzzled with Kasay a minute before prancing up to our front door and peeing on the bush right beside it.

Brodsky was as infuriated as I’d ever seen him. His bark went from lion to tyrannosaurus rex level. The enemy urinating on the one bush he has to pass every time he enters and leaves his own home!

When Jacob finally went home and the dogs had settled down enough that I felt able to take a step without being pulled over, I led them to the door where, predictably, Brodsky made a beeline for the Jacob-scented shrub, intending to cover over the foul cur’s attempt at claiming his boxwood.

You’ve never seen such a disheartened dachshund as Brodsky when he realized that no matter how high he threw up his back leg, there was simply no way he could reach the much taller dog’s mark.

He’s been trying ever since, though, and will not pass by that shrub without marking it. Let’s hope we get a good rain soon, before he kills the poor plant.

The winning ingredients: plot

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 115

Some literary theorists have said all stories can be boiled down to one of two basic plots: Romeo and Juliet or David and Goliath. That tends to make the search to create plot seem deceptively simple. If you’ve ever written fiction, you know how difficult it can be to come up with a plot that is surprising yet feels inevitable, that is both unique and satisfying for the reader.

Plot is the driving force behind fiction, after all; it’s what makes a story a story. Our need for story is a primeval one, dating back to preliterate times when our ancestors gathered around fires asking, “And then what happened?”

I will admit that, for the short-short story contest, Brian and I prefer stories that are complete, with beginnings, middles, and endings, over the slice-of-life Carveresque pieces that leave us flipping the page over, wondering whether the last paragraph got cut off. For the best first chapter contest, we look for plot potential, whether a conflict has been established that’s interesting and complex enough to carry the reader through.

"Everybody Change Places!" by M. J. Amft, Part 3

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 110

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 1

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 2

Sometimes the hunch to try “everyone change places!” comes partway through a story. One of mine was coming along nicely. A funny, bossy mother was advising her daughter not to moon over a summer romance, waiting for a Christmas reunion. In the background (away at college) there was a sympathetic sister. The characters were lively and the dialogue bright, but who really listens to a mother or sister? Change places! I sent the girl off to college, killed off the sister, shoved mama in the background, and gave the girl a funny, bossy roommate and sold that story.

I once saw a young nursemaid at a summer resort. She was dimwitted, with a homely face and a figure like Sophia Loren’s. A young boy was snowing her but behind her back snickering about the “good time” he was going to have with her before he dumped her. I tried writing a story from her point of view, but I couldn’t identify with a stupid, slow but physically full-blown girl, and I didn’t think Seventeen readers could either. So I tried changing point of view to the boy’s side. But no one can see himself as a complete cad, and the boy began developing redeeming features, seeing the girl as an unfortunate human being, not just “a body.” Still she was out of his class, and when (on the last page) his snobbish cousins, a boy and a girl, appeared, he had to snub the girl to save face. Just before slipping the story into the brown envelope, I read it one more time. The hero seemed unbelievable. He had gone through too many character changes in too short a time, and the last-page cousins interested me more than anyone.

Out came my lethal pen. I killed off the hero. I had the girl cousin become the main character and the storyteller. She became the one who met and befriended the voluptuous dimwit. She sat helplessly by while the cad cousin made his plans, and a totally new hero came out of nowhere and wrapped the story up in a surprising and most satisfactory way. That story sold.

It is hard to mutilate your characters. It is hard to write fiction. You have to start with so little: a brief scene glimpsed; a sentence overhead; an old emotion suddenly remembered; an outstanding face; someone’s trite tale of woe or joy. From these small kernels you must create characters who are real; who act, react, and interact. But as a fiction writer you have one big advantage. If your characters are not right for the part, you can command them to change roles. They are your characters, and if it will make for a better story, you can make a handsome hero change places with an ugly girl. If there is something wrong with your mother, you can try her out as a father. If a big brother becomes too sentimental, you can tell him to be a little sister.

Be bossy with your characters. Shove them around. Be courageous. Pick up your pen and give them the order: “Everybody change places! Now!” While your pen is slashing—altering genders, changing ages, shifting loyalties—you’ll feel pain, and sometimes it won’t even work. But if it does—ah! Your labor will be forgotten in the knowledge that thousands will read your story; some will reread it; some will share it with friends; and some will never completely forget it.