You have given us titles.

You have given us opening lines.

You have given us closing lines.

Now it’s time to pick a batch and write some stories.

The job is easy enough: choose (randomly if you like) a title, an opening line, a closing line, and then write a story with… well, do I need to explain it? Use the title, the opening line, the closing line. C’MON PEOPLE JEEZ.

Length is — well, flash fiction is usually ~1000 words, but let’s forego any kind of length here and say, “Just write the damn story.”

Post at your online space, give us a link.

Due by next Friday, September 8th, noon EST.

Title

1. We Never Heard Them Coming
2. I Held Your Heart Once
3. How To Run While Falling
4. Once Hidden, Three Times Found
5. Neptune’s Rain Cuts Like Diamonds
6. The Empire Of All-Knowing Eyes
7. Electric Boy Meets Conductor Girl
8. When They Called Her Home
9. The Limits Of Our Imperfection
10. The Rest Are Your Problem

Opening Line

1. “Listen to the goat,” Valerie said, “it will change your life.”
2. The pale pink rabbit, some child’s lost toy, blinked at him from the kitchen chair.
3. “I told you this was a bad idea!” he shouted.
4. Three days without sleep was the least of my worries.
5. Some people don’t follow direction very well.
6. Martin spread the folders out on the table, “These two.”
7. The odd man remained silent, forcing a small, copper box into my hands.
8. The bodies were bobbing on the sea, and a raft drifted behind.
9. Deep inside the twisting wood, there is a house, in a gully.
10. No one had ever bothered to tell her about this part.

Closing Line

1. Silence blanketed the meadow.
2. We huddled low in the arroyo as wind wailed across the weeping sands.
3. She spread her wings and stepped off the cliff.
4. They would never know what she had done.
5. And that, my son, is how I learned to wrestle alligators.
6. And though the light was still blinking in the distance, never again could it harm her.
7. She plucked a hair from the severed head, and threaded her needle.
8. The children formed a circle, lifted their heads, and watched as the body disappeared into the sky.
9. The smoke was blue and grey and smelled like a promise.
10. I watched the butterfly escape the spiderweb and I laughed.

Ellie Baum feels the weight of history on her when she arrives on a school trip to Berlin, Germany. After all, she’s the first member of her family to return since her grandfather’s miraculous escape from a death camp in 1942. One moment she’s contemplating the Berlin Wall Memorial amidst the crowd, and the next, she’s yanked back through time, to 1988 East Berlin when the Wall is still standing.

Nobody knows how she got there, not even the members of the underground guild–the Runners and the Schopfers–who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall. Now as a stranger in an oppressive regime, Ellie must hide from the police with the help of Kai, a Runner struggling with his own uneasy relationship with the powerful Balloonmakers and his growing feelings for Ellie. Together they search for the truth behind Ellie’s mysterious travel, and when they uncover a plot to alter history with dark magic, she must risk everything–including her only way home–to stop the deadly plans.

* * *

Cats belong in boxes. Stories don’t.

When I was writing The Girl with the Red Balloon, people asked, “What is it?” and I said, “It’s the story of a girl who–,” and they’d interrupt me and say, “No, no, I mean, what genre?” and I didn’t know how to answer them. Historical urban fantasy? Historical time-travel with fantastical elements? Alternate history because magic? And a few times, that nearly tripped me up with this book. It had to be something, right? It has to fit somewhere. Someone has to shelve this book, therefore someone has to know what it is, and what about the metadata on Amazon? How will it be labeled? And if it has to be something, I have to pick because then there are conventions in that genre I need to adhere to! If I don’t adhere to them, then everyone will know I’m a fraud because I just picked that genre out of a hat!

Look. Cats belong in boxes. Stories don’t. Yes, it can be helpful for marketing, and yes, readers have certain expectations in certain genres, but it isn’t one hundred percent necessary. It isn’t a precursor to getting published, or to success. When I was writing Girl, I had to learn to let it go. When someone asked me what I was writing, I started answering, “I don’t know.” It was honest. I wrote the book I wanted to write: it’s historical, and contemporary. It’s both science fiction and fantasy. It has time-travel, but only one jump…so is it reallllllly a time travel book? Does that matter? Not really. I wrote the story I wanted to tell, and it blends genres until I can’t see distinct colors anymore. I’m really glad I didn’t force my book into a box. I love cats, but my book is not a cat.

I worried my book was too Jewish. It isn’t.

There’s Yiddish and Hebrew in the book. There are two Jewish protagonists and only one of them is a victim of the Holocaust. I talk about Shabbat, and prayers, and Jewish stories. One of my main characters, Benno, tells Jewish stories to a girl on the other side of the ghetto fence, and she tries to tell him that when the Jewish people are gone, she’ll tell his stories. And he gets angry with her, the same way I get angry with gentiles telling Jewish stories now. Because we’re not gone. We’re still here.

I’m aware that publishing continues to view certain stories as ‘too niche.’ Publishing believes the only people who want to buy those stories are the people within those communities. That stories with marginalized protagonists will be books that live in the margins.

I worried about that a lot with Girl. I worried that a girl saying the Shema in the first chapter, and a girl who does Shabbat on Friday nights throughout the book, and who says the Mourner’s Kaddish for people who die in the book, and a boy who sings in Yiddish to his sister and dreams of escaping to a land that doesn’t even exist yet would alienate non-Jewish readers.

But I also worry that the only narrative Publishing seems to like about Jewish people is the Holocaust, where Jewish people die, where Jewish people are victims, Othered, and memorialized in their Otherness.

I worry a lot, I know. It’s kind of my thing. But this was a worry I couldn’t shake until recently, until people started reading the book and saying that a Jewish voice mattered to them as a Jewish person, and from gentile readers, that they learned and connected to the victims of the Holocaust through Benno’s life. He mattered to them, and what happened to him and the people around him, matters to all of us.

The book wasn’t too Jewish. I was too worried.

Some stories are born with structure. Other stories have structure thrust upon them. It’s like greatness, but more necessary and more mundane.

The first draft of Girl was 93,000 words and only three sentences survived. I know. That’s still vaguely nauseating to me and I rewrote it well over three years ago now. That first draft included a ten thousand word scene that wanders through a circus for no discernible purpose other than to include a flashback so Ellie could learn about her grandfather’s story. It’s a hot mess of a draft, I won’t lie. The fact that my critique partners had to read through that…I really should apologize to them again. Maybe buy them cupcakes or something.

When I rewrote it, I outlined everything and marched right down my outline. If left to my own devices, I would regularly write full length novels where people walked around cities, holding hands and having feelings. That would be the book. And then I’d be confused about why it didn’t accomplish the thing on paper that it did in my head. Because in my head, a book hurtles toward an inevitability. And without an outline, my books tend to flop about on a deck like confused fish.

I wrote an outline. I followed it. And I wrote each POV in a separate Word doc and copy-pasted into a master document (don’t bother telling me about Scrivener. It has its place for some books I write, but it didn’t work for this one.) The last POV I wrote was Benno’s. He’s Ellie’s grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and his POV takes place in 1941-1942. I wrote his POV straight through, and then chopped it up, inserting chapters into the main narrative to explain plot points or to foreshadow or to increase tension.

The book wasn’t in my head in that exact order. I had to sit down with all the pieces and construct it, again, and again, and again. Some books, and some writers, have to work harder to find their narrative structure. That’s okay.

You won’t get everything right.

I had to let go of getting everything right. I did a ton of research for the book, and even with all of that, I had to learn that I wasn’t going to get everything right. And some of this was more theoretical: when you’re writing something in history, there will be people who disagree with your interpretation of the mood, tone, or level of oppression at that exact moment in time. The way we view and treat history is inherently political (as we are seeing firsthand these days on our screens.)

But on a practical level, there are some details that are difficult to research: exactly how this part of the city smelled on summer mornings; the way that East German cigarettes smelled and whether they burned your nose or your throat or clung to your hair in different ways; the finickiness of an East German toaster; the sound of a light switch; the sound of Stasi boots on wet streets. Some of this you just have to invent and guess and imagine. You cannot research every single detail of the book. Get the important stuff right–laws, dates, locations, racial relations, food, clothing, slang, names, gender relations, etc–and the rest, wing it. It’ll be okay.

Pride isn’t hubris.

Full disclosure: I’m still working on this one, plus learning to separate anxiety about how a book performs as a Product from my pride in having written this book.

We’re socialized to talk about our work in such a way that we don’t sound like we’re bragging. Bragging is bad, we’re told, so we avoid it. “Congrats! You wrote a book.” “Oh, you know. It has a long way to go. But thanks.” As I was writing it and getting feedback and then sending it into the world, I had to work on training myself to say, “Thank you! That means a lot to me.” Because that’s the truth. And having a long way to go doesn’t diminish the fact that I wrote a book and it accomplished what I set out to accomplish, and that’s awesome. I did the thing! I did the thing well! I met my own expectations which is honestly shocking because I am, like many of us are, my own worst critic.

Being proud of the work you’ve accomplished is not bragging. It isn’t hubris. It is not your fatal flaw. And it is critically important to developing resilience and continuing to create. “I wrote a book, it is awesome/it’s going to be awesome, and I’m really proud of myself” is a legitimate statement. Start practicing it now.

* * *

Katherine Locke lives and writes in a very small town outside of Philadelphia, where she’s ruled by her feline overlords and her addiction to chai lattes. She writes about that which she cannot do: ballet, time travel, and magic. When she’s not writing, she’s probably tweeting. She not-so-secretly believes most stories are fairy tales in disguise. Her Young Adult debut, THE GIRL WITH THE RED BALLOON, arrives September 1^st, 2017 from Albert Whitman & Company!

Katherine Locke: Twitter | Instagram | Website

The Girl With The Red Balloon: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Goodreads | iBooks

Empire’s End is now out in paperback.

(Indiebound | Amazon | B&N)

I don’t expect this to be the end of my Star Wars journey — at least, I certainly hope it isn’t. With a story in the upcoming From A Certain Point Of View charity anthology landing, I’ve got at least one more trip to a Galaxy Far, Far Away that I can talk about.

But I have some thoughts.

Uncomfortable thoughts.

I started writing the Aftermath trilogy in March 2015, and finished writing the first draft of the third book in July of 2016 — months before the election, but also in the midst of the very contentious campaigning. I had no idea what was coming, but in a way, I probably should have.

The Aftermath trilogy serves as a pivot point between the two cinematic trilogies — the so-called Original Trilogy and the newest one that began with The Force Awakens, and that fulcrum point is really the fall of the Empire and the rise of the First Order. The Empire has long served as a galactic sci-fi stand-in for the Nazis, and I think it’s safe to say that the First Order is a neo-fascist resurrection of that, just in better haircuts and nicer outfits, much like we see now the surge in white supremacy. Our current crop of nationalists and neo-Nazis wink and shrug and pretend they’re not the incarnation of the Third Reich, but then they get the same Nazi prick haircut and they stomp around with military rifles and they shout Nazi slogans and pretend they’re hipsters doing it for irony’s sake when really, they’re earnest as anything.

And some of them make me think a little of Kylo Ren: a stung, weak, radicalized man with Daddy Issues, who idolizes the glory of an Empire past, who has tantrums and is a bully and yet knows in his heart of hearts that he can (and will) be beaten by a woman. He pretends to be more powerful than he is. He has a lightsaber that fizzles and spits — a weaponized mirror of his own emotional state. He is angry. He is petulant. You could half imagine him thinking of the rest of the world as full of snowflakes and cucks, even as he melts down at the slightest insult, even as he falls to Rey’s saber — into, you guessed it, a pile of snowflakes.

But in the Aftermath trilogy, he’s just a baby — first in Leia’s womb, then born in the world at the end of Empire’s End. All his potential is there, both the potential to be a force for good, and the potential to be a force for darkness. Both equating to the potential for change, good and bad.

And I think too to Mon Mothma in that serious, a beleaguered politician, a woman who has had to make difficult decisions and who has been punished for them in the media — you cannot rule a galaxy, or even a small part of it, without accumulating some baggage. It means she cannot simply spout platitudes and slogans and win an election: she’s stained by the realities of the office, marred by the imperfections of the role, nearly doomed by hard choices.

And then I think about the reaction to the books — yes, yes, I know, some people didn’t like Aftermath because of the writing, or the present tense, or the fact it was not immediately and directly about the principle three characters, and I get that, and I hear you and I’m sorry the book did not satisfy you on those fronts. But I also think about the tweets and emails I still to this day get about how people are mad about Sinjir and Conder, or mad about Eleodie Maracavanya, or mad about Rae Sloane — and these emails are 99.9% of the time from people who appear to be… well, stung, weak, radicalized men. Maybe they don’t know who they are or where they’re headed, but they’re the types to call you a snowclake and a cuck, even as they melt down from safely within the confines of their mother’s basement, even as they yell at you online near a pull-out couch-bed full of rifles and pistols. They want me to know that their complaints about my novel aren’t about the LGBT stuff or the Grand Admiral who is a woman of color, but rather, about ethics in HoloNet Star Wars journalism, dontchaknow. About how well actually, zhe and zher are not words, dontchaknow, no no, we’re not Nazis, just grammar Nazis, but also, didn’t Hitler have some cool ideas, hey, come check out my Twitch stream, my podcast, no, no, that Swastika and pepe frog are just ironic, I’m just a funny ol’ silly ol’ troll?

Then I think about the prequels, and how — no matter what you felt about their storytelling — they predicted some of our political realities, too. Sinister forces lining up, spinning crises not to bring us together but rather as an excuse for greater war, to stir up fear, to seize power. To destroy our safeguards — and our guardians. Guardians who were themselves wildly imperfect and eager to lend a hand in their self-destruction. In the prequels, those manipulations and falls-from-grace were more overt (and arguably, appropriately more cartoonish), but easy enough to find some parallels in the last two decades.

I think about how Rogue One landed right after the election — here came a movie about the peak of the Empire’s power, and how a small but focused resistance found a crack in the mantle to exploit. And how those character sacrificed to free a galaxy from authoritarian rule.

I think about Rey and Finn and Cassian and Jyn and Poe, I think about Sinjir and Conder and Rae and Eleodie, and I think about how white guys (like, well, me) are no longer finding pop culture to be as perfect a mirror for them as it used to be. How they are not reflected as constantly — their narcissism, long fed so achingly on the food of that reflection. But that reflection is now complicated, it’s changed, and to them feels like a damaging, howling void even as it seems to uplift others at their expense. And these men feel lost and alone, even though pop culture still shows them Luke, Han, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Superman, Batman, Greens Lantern and Arrow, Flash, John McClane, John Wick, Star Lord, Iron Man, Captain America in or out of his Hydra guise, Thor, Spider-Man, Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter, and *unfurls list that’s a hundred years long* on and on. After so long of having not to share, we’re being made to share. That excites some people. And it enrages others. Because children don’t always like to share. We no longer have the mirror to ourselves. We no longer have toys that are ours and ours alone. We’ve been told for so long that we’re special, and here comes Star Wars to say, maybe not just you, maybe we’re all special, maybe we can have toys for a lot of people and stories for a lot of people, and wouldn’t that be grand? To some, that’s amazing. The chance to widen the doorway, to see more than just yourself in the glass. Others hear that and they just want to break the mirror.

If they can’t have it all to themselves, then nobody can have it.

That’s the Empire.

That’s the First Order.

Maybe we’re living just a little bit of Aftermath right here, right now.

And maybe we need Star Wars more than ever.

I don’t necessarily mean as an instruction manual, but I do think there are lessons in there that go deeper than just some GOOD VERSUS EVIL battle — even when those lessons actually are, hey, sometimes it really is good versus evil. Sometimes oppression is oppression, and evil is evil. Sometimes resistance and rebellion are necessary. Sometimes governing is hard but that doesn’t mean government is bad. Sometimes government is taken over by sinister forces, and other times we fear sinister forces so much, we end up inviting them inside, like vampires we ask to come inside because we are afraid of werewolves. (I know, I’m mixing my storyworlds here; apologies.)

I don’t mean to suggest Star Wars does not yet have work to do on itself. I think it’s time to see some LGBT representation on-screen, not just in books or in comics. I think we need it confirmed, up there, in bold colors and with love on display — a refutation of the hate that goes on off-screen. But I think too that the great people behind Star Wars are there for that, they’re here to do the work, and they’ve shown that they’re willing to listen and show a galaxy that includes, not excludes. And that’s another reason we need it.

What I hope is, this tumultuous (and if I may, particularly stupid) era of politics ends up being a footnote — we see that rocky, broken speedbump fast receding in our rear-view even as Star Wars sticks around, through 40 years and onward another 40, showing us not a utopia, but instead revealing t0 us a world that can break and be broken, but also one that can be mended by friendship and resistance and by striving to do good in the face of the worst evil.

Thanks to those who have read the trilogy.

Thanks to Star Wars for having me. Thanks to Del Rey for taking a chance with me. Thanks to the fans for sticking with me.

I hope my journey isn’t done there, but even if it is, it meant everything.

I’ll share with you a ZOO TALE in just a moment, but first, a couple updates —

Houston and its environs is obviously in peril due to the hurricane, so I’d encourage you to donate in order to help people and help address the mounting devastation. Lots of folks can offer solid suggestions as to where your money goes best, and I’ll note that CharityNavigator has a good list. If you nab either of my Mookie Pearl books this week (The Blue Blazes and its followup, The Hellsblood Bride), I’ll donate all the proceeds to Americares.  (We’ll say this goes for roughly a week, till Monday, 11:59PM EST) I can only do this if you buy through those links, not Amazon or other e-retailers, FYI, just because I trust the tracking through direct sales, and less so through other sites.

Let’s see, what else?

I talked a little about writing and resistance at Inside 254 podcast.

Several books of mine are still on sale until the end of August, so only a couple more days to grab: the Heartland trilogy ($0.99 per book, the Atlanta Burns books (also under a buck per book), Zer0es. ($4.99), and Invasive ($4.99), on sale at all the standard e-tailer sites. If you’ve already read them, tell a friend, leave a review, scream about them to random passersby, tattoo their opening lines above your nethercrack, etc.

I’ve learned I’ll be at NYCC in October, so gird your loins.

Plus: Pelee Island, San Fran, Portland, Seattle, all in October. Woo.

And now, the tale of the Girl and the Tiger, amidst other zoo shenanigans:

Okay, last week I said, “come up with an opening line.”

The week before that I said, “come up with a last line.”

Now, I want a title.

Then we will mash up all three challenges into one proper short story.

For now, drop down into the comments, and I want:

One five-word title.

Just one.

Not three words.

Not six words.

Five words.

Due by Friday, September 1st, noon EST.

Go.

This is a thing that happens sometimes:

The story you’re writing drives top speed into a mountain and stops short in a ball of flames and crumpled metal. Or, it slowly putters out of gas, or drives off a cliff, or you’re stuck in a swamp, or you feel like an old person lost at the mall, endlessly circling Bed, Bath and Beyond. The plot crashes. The narrative gassily sputters. Whatever. The effect is ultimately the same: it feels like you don’t know where to go next, like you don’t have enough story to carry you forward.

Here, I think, is what might be happening:

Your characters don’t have enough to do.

They are like a six-year-old child whose endless refrain is I’M BORED I’M BORED I’M BORED and they just stare at you as they say it I’M BORED I’M BORED I’M BORED.

Simply put, the characters are driving this car. Not you. Yes, yes, you’re the God of this domain and they’re your little narrative meat-puppets — I’m not suggesting that your characters are independently alive. They have no sentience beyond your own. Just the same, they are the ones driving the car — and you’re the one giving them the map, the GPS, the destination.

If the car stops or hits the wall, it’s because you either gave them the wrong destination, or no destination at all. Orrrrrr, you instead let plot be the driver — meaning, you drop-kicked the characters into the backseat and gave the keys to the plot, which is very bad.

*swats your nose with a newspaper*

VERY BAD NO DO THAT

BAD AUTHOR

BAD

The reason that’s bad is because events are not compelling drivers of narrative. Think of how we learn history, and the difference between a good teacher of history and a poor one: a bad teacher of history concentrates on events, on dates, on occasions. A good teacher focuses on the people involved and the stories that surround them — history is made by people with motivations. They want things. They fear things. They have problems and beliefs, and they act to solve those problems and enact or enforce those beliefs. Be they noble or be they selfish, it is people with motivations who make history — and, more importantly, who make history interesting.

Your fiction is just like that.

Fiction should not comprise a series of inert, disconnected events. It is not a string of dates. It is not an unrolling carpet of happenstance.

Characters are not little paperboats in a stream of plot.

Characters are rocks that divide the waters. They change the course of the river. But that only happens when you give them things to do, when you drive them forward with problems at their heels and at their fore, when you fill their heads with things they want and things they fear.

This forms their character arcs. From this, they make plot.

Plot is the thing that characters poop.

*checks notes*

Okay, that’s not exactly right, but it’s good enough.

If your story has hit a wall, if you don’t know where to go, look to the characters. Ask them. If they cannot tell you, then you have not adequately given them enough to do. Look to their motivations. Look to their problems. Go back through the work, strengthen these emotional seawalls. Give them things to do. Give them somewhere to go.

(Then make it hard for it to do them. Think of the characters like your players and you like the Dungeon Master who is there to fuck with their quest.)

Character is everything. If something isn’t working, look to your characters first.

Give them the tools to move forward. Hand the characters a gun. Give them some crazy space drugs. Stick them in a fast car.

Then point them to the horizon and watch the story move.

* * *

Coming soon:

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig, from Writer’s Digest, October 17th

A new writing/storytelling book by yours truly! All about the fiddly bits of storytelling — creating great characters, growing narrative organically, identifying and creating theme. Hope you dig it.

Pre-order now:

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

(Come see me launch the book on October 17th at Borderlands in San Francisco with Kevin Hearne launching the amazing Plague of Giants and Fran Wilde supporting her sublime Bone Universe books! 6pm!)