Story-writing bloopers

Story-writing bloopers (Confessions of a screw-up, and how *not* to write a story.)

Lesson 1. How to totally mess up a story with a happy ending:

1. Write a story with a happy ending. As a plot device, use a reference to someone who died tragically before the story opens.
2. Decide you want to make the story longer with a prequel. Write it about an episode in the life of the deceased before she died. By itself, it may be an okay story and has a happy ending.
3. Combine the two parts. (Character's death occurs after the first part and before the second part.)
4. Realize you've gotten your readers emotionally attached and sympathetic to a character you're going to tragically kill off halfway through the combined story. Not exactly a happy ending.
5. Scrap the story (15k words and growing) and start over. Doh!

Ummmm, why not simply avoid doing this? Then you'd have a story with a happy ending, plus another one (sequel) which might initially sadden some readers (especially if they had read the earlier story) but would end up rather happily for the characters actually involved in it.

That's just a suggestion, of course... --C.K.

No, no.
Don't scrap it. These are fictional characters and they deserve anything you throw at them. An inconvenient death of a character is the stuff of sagas. If anything your reader will accept it kindly because of the realism.
Of course you do have to be cautious about using that plot device too frequently-unless you are George R.R. Martin that is.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to have to cogitate on this before I decide how to proceed. Quick decisions often don't turn out to be the best ones.

On a slightly different topic about this story (I may have messed up worse than I realized) ... I've read a few historical novels but never thought much about the dialogue in them. But it's different when you try to write one. I haven't done much research and don't have the ability to accurately recreate nineteenth century vocabulary, usage, and speech patterns of the American western frontier. And even if I could, I think it might be annoying for readers to follow. What I've done is to try to avoid most modern words & slang while keeping it smooth and understandable for the present-day reader, not worry much about the accuracy, and throw in an *occasional* colloquialism and bit of incorrect grammar so as these folks ain't gonna come across like twenty-first century college graduates (which I'm not either btw).
Maybe I've unconsciously absorbed this from the movies, but movies aren't necessarily accurate. Anyone have an opinion on whether this approach is acceptable or would not seem right to you as the reader?

I think that is exactly the way to proceed. You want your story to be readable and non-irritating to the reader.


Exactly! And the same non-standard should apply to your story. You are writing fiction, not a history text! So keep it simple and readable.

What Guy said...

I'm in agreement with this approach to capture the 'flavor' of a historical era without actually attempting to accurately replicate the dialogue, since that might well make it much more difficult to read.

However, I'll venture that you should try hard to avoid anachronisms, via both description and dialogue, since they do tend to reduce a story's credibility when noticed by readers. (I still recall, from years ago, once reading a spanking-oriented account set in 1972 which referred to a character accessing the internet.)

"History buffs, they're known to be picayune about time-period accuracy..." --C.K.

What I try to do when writing any dialogue is to imagine myself either hearing the speaker or being the speaker myself. Movies are notoriously inaccurate, but there are plenty costume dramas which give one a feel for how people might have sounded and an average of them all might be helpful always assuming they don't copy each other.
I always try to remember that people are pretty much the same now as in the past, the details of life might be different but the essential driving forces, money, power, sex and spanking remain the same.

There's a writing convention called 'kill your darlings' which discusses killing off characters, especially popular ones. GRRM has a bit of reputation for it, but Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora) makes him look rather squeamish.

Depends how far back you want to go, of course - but assuming your story's set at some point in the last 500 years, I'd recommend using the literature of the period as a rough guide to the way people talked. I've always tried to make the dialogue in my stories true to the period, without sliding too much into costume-drama Hollywoodisms ("Zounds!" "I'faith!" and the like).