When a Book Hangover Spills Over Into Your Writing
If you recall last week’s post, I wrote about book hangovers. Those are the books you read that you love so much that you find it challenging to start the next book because you just want to bask in the halo of the book you just finished. This happened to me recently when I re-listened to Charm City Rocks by Mattew Norman. Turns out the halo/hangover from that book not only caused me to listen to anything other than a new novel but also manifested itself in my writing.
The Genesis of the New Project
A few weeks ago at church, a friend of mine who is an actor started talking about the new indie movie he was in. We chatted and I casually threw out the idea that if he or any of his friends needed any help writing, I’d be game. He then asked me if I had anything for his age range—he’s a few years older than I am—and a story I had completed a few years ago instantly jumped into my head. “Just let me re-read it to make sure it’s as good as I remember,” I told him and went home to print out the story.
Turns out my memory—as good as it is at remembering historical dates, movie trivia, or who played piano on David Bowie’s “Lady Grinning Soul”* from 1973—is not great at remembering my own stories. I read the tale that I wrote as part of a writing course from Dean Wesley Smith. I accurately remembered the setup: guy in a bar waiting to meet his blind date. What I did not remember was the ending.
Spoiler alert: it was a downer. My initial reaction was “Who the heck wrote this because I could have sworn it was a happy ending?” I instantly thought about revising it, to change the ending to one that was happy. I brought it up to various folks including my fellow writers at my day job and their consensus was spot on: Not every story ends like a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Mind. Blown (to the stunningly obvious). And: New project born.
The New Project
Look, I know that not every story has a happy ending. That’s life. That’s literature. That’s just the way things go sometimes. And I know there are a ton of writers who don’t follow the Hallmark script or even the uplifting ending formula.
But I tend to do that. If a person chooses to spend their valuable time reading something I wrote, then I want their ending feeling to be a good one. I like to leave a reader cheering, tearing up, or pounding their fists in the air. The counsel of my family and friends and fellow writers let me know that not every story ends that way.
Okay, I thought, that older story is a meet/cute, that most wonderful moment in a romance where the two main characters actually meet, but it is a down ending. What if I created a collection of short stories, all featuring meet/cutes, and they were written in such a way that the reader, hopefully, won’t guess the ending? I could have half of the tales end happy and half end bittersweet.
Light bulb moment. But where to start?
Generating Ideas
Okay, so AI is here and it’s here to stay. But AI—and ChatGPT in particular—can only spit out what’s already been done before. So don’t hate me when I tell you that I used ChatGPT to generate something like 90+ meet cutes. I asked it to give me quirky ones, bittersweet ones, cinematic ones, happy ones, and everything in between. I compiled a giant list and waded through them. A few things emerged.
A shocking percentage—maybe as much as 10%—involved guy and gal reaching for the last [name your item] and then having to fight or discuss or come up with some sort of contrived compromise where they both get to use the thing. Every one of those was an instant rejection. Some were really, really stupid. Reaching for the last ink cartridge? Seriously.
I solicited input from various folks and culled the list down to about twenty-four: 12 happy endings and 12 bittersweet endings. I ended up revising that old story and I counted it as Story #1. I picked a random odd number—thirteen—and started writing them on July Fourth.
And have been having a blast!
The Stories So Far
The first thing I realized when I started writing the first new story is that my imagination quickly went off-script from the AI-generated story prompt. The directions my prose took vs. what the prompt said I should do were vast. That energized me, as did the process of writing these stories, every one diverging from the initial story prompt as my imagination expanded.
Some were started and ended in a single session on a weekend. Others took a few days. Still more took me a week’s worth of lunchtime writing sessions to complete. Earlier this week, I finished one of my tales while waiting for my car at the mechanic’s shop. Hey: you write when and where time becomes available.
I’ve had romantic elements in many of my stories but these tales are my first outright attempt at romance, and I am loving it. I enjoy telling stories, but to have the imagination focused solely on romance has been eye opening. I laugh at some of the “me” that filters through. For example, I have one meet/cute in which the dogs of the two main human characters meet and like each other. Naturally, I was compelled to create a pair of dogs. Turns out, I have two dogs here in the house. Why not just use them? When I told them about their starring roles in my story, they were nonplussed and unimpressed. Fine. See if I use them again.
For each story, I also decide on the main POV character. To date, only one story switches POVs (back and forth) from the guy to the gal. As a result, I find myself writing multiple female characters. Again nothing new—my first Christmas book, Have Yourself a Merry Christmas Murder, features a female lead—but I’m changing characters with every story and trying to make sure I write accurately from a female’s perspective. Just today, I wrote a scene in which I had the gal react in a particular way and, unsure if that was legit, I asked my female fellow writer and co-worker to read it and see if I did okay. She’s a former teacher so I’m happy to say I passed.
But what about that book hangover I experienced as a result of re-listening to Charm City Rocks? Well, I think I have two or three stories in which the characters are reading the novel and discuss various aspect of it, and one story is directly influenced by the female lead in Norman’s novel.
Titles are another funny thing. The original AI list generated titles and I’ve been using them as a go-by. Saves me time from creating new titles, especially considering I don’t know how the story is going to end when I start writing. To date, I’ve changed the title on only one story, and it was organically generated from the events in the tale. I plan to complete the collection, review, and then retitle accordingly.
Speaking of titles, I’ve already got the title of the book lined up. But you’ll have to wait until the collection is published this fall.
What This New Project Tells Me About My Writing
This collection is my first group of short stories around a central theme. I’ve written short stories in the past but they’ve been one-offs. Nearly everything I’ve written has been novels. Long works of fiction that take weeks, months or years to complete.
This is different, and it’s different specifically because I use different writing muscles for short fiction. I finished my latest novel on Friday, 27 June. I began this new short story collection exactly a week later, on 4 July, and the mental results have been exhilarating and rejuvenating. I’ve long thought that the best antidote to completing a novel was to write short stories but I’ve never put it to the test. I’ve always defaulted to the next novel.
Now I have proof that something like this works. The other evidence: there’s a particular story prompt I fell in love with and instantly realized it was too good for a short story. Guess what my next novel will likely be?
*For those of y’all who remembered I included an asterisk in the early part of this post, the answer is Mike Garson. He played piano on David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album, which not only features his shimmering piano flourishes on the wonderfully atmospheric ending track “Lady Grinning Soul” but also his wild and energetic piano solo on the title song. Give them a listen.