Josh Hilden's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Opening The Box of Busted Stories
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs
When a story just doesn’t work there’s only one option, you have to kill it.
Now before you start screaming at me just let me finish the thought. I don’t mean when you hit a hard spot or you encounter a bit of the old writers block that you take your story out back and put a bullet in its head. That would be insanity. I am a firm believer in setting those stories aside, writing something completely different, and then coming back to the trouble spot with fresh eyes. Nine times out of ten that does the trick with no muss or fuss.
Then there are the busted stories.
When I was 14 my father got me a foot locker for Christmas. Actually it’s a cube roughly two feet by two feet and is garishly anointed with the colors and symbols of the University of Michigan. For several years I primarily used it as my porn bunker.
Don’t know what a porn bunker is?
Damn kids, fine I’ll explain but pay attention because I’m only going to do this once. In the bad old days before the internet we had to get our porn in one of the physical mediums. Either books, magazines, photos (usually Polaroid’s you damn hipsters), or video cassettes. The problem with all of these forbidden objects, aside from acquiring them in the first place, was storing them where they would be both safe from parental discovery and yet remain convenient for firing off some knuckle children at a moment’s notice. My big yellow, sorry maize, and blue box was the perfect option.
That was until I hit 16 and didn’t care if they found my porn or not. That was when the porn, the glorious dirty physical porn, made the migration from the box to my nightstand. I mean really where the hell else in the years before the smart phone and tablet computer should an honest teenager have kept their porn? That’s right, we kept the smut as close to the bed as possible and near the tissues!
So what happened to the box?
I didn’t get my first computer, a clunky slow as hell behemoth, until 1998. Until then all of the writing I did, and I mean all of it, was done by hand. But this was before I had the courage to let friends read my stories let alone try and have them published so each and every one of them were effectively dead on arrival. As they died, either finished or unfinished they found their way into the Box of Busted Stories.
Every writer above a certain age has one, or many, of these boxes. Mine currently live in my basement nestled beneath the stairs alongside one of my dozens of comic book long boxes. Inside are hundreds of short stories, dozens of novellas, and three unfinished novels. It’s a glorious sight and some of the worst writing I’ve ever read in my entire life… I love every inch of it!
Right now you’re probably thinking some version of, “Hey Josh, that’s cool and everything, but what does any of this have to do with anything?”
Well keep you panties on if you’re wearing any and put some on if you’re not, I’m getting there. Once I switched to computer based creation I closed the physical Box of Busted Stories and added no more. Then I opened the virtual Box of Busted Stories. The first iteration was on a bright green 3.5x5 inch floppy and the current is a folder in my Drop Box backed up on an external hard drive.
I know EVERY writer has one of these.
The box contains story ideas, notes, and of course stories that died before they could reach that point of self sustainability. Once a story ends up in the current version of the Box of Busted Stories I’m done with it, it never comes back to life. These ARE the stories I’ve taken out behind the barn and told to look at the flowers. This is a law of my creative reality.
Or at least it was until last week.
I’d just finished a novella and was enjoying the post first draft high when I decided to open The Box. I don’t know what made me do it. I almost never skim the contents of the Box of Busted Stories. I mean seriously who the hell wants to be reminded of all their failures? But I did and I’m glad I broke my own rules, just this once.
To put it all in perspective, and to quote a wise and powerful man;
"Chicken arise! Arise chicken! Arise!"
- Billy Witch Doctor
In the trunk was a very old story called “Down The Old Road” (Seriously before I was actually publishing my titles were so pretentious they now make me want to vomit) a post apocalyptic alien invasion story I began in 2011. I got about ten thousand words into it and threw it down, the clunky disjointed tale was too much for me to handle back then so I did what I always did when things got hard back then. I ran away and back to the world of zombies. I remembered really digging the bones of the story so last week I opened that file back up and gave it a read through.
Whoa boy was my writing bad back then.
But grammar and structure aside the core of the tale was still strong. Yeah it needed a lot of help but maybe I’d consigned the story to a Carolesque fate too soon. So last week I did the unthinkable, I took a story out of the Box of Busted Stories and put it back on my working pile.
First I needed to edit and repair what was already there. It wasn’t fun, this was harder than a rewrite or an edit. This was more like tearing a house down to the foundation and studs and then starting over. Once I was finished with phase one the story went from just shy of ten thousand words to a hair over six thousand.
So yeah, I did some major renovations.
After the foundation was fixed I went back to writing and as of this moment I am closing in on twenty thousand words. The book, now retitled “The Long Night Book 1: Night Falls” will probably clock in around twenty five thousand words when I send it to my editor. I like to think of it as Lord of the Rings meets Hell Comes to Frogtown meets Independence Day set almost two centuries after the apocalypse.
Yes I know how that sounds… it sounds amazeballs!
So what was my point in all of this besides talking about my new project? I recommend all writers stop and look in their own Box of Busted Stories. Yeah most of what you’ll find deserves to be in there with the bullet still lodged in the back of their heads. But I’m willing to bet there are a few dusty unpolished gems in there. Take an hour every year check them out, you might be happy you did.
Unless it’s still your porn bunker… if that’s the case you have issues and probably need tissues.
- Josh
—William S. Burroughs
When a story just doesn’t work there’s only one option, you have to kill it.
Now before you start screaming at me just let me finish the thought. I don’t mean when you hit a hard spot or you encounter a bit of the old writers block that you take your story out back and put a bullet in its head. That would be insanity. I am a firm believer in setting those stories aside, writing something completely different, and then coming back to the trouble spot with fresh eyes. Nine times out of ten that does the trick with no muss or fuss.
Then there are the busted stories.
When I was 14 my father got me a foot locker for Christmas. Actually it’s a cube roughly two feet by two feet and is garishly anointed with the colors and symbols of the University of Michigan. For several years I primarily used it as my porn bunker.
Don’t know what a porn bunker is?
Damn kids, fine I’ll explain but pay attention because I’m only going to do this once. In the bad old days before the internet we had to get our porn in one of the physical mediums. Either books, magazines, photos (usually Polaroid’s you damn hipsters), or video cassettes. The problem with all of these forbidden objects, aside from acquiring them in the first place, was storing them where they would be both safe from parental discovery and yet remain convenient for firing off some knuckle children at a moment’s notice. My big yellow, sorry maize, and blue box was the perfect option.
That was until I hit 16 and didn’t care if they found my porn or not. That was when the porn, the glorious dirty physical porn, made the migration from the box to my nightstand. I mean really where the hell else in the years before the smart phone and tablet computer should an honest teenager have kept their porn? That’s right, we kept the smut as close to the bed as possible and near the tissues!
So what happened to the box?
I didn’t get my first computer, a clunky slow as hell behemoth, until 1998. Until then all of the writing I did, and I mean all of it, was done by hand. But this was before I had the courage to let friends read my stories let alone try and have them published so each and every one of them were effectively dead on arrival. As they died, either finished or unfinished they found their way into the Box of Busted Stories.
Every writer above a certain age has one, or many, of these boxes. Mine currently live in my basement nestled beneath the stairs alongside one of my dozens of comic book long boxes. Inside are hundreds of short stories, dozens of novellas, and three unfinished novels. It’s a glorious sight and some of the worst writing I’ve ever read in my entire life… I love every inch of it!
Right now you’re probably thinking some version of, “Hey Josh, that’s cool and everything, but what does any of this have to do with anything?”
Well keep you panties on if you’re wearing any and put some on if you’re not, I’m getting there. Once I switched to computer based creation I closed the physical Box of Busted Stories and added no more. Then I opened the virtual Box of Busted Stories. The first iteration was on a bright green 3.5x5 inch floppy and the current is a folder in my Drop Box backed up on an external hard drive.
I know EVERY writer has one of these.
The box contains story ideas, notes, and of course stories that died before they could reach that point of self sustainability. Once a story ends up in the current version of the Box of Busted Stories I’m done with it, it never comes back to life. These ARE the stories I’ve taken out behind the barn and told to look at the flowers. This is a law of my creative reality.
Or at least it was until last week.
I’d just finished a novella and was enjoying the post first draft high when I decided to open The Box. I don’t know what made me do it. I almost never skim the contents of the Box of Busted Stories. I mean seriously who the hell wants to be reminded of all their failures? But I did and I’m glad I broke my own rules, just this once.
To put it all in perspective, and to quote a wise and powerful man;
"Chicken arise! Arise chicken! Arise!"
- Billy Witch Doctor
In the trunk was a very old story called “Down The Old Road” (Seriously before I was actually publishing my titles were so pretentious they now make me want to vomit) a post apocalyptic alien invasion story I began in 2011. I got about ten thousand words into it and threw it down, the clunky disjointed tale was too much for me to handle back then so I did what I always did when things got hard back then. I ran away and back to the world of zombies. I remembered really digging the bones of the story so last week I opened that file back up and gave it a read through.
Whoa boy was my writing bad back then.
But grammar and structure aside the core of the tale was still strong. Yeah it needed a lot of help but maybe I’d consigned the story to a Carolesque fate too soon. So last week I did the unthinkable, I took a story out of the Box of Busted Stories and put it back on my working pile.
First I needed to edit and repair what was already there. It wasn’t fun, this was harder than a rewrite or an edit. This was more like tearing a house down to the foundation and studs and then starting over. Once I was finished with phase one the story went from just shy of ten thousand words to a hair over six thousand.
So yeah, I did some major renovations.
After the foundation was fixed I went back to writing and as of this moment I am closing in on twenty thousand words. The book, now retitled “The Long Night Book 1: Night Falls” will probably clock in around twenty five thousand words when I send it to my editor. I like to think of it as Lord of the Rings meets Hell Comes to Frogtown meets Independence Day set almost two centuries after the apocalypse.
Yes I know how that sounds… it sounds amazeballs!
So what was my point in all of this besides talking about my new project? I recommend all writers stop and look in their own Box of Busted Stories. Yeah most of what you’ll find deserves to be in there with the bullet still lodged in the back of their heads. But I’m willing to bet there are a few dusty unpolished gems in there. Take an hour every year check them out, you might be happy you did.
Unless it’s still your porn bunker… if that’s the case you have issues and probably need tissues.
- Josh
The Original Longhand Gangsta
Here's an interesting tidbit about the life of a proto-writer for you to chew on.
I'm in a lot, like wat too many, Facebook writers groups. The predominant members of these groups are fresh writers who, despite their various ages, are just learning their chops. There are also writers, like me, who've been at this for a while and know a thing or two. Mostly we've learned these things through brutal trial and error.
Brutal man, just brutal.
More often than not, the older (more experienced) writers do their best to help sheppard the newbies along. But there's always those sanctimonious condescending jackasses who don't want to help. All they do is try and ram their ways of doing things down the new writer's throats.
I've witnessed more than one new writer being destroyed by their "Peers" when they're seeking out help and advice. There are plenty of so-called writers who seem to think they must cull those they feel aren't worthy from the writing world.
Of course, this isn't a new thing. As long as there have been writers, there have been critics and trolls in one form or another. Let me give you an example from my own experiences in the pre-internet (for 99.9% of humanity) world.
I've been a writer my entire life, or at least since I could pick up a crayon and put words in a semi-logical order. My writer's journey started in the early 1980s. Suffice it to say I had no access to a computer, and I had no inclination towards learning to use a typewriter. So I wrote everything longhand from those first crayon stories until my teenage years.
Let me say right up front, I hated it with the fire of a thousand stars.
Ok, maybe not. But it sounds cool. Right?
When I write longhand, my hand hurts, and my wrist hurts. Inevitably writing longhand leads to an inability to concentrate, and everything feeling thick and muddy. Writing longhand, for me, has always been a torturous process. Eventually, it got so bad that it almost made me give up writing. In the end, I wrote two novels no one will ever see, longhand and dozens of short stories.
I still hate working longhand.
Now let's fast forward a few years from my nascent years. We're taking a journey all the way to the fabulous year of 1994. I was a High School senior in Belleville, Michigan. I worked 32+ hours every week at McDonald's while still going to school. I was obsessed with REM (I still am and always will be), Star Trek, comic books, Palladium Books RPG's, and at the time the Lord of the Rings was my safe place.
I think it's safe to say that 17-year-old Josh was a geek of Lewis Scholnick proportions (without all of the bounce house rape).
I can assure you 43-year-old Josh is worse (again, without the bounce house rape).
When I was in Junior High and high school, I took a lot of English and Creative Writing classes. Even then, I wanted to learn and hone my chops. Of course, back then, I thought I was a great writer just bursting with talent. If you thought about your writing, please take a second and look at your stories from back then.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Did you read them?
Do you want to roll up into a ball due to the shame?
Relax, we all feel that way.
In my senior year, I had a creative writing teacher, I will never forget. And trust me boils and ghouls, it's not for a Good Will Hunting reason either. He was one of those teachers who brooked no dissension. You'd do everything exactly the way he told you, and you'd like it. I won't go as far as calling him a Writing Nazi, it never seemed like he hated the Jewish students. But I will say he was a breed of fascist when it came to the craft of writing. I wish I could tell you he was a rarity, but a lot of the old school writers fall into this category.
I went through the Hilden-Maynard school of criticism, so I could more or less handle all of his bullshit. All of it that is, except for one thing.
This teacher, let's call him Teacher X, insisted every first draft must be produced in that damnable longhand. If we didn't turn in a longhand version, we'd receive a zero for the entire assignment. Considering we only had a set number of projects, and each weighed heavily, a single zero would have tanked us.
I handled it, like I said, until one particular project that stuck in my craw.
We were assigned a 10,000 story on any subject and in any genre we wanted. I went for post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi (shocker, I know. Water is wet, and Josh loves end of the world fiction). More than any other time, my hand hurt. It felt like my wrist was on fire as I wrote. I wanted to stop, but in the end, I did the damn longhand version (wasn't much of a rebel back then, or now for that matter) and suffered the days of aches and pain in my right hand.
Interesting side note. These days I live with moderate nerve damage in my right hand.
After we moved on to the finished the computer drafted versions and received our grades, I approached Teacher X to question his position. I told him I thought being forced to work longhand was pointless. I asked Teacher X why it was so necessary that we wrote in longhand first.
Teacher X's answer was significantly less than satisfying.
He said all of the great writers of the past used the longhand method for t least the first draft. He told me it was the way it should be done. He said longhand made you really feel the story in a way typewriters and computers didn't ( I still don't get that one).
I bet you either think I'm going to say I told him off or that he convinced me he was right.
I did neither (remember, I'm no rebel).
Years, really more than a decade later, I got my writer's legs under me. These days I write only on a computer.
Do you know what happened when I went solely digital (Because I hate typewriters, like seriously I'd shotgun one if I had to use it)?
For the first time, I was able to actually write and concentrate without the physical discomfort of longhand.
Long story short (I know, too late) I'm not saying people who write longhand are wrong. I am saying a writer should write in a manner best suited for them and their comfort level.
Do what works best for you.
Please, new writers, don't let anyone else tell you how to do it.
Fuck the writing fascists.
- Josh (06/20/20)
I'm in a lot, like wat too many, Facebook writers groups. The predominant members of these groups are fresh writers who, despite their various ages, are just learning their chops. There are also writers, like me, who've been at this for a while and know a thing or two. Mostly we've learned these things through brutal trial and error.
Brutal man, just brutal.
More often than not, the older (more experienced) writers do their best to help sheppard the newbies along. But there's always those sanctimonious condescending jackasses who don't want to help. All they do is try and ram their ways of doing things down the new writer's throats.
I've witnessed more than one new writer being destroyed by their "Peers" when they're seeking out help and advice. There are plenty of so-called writers who seem to think they must cull those they feel aren't worthy from the writing world.
Of course, this isn't a new thing. As long as there have been writers, there have been critics and trolls in one form or another. Let me give you an example from my own experiences in the pre-internet (for 99.9% of humanity) world.
I've been a writer my entire life, or at least since I could pick up a crayon and put words in a semi-logical order. My writer's journey started in the early 1980s. Suffice it to say I had no access to a computer, and I had no inclination towards learning to use a typewriter. So I wrote everything longhand from those first crayon stories until my teenage years.
Let me say right up front, I hated it with the fire of a thousand stars.
Ok, maybe not. But it sounds cool. Right?
When I write longhand, my hand hurts, and my wrist hurts. Inevitably writing longhand leads to an inability to concentrate, and everything feeling thick and muddy. Writing longhand, for me, has always been a torturous process. Eventually, it got so bad that it almost made me give up writing. In the end, I wrote two novels no one will ever see, longhand and dozens of short stories.
I still hate working longhand.
Now let's fast forward a few years from my nascent years. We're taking a journey all the way to the fabulous year of 1994. I was a High School senior in Belleville, Michigan. I worked 32+ hours every week at McDonald's while still going to school. I was obsessed with REM (I still am and always will be), Star Trek, comic books, Palladium Books RPG's, and at the time the Lord of the Rings was my safe place.
I think it's safe to say that 17-year-old Josh was a geek of Lewis Scholnick proportions (without all of the bounce house rape).
I can assure you 43-year-old Josh is worse (again, without the bounce house rape).
When I was in Junior High and high school, I took a lot of English and Creative Writing classes. Even then, I wanted to learn and hone my chops. Of course, back then, I thought I was a great writer just bursting with talent. If you thought about your writing, please take a second and look at your stories from back then.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Did you read them?
Do you want to roll up into a ball due to the shame?
Relax, we all feel that way.
In my senior year, I had a creative writing teacher, I will never forget. And trust me boils and ghouls, it's not for a Good Will Hunting reason either. He was one of those teachers who brooked no dissension. You'd do everything exactly the way he told you, and you'd like it. I won't go as far as calling him a Writing Nazi, it never seemed like he hated the Jewish students. But I will say he was a breed of fascist when it came to the craft of writing. I wish I could tell you he was a rarity, but a lot of the old school writers fall into this category.
I went through the Hilden-Maynard school of criticism, so I could more or less handle all of his bullshit. All of it that is, except for one thing.
This teacher, let's call him Teacher X, insisted every first draft must be produced in that damnable longhand. If we didn't turn in a longhand version, we'd receive a zero for the entire assignment. Considering we only had a set number of projects, and each weighed heavily, a single zero would have tanked us.
I handled it, like I said, until one particular project that stuck in my craw.
We were assigned a 10,000 story on any subject and in any genre we wanted. I went for post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi (shocker, I know. Water is wet, and Josh loves end of the world fiction). More than any other time, my hand hurt. It felt like my wrist was on fire as I wrote. I wanted to stop, but in the end, I did the damn longhand version (wasn't much of a rebel back then, or now for that matter) and suffered the days of aches and pain in my right hand.
Interesting side note. These days I live with moderate nerve damage in my right hand.
After we moved on to the finished the computer drafted versions and received our grades, I approached Teacher X to question his position. I told him I thought being forced to work longhand was pointless. I asked Teacher X why it was so necessary that we wrote in longhand first.
Teacher X's answer was significantly less than satisfying.
He said all of the great writers of the past used the longhand method for t least the first draft. He told me it was the way it should be done. He said longhand made you really feel the story in a way typewriters and computers didn't ( I still don't get that one).
I bet you either think I'm going to say I told him off or that he convinced me he was right.
I did neither (remember, I'm no rebel).
Years, really more than a decade later, I got my writer's legs under me. These days I write only on a computer.
Do you know what happened when I went solely digital (Because I hate typewriters, like seriously I'd shotgun one if I had to use it)?
For the first time, I was able to actually write and concentrate without the physical discomfort of longhand.
Long story short (I know, too late) I'm not saying people who write longhand are wrong. I am saying a writer should write in a manner best suited for them and their comfort level.
Do what works best for you.
Please, new writers, don't let anyone else tell you how to do it.
Fuck the writing fascists.
- Josh (06/20/20)
