Rani Divine's Blog, page 42

The Fall

Last but not least in the topics I think are far too big to be covered in a short story, is one many of you will disagree with me on.
Falling in Love
See? How many of you disagree already? I see you nodding. You think it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to cover in a short story, and that it’s not that hard to do. But I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. Falling in love isn’t an easy thing, it’s not an act that can be completely covered in 6,000 words or less. There’s too much involved with falling in love, too many things that have to be explained and dealt with. 6,000 words isn’t enough for two people to really get to know each other, to truly fall in love.
But you’ll say that people do it all the time, so why do I think it can’t be done. I’m nearly positive a lot of you are thinking that right now. So I’ll tell you.
A lot of short stories deal in lust, in infatuation, not in love. Love takes time to develop, it takes effort on the part of the writer to take two characters and put them together, to allow them to develop naturally into that sort of relationship. Even now, even after writing so many novels and short stories that I can’t always keep them straight, I can tell you that it took more than a little while to learn how to make two characters fall in love—and how to let them fall in love, when it wasn’t what I was expecting.
Love is a topic that spans a lot of detail, a lot of time. That’s been the ongoing theme of this series, that these are all things that just take way too many words to cover in a short story, but love is the biggest of them all.
If you want to talk about love in a short story, if you want to write a love story, then I’d suggest doing one of two things. Either write a story about two people who are already in love, or write a story that focuses on how two people meet (the meet-cute, you might say) and how they become close enough to each other that they might fall in love at some later date, off the page.
Next week, things too small to stretch out into a novel!
[love]
{Rani}

TMI

Now, I know this whole time I’ve been talking about topics that you shouldn’t try to master in a short story, but today I want to talk about something that you shouldn’t do in a short story. It’s almost impossible to do, really, again because of the limited number of words we’re allowed to have in a short story.
Full Backstories
Don’t take that to mean that you shouldn’t put any backstory into your short stories. Quite the opposite, in fact. Almost every story requires at least a little bit of backstory, something to ground it in whatever world where it takes place. Backstory is the thing that sets a story in time, that makes characters and setting fuller and richer.
But you should never try to put a full backstory in a short story. It’s just not possible.
What you should do, instead, is put snippets of backstory into your work. Your readers want to know about your characters and your setting, but they don’t want to know everything about them. Tell your readers what they need to know, and leave out what they don’t. Of course, that’s what you should be doing anyway, but when it comes to short stories you’ll have to be a little more limiting.
Do not, I repeat, do not, even think about fully fleshing out your characters in a short story. You can get close, but you won’t be able to do it completely.
Take your time when writing a short story, focus on the story. Make your character vivid and real, but don’t feel like you have to add a mass of backstory in order to do it. You don’t. In fact, in a short story, we frequently don’t need more than a hundred words of backstory in all, if even that much.
Backstory is one of those things on which you’ll walk a fine line, and in short stories more than novels. Just remember that we only need enough grounding information to help us understand what’s going on, and not so much that we’ll be drowning between the story and what happened before it.
[love]
{rani d.}

Extra-terrestrials

For once, I’ve actually tried this one. So I thoroughly know what I’m talking about when I say that you really shouldn’t try to tackle this in a short story. I’ve tried, I’ve failed, and I’ve tried again—and failed again. And this is one of the subjects I most enjoy writing. So when I say that you probably shouldn’t try to do this, I really mean it.
Full, Rich, Alien Races
Here’s the problem: aliens aren’t human. Obvious. But it means that they don’t follow the same lifestyles we do. They don’t talk like we do, don’t act like we do, don’t really do much like we do at all. And in order to make a fuller richer alien race, you really need more than a mere 6,000 words. I’m working on a novel series at the moment, Earth-Space, and in it I have two distinct alien races. I’m four books in at this point, and neither of those races has been fully fleshed out. There’s just too much to do to create a fully realistic and lifelike alien race, even for novels.
How you’re supposed to do it with a short story?
I honestly don’t know. Like I said, I’ve tried. And every time, it just falls short. There simply aren’t enough words in a short story to give real life to aliens.
Now, as always, there is an exception. Fan fiction. These are based on already created aliens (for instance, the Goa’uld of the Stargate franchise). If you were to write about them in a short story, there would not be as much backstory or descriptive information for you to cover, because most of it has already been done in the movies and television shows, and you can safely assume that anyone reading your story has already seen at least some of the Stargate shows or movies before, because really, fans are the only ones who read fan fiction. 
But even then, there’s a lot to do when it comes to aliens. They’re so uniquely different from us, so entirely other from all of humanity, that it’s hard to write in any way, shape, or form at all.
If you’re going to try writing aliens, I highly recommend starting out with a novel. That way, you’ll have plenty of wiggle room and a lot of time and space in which to create your alien race. And afterward, if you like, you can cut it down or shave a piece off to use as a short story.
[love]
{rani divine}

Think of the children!

Today’s topic is actually one that I might recommend. It’s been done before, successfully, but it’s not at all easy to do. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of attention to detail, and I must stress that it should not be attempted by anyone but seasoned professionals. 
Why? Because I’ve seen it done by newbies and it invariably fails.
Child or Animal POV
Now, just as a sidebar, I don’t mean children’s lit. I mean adult fiction, written from the point of view of a child or an animal.
As I’m sure you can imagine, that’s more than a little difficult to do. Adults aren’t used to reading something in this sort of POV, and they’re more likely to be either annoyed or confused by it. We older people tend to want to read things about people or humanoids over the age of sixteen. Usually.
However, I’ll say that this is a POV that can be tackled in a novel, if it’s handled properly. I’ve seen it done where one of the main point of view characters is a child, and because only part of the story was in their point of view and those parts were handled properly, it read very well.
I don’t know that it could be done in a short story, at least for a young writer.
So I’d like you to take this one with a grain of salt. If you’re a seasoned professional, then yes please, try it. If you’re not, then I beg you to take your time before trying to delve into this. Children are not easy to write, especially if you’re an adult. It’s hard to remember what things were like when you were a kid, how you thought when you were a child, because all your thoughts of when you were that age have now been tainted by your adulthood. And it’s flat out impossible to imagine what an animal is thinking at any given time, because none of us have ever been an animal, nor can we read their minds.
I’ve never tried it. I’ll also mention that. But I also am not fond of having children in my stories, and honestly I don’t think I’ve ever had an animal in any of them. Maybe a stray dog here and there, but no primary animal characters. And those are all novels, not short stories. I don’t even know how I would hope to manage it in a short story—and after writing twelve novels, I like to think I’m relatively seasoned.
In short, it’s not a POV I’d try to tackle in a short story. Unless you’ve already mastered those POVs in other works, don’t even try it. Please.
[love]
{Rani D.}

The traveler

You know what topic is practically impossible to do in a short story, to where it’s completely fleshed out and makes full sense?
Time Travel
I don’t even know why people try this. I can see how it might be doable in a short story series, but then, that’s fairly akin to being a novel anyway, isn’t it?
The problem with writing time travel into a short story is that it requires two things. Your readers need to understand both (1) time traveler and (2) the place to which they’re traveling. That means you’ll have to do a lot of detail work, which takes up a lot of your words—and when you only have 6,000, that’s a problem.
I don’t recommend trying this. I really don’t. I’ve written time travel work before, and it’s complicated enough to fit into a novel, let alone a short story (honestly, I don't recommend writing time travel at all until you've really studied up on how to do it right). But if you’re going to try it, I recommend having someone travel back to the common era, so you’ll spend most of your time describing the traveler as opposed to the place to which they’ve traveled. But, you’ll also need to describe things in the common era through the POV of your traveler, which will take a lot of time and detail. Remember, they might not understand everything that’s going on in this alternate era, and you don't want to confuse your readers by assuming too much. 
Take 12 Monkeys, for example. I know it's a show (on Syfy, for those who don't know), but bear with me. The viewer wants to know as much about both times as possible, but by putting the destination in the common era, there's a little less for the writers to explain. They can focus on adding more details to the future, while letting the common time stand on its own two feet.

The subject of time travel tends to be one that requires a lot more words, inherently. Of course, like anything else, there are exceptions. I’m sure some of you can think of plenty of examples off the tops of your heads, but in general, it’s not a subject to try to tackle in a short story—especially until you're seasoned and really know what you're doing. It's not a topic for beginners. 
If you want to write something in time travel, then I suggest going for a novel. It’ll be easier to start out with, and you’ll have plenty of wiggle room to get it going.
Actually, that’s good advice anyway. Always assume you’re writing a novel, and then if it’s not long enough, keep cutting until it’s a short story. I like that.
Yeah, that might work for a time travel story. Someone should try it and let me know how it goes. I’d do it, but there are no time travelers in my current novel series *wink*
What do you think? Is time travel something you can thoroughly tackle in a short story? Let me know in the comments!
[love]
{RD}

It's history

Happy Monday, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed last month’s series on Christianity. I liked getting to share some of myself with all of you, and I hope you felt like you got to know me a little better. This month, however, I think it’s time to get back to the writing. After all, this is a writers and editors blog. So for the next four weeks, we’re talking topics. Some things are just too hard to fit into a short story, and others are just too small to stretch out into a novel. That’s what we’re talking about this week.
Just as a side note, these will all be things that I can’t do. You might be able to. Who knows? Other people have, in times past. Me, I just can’t do it. And I'm going to tell you why.
To start off, let’s focus on short stories.
Historical Fiction
I can’t do it. History requires a lot of detail to make it work properly. It just does. And without all that detail, it’s hard to make sense of the story. So for me, historical fiction just can’t be pressed into a short story. Not one that’s short enough to be published in a magazine or some such small publication (usually under 6,000 words).
See, for a fully fleshed historical work, you need to go into the time period, the clothing, the style. You can’t just throw something together and pretend it’s accurate historical fiction—and you really don’t want to confuse your readers by throwing them into historical fiction without that detail and background. It tends to make things convoluted, and then nothing's working properly.
It’s not that you shouldn’t write historical fiction, or that you shouldn’t try to write it into a short story. It’s that this genre really prefers a novel setting. If you’re going to make it into a short story, you’ll have to be very cautious in how you do it, to make sure things aren’t jumbled and confusing. You'll have to put in a lot of time and effort, and you'll probably have to write it more than a few times before you get the right balance of story and background information. 
For me, that's just too much to do. I don't like to take the time to write a mass of backstory when I'm working on a short story. I'll do it for novels, no problem, but not short stories. Maybe that's just me.
You might be able to do it. You might. But you might also end up with a mess that’s just confusing and unpublishable. In my mind, that seems the most likely.
Me? I can’t do it. Cue, the Druid Novels. Semi-historical fantasy fiction. Woo!
[love]
{Rani D.}

The Christ.

To finish our month-long series, I wanted to spend some time talking about the simplest and most basic part of Christianity, and also the very most important part.
Who is Jesus Christ?
Well, Jesus is the Son of God.
That’s the easy answer. But since we talked about the Trinity on Wednesday, we also know that He’s the human person of the Almighty God. He is reason Christianity as we know it even exists at all. Before Jesus, Christianity wouldn’t have been possible. Jews did not share their faith, because they didn’t really have faith. In those days, you were either Jewish or you weren’t. Most people weren’t. But Jesus came to change that, and to give the rest of us the possibility of freedom.
See, Jesus is the person of the Trinity who came down to Earth. He was born of the virgin, Mary, a Jew. He was without sin, in the whole of his life. His ministry began when he was in his thirties, and lasted only about three years before he was beaten and hung upon the cross. But the cross was not the end. In fact, it was more like the beginning, for us.
When Jesus died on the cross, no one took His life from Him. He gave up His life for us. As a sinless man, death had not touched Him. It couldn’t touch Him. Death is part of the curse that came upon humanity when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, so that anyone who sins falls short and must therefore perish. But Jesus didn’t fall short. He wasn’t born of a man, he was born of God, and so he was not subject to the terms of that curse. He was subject only to humanness, by the fact of being born from the womb of a woman.
So when He died, He died a perfect and holy sacrifice unto God. He gave up His life, His perfect life, so that the rest of us could live.
But maybe that doesn’t make sense.
I’m not going to pretend to understand Jewish customs even in the slightest, but what I understand is that the priests would frequently sacrifice pure and spotless lambs to God, to cover the sins of the people. But they had to keep killing lambs, over and over, because a lamb could never take the place of a person.
Jesus, on the other hand, was human.
So when He died, He took our place. We no longer have to die. Not like He did. Because of what He did, we now have the ability to go to heaven when we leave this Earth. Before Jesus, that wasn’t possible.
He is the one who brought salvation.
Because He was lashed, we are healed. Because He was bruised, He has taken our iniquities. Because He is perfect, unblemished, without spot, He gave us the ability to be free.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31).
That’s from the Bible. And you know what we’ve been saying? The Bible is the Word of God, and because God is God and cannot lie, the Bible must be true. Therefore, if you do not believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you will not be saved. That’s what it says. The Bible is very black and white, despite those who try to make it grey.
That’s who Jesus is. He’s our namesake, our freedom, our salvation. We live because of Him. We live for Him. We live in Him and through Him. 
We live, because He lived. 
We love, because He loved.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Three.

One of the questions I’ve gotten from a lot of people who don’t know much about Christianity is the question of the Trinity. It’s a tough one to tackle, but I’m willing to give it a go. You’ve asked, and now I’ll do my level best to give you an answer.
God is one, and God is three. He is the three in one, the trinity. (didn’t mean to rhyme there)
But in terms of humanity, that doesn’t make any sense. He would have to have multiple personality disorder for that to even work, right? Wrong.
All three persons of God are indeed God, but they all play their different roles. Think of it like a married person who has a child and a job. They’re a husband or wife, a mother or father, and a business person—but they’re still the same person, defined within one being. That’s not quite how it works, but that’s probably the simplest terms I can put the Trinity within.
See, God has three distinct roles played by the three different persons of the Trinity.
God the Father is who I’ve spent the most time talking about in this series. God the Father is just that, He’s our Father. He’s the one who makes plans for us (Jeremiah 29:11) the one who blesses us (Deuteronomy 29) and the one with whom we make a covenant.
God the Son is Jesus Christ. He is the human person of the Almighty, who came down to Earth and gave up His life unto the wicked one so that we may have salvation. Jesus Christ the one from whom we get the name “Christian.” In Him we have salvation (wherein He lives within our hearts), we have healing, and we have an intercessor. He is ever in heaven praying on our behalf unto God the Father.
God the Spirit is the Holy Spirit, the one left here on Earth by Jesus when he returned to the heavens to be seated on the right hand of God the Father. The Holy Spirit is our counselor, our comfort. He is always here for us. When we are baptized in the Holy Spirit, we are able to better communicate with God the Father, through our own prayer language and through a deeper level of understanding of the Spirit.
Those are the three persons of God, and they are all contained within one: the Almighty God. Usually, Christians refer to the three by name. When we’re talking about Jesus, we’ll call him Jesus, and so on. But when we talk about God, singular God, we speak of all three. For all three are God, and all three are the basis of our faith.
[love]
{Rani Divine}

Planned.

Jeremiah 29:11 is one of those verses that Christians quote not infrequently, to themselves and to people around them. It’s one of our go-to scriptures, because it’s a promise from God. But today I want to delve just a little bit into what it really means and what we can believe in for ourselves, from the promise of our Lord.
Let’s start by reading the whole verse:
Jeremiah 29:11 – For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
I’d like to begin now by reminding you that though the Bible is a huge book, though there seems to be a lot in it that has to be learned and understood in order to really get what Christianity is and what faith in God is, the faith is really very simple, and the message within the Bible is equally simple. When the Bible says something, it is true. No matter what. So when we look at this verse, we can know without doubt that what it says is true.
To break it down further…
1. I know the plans I have for you
Because we know that the Bible is true and that whatever it says must also be truth, in that it is the Word of God and God cannot lie, we know this means God has plans for each and every one of us. Whether you believe in Him or not right now, He has plans for you. His will is for you to carry out those plans with your life.
2. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you
To me, this section is another reminder that God doesn’t want us to suffer in any way. That means He would never wish for us to be ill. So to those of you who say that God made you sick to teach you a lesson, please stop lying to yourself. There is nowhere in the Bible that God made anyone ill for any reason (nope, not even Job — God didn't do that). He never caused any of His people to suffer. They did that themselves. Follow Him, follow the plans He has for you, and there will be prospering—not suffering.
3. Plans to give you hope and a future
The only hope there is, comes from God. That hope lies in Jesus Christ. God gave us hope. Without Christ, there would be no hope for us whatsoever. And without hope, we can have no future.
So because we know that God is truth, that what He says must also be truth, we can say this:
God has made plans for each and every one of us. We are His children, and like any good father, He makes plans for us. Those plans do not involve bringing us to any form of harm. Instead, like any good father, God’s plans for us are for prosperity. He has given us hope in Jesus Christ, and therefore a bright future as well, one where we are free from torment and shame.
Praise the Lord for that.
[love]
{Rani D.}

Miracle.

All over the New Testament, we see people performing miracles. People are healed, they’re saved, they’re freed from possession and strife. If you’ve read any of the New Testament, perhaps especially Matthew-Acts, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The Bible is full of miracles, of God doing the supernatural for the benefit of His people.
Nowadays, there are plenty of people who say miracles were for a different time, that since Biblical times, we no longer experience miracles, that God essentially changed His mind.
Today, I’m here to tell you that this is simply not the case.
Let’s start out with a verse:
Hebrews 3:18 – Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (NIV)
Jesus is God. They’re the same person, the same entity, the same being. And if Jesus cannot change, then God cannot change either. If He were to change, then He would be a liar, and He would no longer be God. 
It is not within His power to lie, to change His ways.
But I bet you're thinking, what does that have to do with miracles?
Well, miracles took place plentifully in the Bible. In the New Testament, Christians performed miracles in the name of Jesus. That was God’s will for His people, that we should go out and be as Christ. That’s why we call ourselves Christians, or “little Christs.” Our purpose is to be like Him, to mirror His time on this Earth.
Mark 16: 17-18 reminds us of this:  
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (KJV)
That’s what we’re supposed to be like. Those are the things we’re supposed to be doing. God didn’t change His mind – He doesn’t do that. To do so would make Him changeable, which would not make Him God.
Miracles are intended to still occur. In fact, they still do. People receive healings from God every day. They do. All you have to do is look, and you’ll find them. He’s still out there, He’s still working in signs, wonders, and miracles – and He still desires for His people to be well. 
We should have no excuse not to carry out His work in this manner, in love. 
[love]
{Rani Divine}