Thanks everybody for your comments on my short story “Razor Games”. I’m glad you all enjoyed it. It has an interesting evolution, and since it was such a learning experience for me, I thought someone else might gain wisdom from this as well.
When I first sent the draft to Steve to look over, it was about 20 pages long, with another 40 forthcoming. Let me say here and now, I had PRIDE in this thing. Like a mother after 20 hours of labor, or a successful brain tumor operation. Following the set rules of storytelling, I laid out characters, theme, plot, etc. to the letter. I had history. I had dialogue. I had action. I had flying cars. I had hot chicks and studly warriors.
I had no clue whatsoever.
My short story was a bloated warthog. This thing was Ben-Hur with spetsdods. The unfinished rough draft alone was the size of three Gothic novels, fully illustrated. Not the shortest of blog-post short stories. Obviously, I had no idea what the word “short” meant in literary terms. I had so much history of Talis coming, and the fight scenes were longer than the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Steve was really a lot more supportive than he comes across in the comments section, telling me this was actually great stuff…If I was writing an actual Matador novel. Which I wasn’t. He then proceeded to tell me what he thought I should cut, how I needed to reword some things, and where the story should really start. Which of course, made me consider telling him where he needed to stick it. Didn’t he understand? How will you unwashed masses know why Talis is like this, and how he’s suffered through his life, and what all this means to him if I don’t spell it out for you? You’ll never make the connection between my take on the Matadors and Ingmar Bergman's “The Seventh Seal” without my 60 page dissertation! Oh, the crimson woe of it all!
So after stewing in it for a few days, I started to flip Steve some smartass comment about him just not understanding the literary art, and hacked my story up even further than he did. Furthermore, I put the last scene first, chopped my witty dialogue down to a couple of one liners, trimmed the looooooooong fight scenes, and lastly, led several of the juicer characters out behind my house and put a bullet into their brains. (This is a writer’s technique called “Killing your darlings” – you often have to chop out your favorite part of the story to make it flow better.)
I did all this out of spite, you understand.
Perry’s reply email: “NOW, you have a story!” (verbatim)
God dammit. You know what? It really did look good. If it wasn’t for the hard way, I wouldn’t learn jack shit.
I used to write in direct linear sequence, meaning as a thing happened chronologically so would you read about it. This was my first attempt at nonlinear sequencing, and I’m glad I did it. I think it works great here, and it’s certainly changed how I write.
The story is one long fight scene interspaced with a few flashbacks that break it up enough to keep it from becoming monotonous. If you just couple the fight scenes themselves together (and add about four more pages) you would have the ending as I originally wrote it. One well choreographed, hellishly long, mind numbingly dull fight scene. Looking at the original draft now, I can’t believe I didn’t see this. Live and learn, I guess. Unless you belong to one of those dopey religious cults that plays with pit vipers hoping God will protect you. Then it’s usually a one-lesson deal.
The original title was “The Braided Laser” and I was giving a lot of backstory to this one particular move, making it a near-insurmountable challenge for Talis. He pops his ankle trying it, as you all know. There were several points in the story where he gets closer to pulling it off, but is kicked out before he can really master it. His fight with
Also, it’s fun to say.
Steve left that opening quote from Khadaji alone, and I'm glad he did. I always imagined Emile would one day write his memoirs, and I thought this would be a direct quote, like the opening of every chapter in Dune. I was especially proud of that & I'm not sure I would have been able to kill it off. I'm only one man.
There was a point where
So that’s the story, the “making of Razor Games“ featurette and the lessons I learned in the process. I wasn’t trying to copy Steve’s style, but by the time I figured out which shoe went on which foot, it looked an awful lot like the Old Man himself was ghostwriting it. Which, I want to make clear, he didn’t. But without his help, this wouldn’t have been a growing experience, just a writing exercise. So…
*Swallows Pride*
Thanks, Steve.
Now to slash my Lovecraft novel all to hell…
3 comments:
Addendum, the lesson:
Mostly the reason I didn't like that scene you thought was so clever, aside from the inelegant shotgun spetsdod -- the reason that Khadaji chose that weapon was a big deal in the original book -- was the fact it was going to cost Tal months in the Healy to recover.
Think about that. Months? What kind of organization puts its own out of commission for that long?
Not necessary to make the point. Putting an enemy into a coma for six moths, sure. One of your own? Keeping him -- and the expensive Healy -- tied up for that long?
You have to think such things through. It can't just look or sound cool, it needs a reason. If you were going to do it anyhow, you'd need to tell us why and make us believe it.
There's a scene in Butch and Sundance wherein the Strother Martin mine foreman is interviewing the boys for a job as guards. He wants to see how well they can shoot. He throws a plug of chewing tobacco out and says, "Hit that."
Butch loosens his six-shooter in the holster, getting ready to draw. Martin stops him. No, just show me you can shoot your piece.
So Butch takes his gun out slowly, aims, shoots ... and misses.
Martin shakes his head and starts to turn away.
Butch says, "Can I move?"
Martin raises an eyebrow. Say what?
Butch draws in a blur, point shoots, kicks the plug up into the air with his first shot, fans the gun again, and hits the plug in the air, blowing it away.
Martin stares at him.
Butch says, "I'm better when I move."
That establishes worlds about the Sundance Kid, if you didn't get it in the opening scene when the gambler who has insulted him says, "How good are you?" and Butch leaps out of the way like a scared rabbit because he knows exactly what his buddy is gonna do.
William Goldman is brilliant at writing this kind of thing. And he keeps coming back to it for the story's throughline: As smart as Butch is, as fast as Sundance is, they doomed by their natures.
A rifle is a much better weapon than a pistol, holds more ammo, reaches farther, hits harder, but the only guys who ever seemed to use one of those as a primary weapon in cowboy movies were Chuck Connors, in The Rifleman, and Tom Selleck, in Quigley Down Under. Revolvers and pistols are much more limited, but they produce a different kind of shootout. Doc Holliday had a shotgun at the OK Corral -- but that was because he was a lousy shot with a handgun. Everybody else was using sidearms. Not the most efficient way to go, but that was how it went.
A smart man who was expecting trouble and couldn't get out of going to meet it would be carrying a rifle. Unless he was trying to make a point.
Spetsdods *are* the Matador's lightsabers. Making them more effective takes away the reason for using them. Any idiot can pick up a blaster. A spetsdod requires skill and a lot of practice.
It's a continuing process, Kid, you have to keep moving or moss grows on you.
Two unrelated comments:
1. Steven Brust once wrote that Roger Zelazny told him that the way to write short fiction is "Write the last chapter of a novel." That might or might not always be the way to do it but "Razor Games" had that feeling to it ... a natural conclusion to a longer, complex tale of the Matadors. You didn't have to explain everything because these characters embody by their actions (almost) everything that you've had them go through in the course of the novel that happened in your mind as you wrote it. It was a good story.
2. For a different take on cutting a story down to its bones, there's a flash fiction site called 365tomorrows.com which puts up a short story every day ... 600 words or less. I wrote two stories on there (back when I was writing) and I can speak from experience that it is one way to really focus your story on the essentials.
*shrug* Your mileage may vary.
Don't forget that Quigley turned out to be a lightning quick-draw at the end of that movie, although he never carried a pistol because he liked that rifle.
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