The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Munitions Run (Flash Fiction)

    “Can I come this time?”Charlotte asked, loudly popping her gum.

    Gale glared at his little sister. “No way. You’re still too young.” He slid the red wagon from its hiding place at the back of the playhouse, under the clunky wooden desk their mother had salvaged from some auction or other.

    “I’m not too young. Sassy goes with her brother all the time. Besides, you’re only three years older than me.”

    “Practically four years,” he said as he pried loose one of the floorboards. Inside, nestled in a cocoon of hay, lay the stash of coal black shotguns and boxes of shotgun shells. He gently picked each one up, checked to make sure they weren’t loaded, set them inside the wagon, and then added several boxes of bullets. “And Sassy knows how to use one of these. You’re still too sporadic.”

    She popped another bubble and crossed her arms over her chest. “Am not. I can hit three out of five.”

    (more…)

  • Neighborhood Watch (Flash Fiction)

    I’ve always liked watching my neighbors.

    Not in a pervy kind of way. I mean, I know how that sounds. You’re immediately like, “Oh, he’s the guy who defiles himself behind the half-drawn curtain while the single mom next door sunbathes in her backyard.”

    I’m not some kind of deviant. I just like to know what’s going on along my block. It’s always been a nice, quiet kind of place. It didn’t really start to go to hell until the clown moved in across the street.

    Now I’m not prejudice against clowns as a whole, other than the fact that they’re evil incarnate and largely devoid of souls. In the pantheon of creepy-ass shit, clowns rank right up there with ice cream truck drivers, because you know something shady is always going on in the back of those things.

    (more…)

  • A Burial (Flash Fiction)

    Tanner placed the shotgun in his little red wagon. Its weight surprised him. He couldn’t imagine carrying it through miles of snow-covered fields like Daddy. But Daddy was really strong. Tanner trusted Otis, his teddy bear, with making sure the gun stayed safe. He sat Otis near the stock. Otis watched the shotgun though one black button eye. Tanner felt bad about not having Mommy fix his other eye, but he was afraid.

    Daddy had made Mommy angry. Daddy worked at the dog food plant for a long time. He got fired when they caught him taking tools home to fix Tanner’s swing set. He fixed it, but Tanner didn’t feel like swinging anymore.

    “I can’t believe how stupid—“ (more…)

  • Inspired Stories (Week Ending September 1)

    This month, the Cafe is challenging our writers to create a flash fiction short story inspired by an image. This is a bit different than the “Worth 1,000 Words” challenge we had back in March. Instead of everyone having a different image to work with, this month each writer will get his or her inspiration from the same painting.

    Becky by Dave DeHetre
    “Becky” by Dave DeHetre. Used with permission of the artist.

    This painting, titled “Becky,” is the work of Lawrence-based artist Dave DeHetre. It should be noted that because of the powerful image presented here — and in light of recent events in Aurora, Colorado — we gave our writers the option to opt-out of using the painting for this month’s stories.

    In the past Dave DeHetre has been an integral part of the local writers group. But lately, he has poured his creative passion into painting and photography. You can see more examples of his work on his Flickr photostream.

    We are very happy to have Dave’s painting as a starting point for this month’s fiction.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Do you ever write naked or dress up like your characters to write?

    Writers will try all sorts of crazy things to grease the writing wheels and inspire the muse. It can sometimes be as superstitious as athletes having their special game-winning underwear, what writers will do to get in the right mood for a story. This week we asked the Confabulators if any of them write in costume…or in nothing at all!

    Paul Swearingen

    No! (I’d look silly in a dress.)

    Jason Arnett

    I believe that every writer should do whatever he needs to put himself in the proper frame of mind to get some writing done. I see a lot on the internet about ‘no pants’ and stuff like that and while it’s tempting, I don’t feel comfortable writing without clothes on. Of course one can assume that each writer has tried every trick he’s been made aware of to tap the muse when it seems impossible.

    Larry Jenkins

    I try not to write naked because I have a leather office chair and bare buns present sticking issues. (Hello, voice of experience.) That being said, pants are always optional.

    Amanda Jaquays

    I do my best writing in the living room, so with roommates, writing naked is a bit of an issue. They tend to object when you lounge about on the couch starkers. Plus, I write on a laptop… and those can get really hot, my delicate skin just can’t handle it. As for dressing up, well… there aren’t any pictures of me dressed up as my characters while I write, so I think I can continue to deny that one too… at least until I’m caught.

    Ted Boone

    Sadly, my apparel during writing is always boring and…there. But now I’m inspired to go au natural and see how it inspires my writing process. Hmm…Naked NaNo?

    Sara Lundberg

    Oooh, I definitely want to have a character costume party for Halloween now. Might be a great way to kick off National Novel Writing Month on November 1st: have the midnight write-in be done in costume? And while I’d never rule writing naked out completely, the closest I’ve come is sitting down to my desk to write something down I thought of in the shower while still in my towel. Sometimes there’s just not enough time to get dressed before I lose my train of thought!

    Kevin Wohler

    When I’m writing I try to be as comfortable as possible. A t-shirt and pajama bottoms is my favorite writing attire. But when I was starting my superhero novel last year, I made a point of wearing superhero t-shirts as often as possible to put me in the frame of mind of a hero.

    Jack Campbell, Jr.

    I have a laptop with a rather ineffective heat sink. It could be downright dangerous to use the thing naked. I’m not a suspicious person, at all. I don’t have things that I think help me get in the proper mindset. I wish I did. I wish I had some hat or something quirky that I could point to and say “That is what I have to wear when I write.” Unfortunately, I am nowhere near that interesting.

  • It’s the Triforce of Storytelling

    I’m going to break the fourth wall here for a minute: this week’s topic was hard for me, because it’s hard for me to think of the writing I do as having any sort of technique. I realize how pretentious that sounds. I don’t mean, like, Everything I do is pure a~rt~ or anything like that — nor do I mean it in the self-deprecating (my favorite) way of, nothing I write is any go~od T_T. It’s just that, um, I just write and think about all that other shit later.

    Here I am, two days before my post is supposed to go up (and thus days late from the poor editors POV), with a cup of coffee, and I’m thinking: When I’m writing, how do I try to manipulate my reader?

    And there it is: I want to mess with my reader’s feelings. I want to own my reader for about 30K to 70K words and never ever let them go. I want to make their whole brain go HOORAY or NO NOT AT ALL NOPE or OMG WHY or, maybe sometimes, HMMMMM. I even expect them do it in all caps. If life were Tumblr, I would expect them to need at least three reaction GIFs by the end of my story.

    Now that I think of it that way, oh, of course. I use techniques. Duh.

    It’s still taken me damn near two hours to figure out the rest of this post. The number of failed drafts would utterly boggle you.

    SPN - Writing is Hard
    You can’t mention reaction GIFs without including one. Internet Law.

    I think there are three things I try to do well to keep a reader invested. (Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.)

    1. World Building
    2. Characters
    3. Structure

    I don’t always do them well, or maybe I don’t always pay attention to what I’m doing, but generally speaking, this is how I do it.

    (more…)

  • Getting It Out In View

    What you see is not necessarily what you get. The well-dressed man’s brain is filled with realistic though bizarre characters who will get under your skin. Image borrowed from here.

    I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway, The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing about him.

    His stories are peopled with characters who are so twisted, so damaged that one cannot turn away from the story. It’s like each person he’s writing is such a train wreck that to not look is impossible. Pop. 1280 is the most twisted thing I’ve read since The Killer Inside Me. In Killer, you’re as involved as the main character in every depraved act that’s committed, complicit in the crimes. The same is true in 1280, but he adds a layer of racism that’s beyond uncomfortable and it’s even uncomfortable in the mind of the narrator.

    Each book, written in first person, puts the reader deep inside a main character’s insidious brain squirming with creeping tendrils of evil and malice disguised as rational thought. It’s unnerving, to say the least. I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen next.

    Dropping compelling characters into bizarre circumstances is certainly one way to keep me engaged in a story and Pop. 1280 is a master class in how to do it. Each chapter ends not just on a cliffhanger, but with the expectation that while that may be a nice place to stop you’d better not. If you do — well, let’s just say that no matter what you think might happen next it won’t hold a candle to what does happen. It’s not the shock value that kept me reading, it was that the darker the places his characters went the more it made sense. He drew me deeply into those parts of my psyche that I don’t often go. (more…)

  • Structural Integrity

    For what I do, one of the challenges it to prevent the reader from flipping though pages. If the reader is flipping pages, searching for an elusive bit of information, then my document structure has failed.

    You can tell a story different ways. If you are looking at a sequence or procedure, then you probably want to organize your document chronologically. But if I’m trying to describe a situation, I prefer an inverted pyramid structure. Start with the wider picture, then drill down into specific details. Each section can have an independent internal structure as well.

    (more…)

  • If they don’t stumble, trip them

    I’ve tried lots of structural things to keep the reader moving through the story. The first and easiest place to start is with mechanics. Things like cliffhanger chapter endings, ominous foreshadowing, alternating storylines, out-of-order plot sequencing. I’ve read lots of good books that use similar techniques, and to great effect. For my own writing, I’ve found that all of these techniques work, at least to a point.

    But none of them are particularly good substitutes for simply writing a compelling plot.

    So, how do you write a compelling plot?

    (more…)

  • One Good Turn

    Go for the unexpected.

    This week’s question is tough. Telling you what I do to keep readers turning the page assumes two things—first, that people do feel compelled to turn the pages of what I write, and second, that I actually do things intentionally to make that happen.

    I don’t have a big enough ego (yet) to be sure of either of those things. All I can tell you is what I try to do:

    • Go for the unexpected. If the story seems to be travelling in a straight line, swerve to the left or right and throw in something bizarre. In my books, this often translates to a lovesick satyr on the doorstep, a unicorn with a skin rash and no virgins around to treat the wounds, or a gremlin waylaying my heroine and dragging her off to break up a fight between his brothers in the tool shed.
    • Drop a bomb at the end of the chapter. Blow something up. Have someone unexpected show up and say something weird, threatening, or ominous. Toss the main character over the side of a ship into shark-infested waters. Have the ex-husband show up and bang on the restaurant window while the main character is on a date. (more…)