I stumbled on the Netflix series, Imposters, a couple of days ago and love it. I had just finished the post about my latest Goodreads Giveaways. One of the books up for the giveaway, Esmirana’s Trunk, has a story that has a con artist/imposter in it. The story is “Incontrovertible Evidence.” I immediately thought, should I go back and edit the post that talks about the book and what types of stories are within the book, and add this info? How important is it? Not very. I had given a good bit of information about the types of stories. There is a wide variety of stories in the book. But is it necessary to mention each story? Nope! And yet, here I am, talking about it. I guess it bugged me
So how much extraneous information does a reader need, or even want to know?
Well, I guess it depends on the reader. Some readers won’t care at all, and then there are some who might find the extra tidbits interesting.
A friend of mine, being quarantined with Covid-19, picked up Esmirana’s Trunk and reread it. He will sometimes pepper me with odd questions about the stories. Of course, he’s been a lifelong friend, and had read some of the very first stories I had ever written, way back when. Sometimes it will be a question like: “What were you thinking when you wrote this?” Or, he might say something like, “This character reminds me of . . .”
Well, this time he just mentioned that he liked the story, “Night Train,” better upon the reread than he had on the first reading. He said it reminded him of an old “30s movie.” He asked me the timeframe of the setting. I didn’t know. I mentioned that I guess that was about right. I thought that I vaguely had a Ken Follett novel in mind, sort of. Perhaps Eye of the Needle. I also then said that I roughly had thought of the train scene from the Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest. Even though the train in the movie would have been a more modern one, I sort of used it as a reference. And I also maybe pulled some of the atmosphere from there, and threw in a touch of, say, Casablanca. So, I guess I was maybe also thinking of a black and white movie from the thirties or forties. And the content/context of the story would fit that era.
Then he asked when I had written the story. I remembered knocking it out one Saturday, midafternoon, during a football game. As usually happens, I’ll get the urge to write when I really want to watch a good college football game. For some reason I’ll feel like I really should at least get the story down. If not, it will bug me and I won’t be able to enjoy the game. So there I sat in the recliner, sound off on the game. Took me an hour or so to knock the story out and then I was able to relax. I didn’t give him all these details; but he was surprised to learn that I had written it twelve to fifteen years previous to putting the book together.
Turns out, only three of the stories were written recently, and specifically for this book: “Clackers”, “Myra’s Wedding”, and “Footprints”.
“The Early Ones,” was actually written as sort of an intro story to my book of early short stories that I was putting together. I was going to call the book of early stories, The Early Ones, but since the story wasn’t actually an early story it didn’t seem to fit. So I just threw it into Esmirana’s Trunk. I ended up calling the actual early stories book The Soft Eloquence of Neon, which is the title of one of the early stories.
The weird thing, which you won’t know when you read the story, “The Early Ones,” is that the early characters (the “early ones”) that the writer in the story has written are, in fact, early characters from my early stories (several of the stories from The Soft Eloquence of Neon). Confusing enough? I believe I reference little Francesca, and the Jiminy Cricket girl, and I can never remember the little girl’s name from “In the Corner Pocket.” I do remember that she always wears combat boots.
A few other tidbits:
When I wrote the story “Cobra’s Demise,” the actor Hugh Grant was in his heyday and that was who I had in mind as I wrote the character, Carlyle. So if you want to get a good sense of the character before reading the story, watch the movies, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Nine Months, and Notting Hill.
Shall I continue with the tidbits?
The characters in the story, “The Hand”, are from the very first novel I ever wrote. The novel has never been published or titled. I mention this novel in the dedication section to Daguerreotype Dreams. The novel will forever remain in first draft form. Milo was around the age of thirty when I first wrote him in the novel. Jessie was about twenty-three or twenty-four. For some strange reason (perhaps due to my being much older now, and feeling ancient—and perhaps feeling a little more prudish) I bumped her age up a couple of years, to twenty-six or twenty-seven.
And now, speaking of writing short stories with characters from novels . . .
Character Development by way of Short Story.
There are times when a character springs forth, fully formed and larger than life. I’ve probably mentioned a character named Riley (from the short story “Bawdy, Bonny Sally,” and the book Pirate Tales) in an earlier post. He was just such a character. It is fantastic when this happens, when the character just springs up like that. But sometimes it doesn’t happen so easily. Sometimes it is difficult to get a handle on a character, even a main character. If you are in the midst of writing a novel when this happens it can be annoying. So, what do you do? Well, that’s when you might try writing a short story with that character. You might place that character in a whole different situation or setting, just to loosen things up a bit, or to get a different perspective. Writing a short story involving the character forces you to concentrate on this character specifically, without the distractions of the other characters around. And sometimes it takes the interaction with other characters, new characters, to bring this character out into the open. Of course, it could be the case that this character isn’t a main character after all, might only be a minor figure, or perhaps doesn’t even belong in the book. Most often, however, you won’t have to discard the character completely.
I know when I was writing that first novel, the one that shall remain unpublished, I had a very difficult time getting a handle on the main character, Milo. Part of the problem was the awkwardness of how I was looking at things. As I was writing, I kept wondering if someone reading the work in the near future would think this character was me, or that he was made up of parts of me, my inner self. And then I started feeling that he was, in fact, me, and that when I was writing him, I was looking at things from his perspective, and that it was my perspective. He seemed to be too close to home. In any case, I kept writing, muddled my way through and came to the end of the book. It all worked out. I even started a second novel with the same characters (which for whatever reason I only wrote about four chapters), and then eventually wrote the short story “The Hand.”
This wasn’t a case where I wrote the short story to flesh out the character. This was one character that I never did completely feel as though I got a handle on, however. I chalk it up now to inexperience. At the time I was still trying to find my way in the writing process. I had a few short stories under my belt, but not enough, I guess.
A few years later, I gave a handful of stories to a woman to read. “The Hand” was in the mix. She made the observation that I must have written about those characters before. I don’t know how she picked up on it. My only thought at the time was that my familiarity with the characters when I wrote the story might have caused me to leave out a detail or two that a new reader might need to establish the characters for the story. The woman picked up on the familiarity. It is way too easy, being overly familiar with characters, to leave something out. I guess that’s why most series characters carry with them a handful of characteristics that the author reiterates and re-establishes with each successive book for the benefit of new readers. It is usually just a paragraph or two. But to do that, you have to have a clearly formed character with definitive traits that can be listed.
And finally, of course, you might just write short stories with the same characters for the simple reason that you miss those characters from time to time and enjoy spending time with them.
Sprinkled throughout my Dark Tales of the Civil War series I have stories with characters from my Civil War novel (yet to be published), The Sound of Chimes. I mention this in a note to the reader in the beginning of the book, Daguerreotype Dreams. These characters include Jem, Minnie, Mossy, Nell Parker, Judge Parker, Martha Du Barry, Esther and Morris Garvin . . .
I am very familiar with these characters and love spending time with them. I’ve got my own room at the Parker place, and at the Du Barry place. It’s an invisible room, of course. I don’t know if any of the characters sense my presence or not. I guess if they stopped to think about it, they might be aware of me.
At least one of the included short stories (in Daguerreotype Dreams, “The Trap”) contains events that happen in the novel, along with the characters, but, overall, the majority of the stories are new and separate events and instances.
In one of the short stories, “The Snow globe,” which is in the book, The Scarecrow, I delve into a scene from Nell and Jem’s childhood (no childhood scene of the two is even in the novel). This was sort of an exploration on my part. I did, in this story, touch upon a scene from the novel that is somewhat surreal. This surreal scene is a scene that takes place at a neighbor’s home (and is mostly in the adult Nell’s imagination). I also fear, that in this story, though not in the scene I just mentioned, I might have given away an important revelation from the novel. I’m not sure. This depends on how I decide to handle the revelation in the novel. I’ve been undecided about it. At 171,000 + words, the novel is almost complete. I haven’t worked on it much in the past couple of years. I started it on May 1, 2011. So, as you can see, I’ve lived with these characters for quite a long time. And even longer for those characters that appeared in “The Trap”, because that story was actually written in 2004. Maybe one day in the near future I’ll sit down and wade through it all, my epic novel, shaping it into something publishable.