My Method for Writing a Short Story
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
A few weeks ago, I started following the #WritersRoutine hashtag on Instagram. Since then, I’ve learned that journalist and author Charles Duhigg, best known for his book about routines, The Power of Habit, treats writing like a 9-5 day job, complete with rented office space. And, fantasy author Saara El-Arifi, also published by Random House, does 99% of her writing in the bathtub (with writing sessions lasting up to four hours!).
You really can’t do it wrong.
I’m high on fiction ideas, and also high on shaming myself for being “not productive enough” when I can’t seem to get work on a page. But, by borrowing routine ideas from other authors, I’ve begun to accept and refine my own convoluted process.
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In this post, I’m going behind-the-scenes with a recent short story called “Dog Deities.” I’ll share where the idea came from, the process for drafting and gathering feedback, and the big creative decisions I made along the way.
My greatest learning is that force is the enemy of inspiration. I hope my example will help you give yourself permission to let the process be weird.
How I Come Up With Ideas for Short Fiction
In his book, On Writing, Stephen King describes fiction ideas as an intersection between two things, i.e., the occult-meets-female puberty for his first book, Carrie.
My ideas follow a similar anatomy. It starts as a joke to myself … what if THIS happened, but there was also THIS? That’s a concept. Often, it quickly becomes a whole world, and then it’s a question of what might happen there and what are the particulars of who would be involved.
“Dog Deities” takes place in an alternate reality Brooklyn where people idolize their dogs, literally.
This idea originated when I adopted a senior chihuahua, Bambi, in Brooklyn in mid-2020. As a new dog owner, I began noticing storefronts that were pet bakeries, and learned that the parks have off-leash hours before 9 a.m. I experienced, first-hand, the guilt of leaving her at home when I went to the grocery store and not being able to explain to her that I would be back soon. But, she wagged her tail and danced in circles every time I fed her or got the leash out for a walk. She trained me. Soon, I was living my life to delight my dog. Me, with career frustrations and relationship woes, it’s hard to be happy sometimes. But it was so easy to make my dog happy, and live vicariously through her joy.
Around this time, I also began studying astrology. In my astrology class, I learned that tracking the planets emerged in ancient civilizations as just one way to predict the future, and that there are countless other forms of what’s called “divination.” The popular modern ones include tarot cards, but people with psychic abilities can also use tea leaves, a pendulum, or even the bubbles that form when you drop a rock into water, to intuitively source the answer to a question.
I was beginning to overlay the dog subculture of Brooklyn with a spiritual subculture that’s obsessed with divination. What sealed in the concept is that the letters in “god” can be rearranged as “dog.” The family pet became a personal idol. All the spiritual aphorisms I grew up hearing at church got rearranged to be about dogs.
Ideas for fiction come to me organically like this, and that’s the fun part. The next question is plot, i.e. what happens, and character, i.e. who this is about.
Writing the First Draft
I don’t start writing until I have a good first line. For “Dog Deities,” I wanted to begin in the quintessential dog scene, off-leash hours at Prospect Park. It’s real life in every way until you realize that people are divining predictions for the day ahead based on the behaviors of the dogs. I wanted someone to go to a cafe and order fancy beef for her dog and a yogurt for herself; I wanted people’s personalities to be expressed through their dogs, as mirrors. I love how magical realism fiction feels like real life, but with a twist.
At the time, I was smitten with Celeste Ng’s use of multiple points of view in Little Fires Everywhere. Instead of a full chapter coming from a single narrator, she uses a close third person but switches narrator seamlessly, even within a scene.
Because of this, I wrote the short story in five sections, with each section coming from a different character’s point of view. There was a purpose for this. The fictional Brooklyn in my story was also a spiritual community on the brink of a drought, and there was a lot of judgment and finger-pointing about who wasn’t treating their dogs well enough that the dogs were not bringing the rain. In this draft, the judgment is directed toward a young woman who is both elevated and admired by her community, until she is blamed for falling short (a criticism of how our own modern society treats up-and-coming women!).
I had a lot of fun researching various breeds and their behaviors to “cast” the right roles for each dog.
Most of the draft was written at a local coffee shop. I sent it to a few friends, incorporated their feedback, and then, within the same month as I began writing, emailed it off to what I considered the ideal publication for a New York-centric story: The New Yorker.
Getting Peer Feedback on Fiction (Without Giving Up)
Even with my confidence that what I’d written was a killer concept and composed with flair, I brought the draft to a critique group to get feedback. The result was humbling. They loved the concept, for sure, but not much else made sense to them. The switches in POV were confusing. It was hard to keep straight the dog names versus the human names. The main character, who is the star in the sense that everyone is talking about her from the very beginning, actually didn’t come in to be a narrator herself until the final section. Characters also referenced notable events that had already happened, making it feel like the story itself did not contain the real action.
In sum, there were a number of craft problems, and some that I’d faced in other stories I was working on around the same time. With this feedback, I didn’t see a way to mesh the perfect version of the story, as it existed in my imagination, with the needs of the readers, as expressed by my writing group.
I was discouraged in my ability to write. And my ability to take feedback.
I put the story aside.
In contrast to the enthusiasm I originally felt for the story, it seemed like a failure—to give up. But as I’ve learned, that’s just part of the process.
Layers of Inspiration
When I took a class on writing process called Write Better-Faster, I learned that one of my top strengths in writing is called Ideation. The positive side of this strength is having really original ideas (which I love about myself) and the challenge of this strength is a bias to make everything original: the world, the character, the plot, the structure, and so on.
This really got to the root of what went wrong with the first draft of “Dog Deities.” The concept itself was original. It was the hook. What I needed was to use existing tropes for the character and plot. In other words, make it easy to follow.
In practice, this can feel like I’m dumbing down my story. But, as a reader, I know that I enjoy stories that follow familiar tropes in a new way.
At some point in the writing process, I’d considered modeling “Dog Deities” after a Greek myth. I’ve seen popular books that are the retelling of a myth, or Shakespeare, and my tendency was to write them off as repetitive. Perhaps more importantly, and despite my studies in astrology, I wasn’t familiar enough with myths to think of one that would work in my existing frame of a community on the verge of drought, looking to their dogs for divine intervention.
Then, my book club decided to read Circe, by Madeline Miller. I didn’t know anything about Circe, and avoided reading up on the goddess until we were done with the novel. The novel both introduced me to a number of characters in Greek mythology and also showed me how someone might keep to an overall narrative but fill in their own fictional details.
Two years had passed since my failed earlier draft of “Dog Deities.” Everything I’d read and written in that time gave me a new vision.
In fact, the story became that much better—because of the time that passed in between drafts. Perhaps this is an ideal way to write. A story is like making wine. There’s a big push and then a waiting on the elements and nature’s magic, before a final harvest.
I was ready to start again, from a blank page.
How I Wrote the Final Draft
When I started to think about writing Dog Deities again, it was like writing a new story. I didn’t bother to look back at my old version, but instead trusted that whatever I loved about it, I could incorporate into the new version. I also had the writing group feedback in my mind, especially the notes about using a single POV and doing something to reduce confusion on dogs vs. human names.
As much as I love writing off pure inspiration, I took my time and researched Greek myths. I was still hooked on this idea of the story being about a woman who suffers from judgment in the close-minded spiritual community. I liked the name Prometheus, especially because I once encountered a chihuahua named Prometheus once, but the myth itself didn’t fit into my world concept. I found one that did. When I was away from my computer, I let my brain ponder on the myth’s plot structure and the plot of my earlier draft, and began to weave them into a single, chronological series of scenes.
Secondly, I did more research on dog breeds, physical traits, and their various abilities. This was important because I’d come up with a clever way to avoid the confusion of dog vs. human names. I decided the dogs would all be named after Greek deities, but also, that the humans would not have names. Someone would just be “Apollo’s owner,” and I’d help the reader associate dog-with-person by going into detail about how people look like their dogs. I don’t know if I’ve come across a story that does this, so I give myself some credit for an original craft strategy!
Once I had an exhaustive list of characters, dogs, and the physical traits of both, I wrote what author Susan Dennard calls a Scene Screenplay. I hand-wrote the setting and action of each scene, as well as any notable lines of dialogue that have dropped into my head fully-formed.
Next, I typed up a cleaner version of the Scene Screenplay. Then, I had all my notes in Google Docs, and could drop in the zone to focus on writing a full draft.
I’ve struggled with hitting a glass ceiling in terms of how much writing I can get done in a day. I often can write for only an hour before my brain feels buzzy and I need to take a break and then switch to a task that’s less intense creatively. I wrote around 400 words of “Dog Deities” one day, and then 400 the next day. With the outline already done, I could see it all in my head, and knew it was just a matter of butt-in-chair to get the rest written. Still, sometimes I find it hard to focus and to get going.
When the writing got challenging I reminded myself that I’d set challenging requirements: blending a myth with a quirky world, and main characters with no names.
I decided to do a full-day break from email and social media so I could fully focus on writing. Often, what’s distracting me is that my brain wants to work on short-term tasks, like how to respond to an email, versus something more creative and sustained. I always get the writing done faster when I am able to focus completely.
So, on the email and social media break day, I got several more scenes written and two hours of writing done before my brain went buzzy. I kept thinking about the story as I went about the rest of my day, and the next morning, decided to keep the break going. I went to a coffee shop and a few hours later, finished the draft. When I did finally check my email and social media, my break had lasted almost 48 hours, and I didn’t miss anything. Nothing bad happened. Plus, the ability to focus my mind on a single task made a huge difference on how quickly I could get the words written (around 6,000 total), and also in the quality of the writing.
Publishing My Short Story
In an earlier blog post, I talked about why I write fiction, and why having an audience matters. It’s not about money, fame, attention, or even validation. When I come up with a fun story concept that amuses me, I want to share it. That’s a big part of my incentive to write.
After several years of dedicating myself to writing fiction, I’ve had a handful of stories published in literary magazines, which are extremely competitive and it’s great validation of all that I’ve learned. But, as a medium, literary magazines don’t always give me a chance to interact with the readers, or even the editors who chose my story.
To me, a story isn’t a product in itself, but the start of a conversation. I decided to publish “Dog Deities” on my own website, and pair it with a podcast series. The intersection of dogs and spirituality translates to the very real-world category of intuitive animal communication. When I first adopted Bambi, I had hired an animal communicator to learn more about her pre-shelter past, to better bond, and meet her needs—and, the animal communicator I hired will be one of my first podcast guests!
To follow along, go to dogdeities.com. There, you can subscribe to the podcast and read “Dog Deities”.
Fellow writer, free your mind! Take my course, Meditation for Writer’s Block
