Death of a Story

How to Find the Balance Between Modification and Destruction

Have you ever wondered about those stories buried in an author’s filing cabinet? Well, perhaps nowadays they’re buried in a layer of digital dust. They’re labelled and relabelled until they’re finally scrubbed.

I once wrote a middle grade story called Ghost in the Piano. A couple of  my novels had already been published, but I wanted to improve my writing, so I joined a critique group. Now I think critiquing is the best way to improve writing, but when you’re first introduced to it you have this notion you have to listen, erase, rewrite until every line is absolutely perfect, according to someone else’s vision.

Here are my relabelled examples:

Ghost in the Piano

Ghost in the Piano Another Revision

Ghost in the Piano Version 3, 4, 5, 6 etc.

Ghost in the Piano A New Beginning

Ghost in the Piano Whatever

The “Whatever” stage is when you scrub. It’s rather sad, actually. I think I did some of my best writing on that story, but eventually I couldn’t look at it anymore. I pull it out every once in a while, intent on finally finishing it, but I always sigh and shove it back into that bloated digital file.

Critiquing to the nth power is an effective way to kill a story.

It all started with the beginning. Beginnings are so difficult. They need to acquire that magical power to draw the reader in. So we write and rewrite our beginnings. But there has to be a point where a red flag appears, where you stop bringing the story to a critique group because they will ALWAYS find something to criticize. Eventually the magic gets warped from the strain of too many rewrites.

I loved Ghost in the Piano. Now I despise it. And yet, I still love some of it.  It was my greatest failure.

I know most authors don’t talk about their failures. They came from a time when the writer struggled through the mire to get to solid footing. They feel like children that died in utero. But I think it’s important to remember, in everything, that too much criticism can be devastating. Our failures are shining examples of what never to do again.

Now I only bring my beginnings to a critique session once, maybe twice, at the most three times. Of course I’ve polished it many times before it reaches this stage, but it can only tolerate major upheaval a few more times before it explodes. I’m serious. I have fragments of Chapter One all over that file.  I will only bring a full manuscript to my critique group once. I get several ideas of what others think is wrong from this one session and I can sift through these ideas to zero in on the problems. But I won’t be replotting ten more times. It won’t help the book and it will destroy my sanity.

Sometimes your sanity is more important than a perfect book or great reviews. Think about it.

Besides, once you hack it apart, it’s sometimes hard to recapture the voice you began with, or the smooth-tender flow. The style can become choppy and inconsistent. The magic of that storytelling voice taking you through the trials of time travel, or the deadly burrows of a cave, or the terror of a haunted piano is lost, never to be found again.

I have other dead stories, buried in that digital drawer, but they were never of sufficient caliber to mourn. By the time I wrote the ghost story, I’d grown as a writer and I was hoping the story would touch many young hearts and give them hope and courage. But it will remain forever locked away, an unfulfilled wish.

I will leave you with this. Fragments, unrequited love, rotting bits of flesh.

There was a single clang—one jarring chord that rang crisp through the bottom level of the house and vibrated in my head. That’s how it all began, exactly a month after I’d quit playing the piano—a month after the worst day of my life.

I crept over the icy floor tiles in my bare feet. I shivered, but didn’t stop. After all, it must have been only gravity that had caused the piano to sound off. Into the living room, across the hardwood strips—that seemed even colder, although that wasn’t possible—right up to the ribbed keys. There wasn’t a book in sight. Only a wispy cloud above the keyboard, as if someone had blown the dust off the keys.

I kept playing over his sharp and painful notes. Soon I was drowning him out, my own less than perfect music chopping through the angry melody. Eventually the dreadful sound petered out and there was nothing between the notes. Now there was no one else but me—licking notes that were soft and belting out those that needed to be bellowed. As my fingers flew over the keys, and caught the elusive harmony, I knew, then, for sure, that I would never hear the ghost in the piano again.

This is an excerpt from my favourite chapter: The Spiritualist

“Okay,” I said. With extreme relief, I slammed the door as my parents and Uncle Max departed. Two minutes later, Rosie and Char slunk in, both wearing long droopy clothes and hoods like medieval monks.

“It’s a séance, not an inquisition,” I said, grinning despite myself. It was great how friends knew just how to take the edge off sometimes.

Rosie shrugged and flounced into the living room. “I thought they looked cool. My brother had them left over from Halloween. He and his friend were Grim Reapers.”

“I think you’ve totally missed the seriousness of this situation,” I said.

I led them into the living room, around the dingy leather couch and scuffed walnut coffee table, to where they could cast long stares at the mysterious piano. The scratches seemed more pronounced today, like ivory spider webs crisscrossing the dark casing. And dust clung to it, as if it had sat there unused for decades.

“So?” said Rosie. “You gonna talk or what?”

I sighed. “It doesn’t work that way. It usually plays in the middle of the night, just to make my life a living hell. It probably won’t make a sound unless this Madame Tussaud can set it off.”

As if on cue, an old baby blue Cadillac swung into the driveway and flashed bright beams through the front window. The lights switched off and a tall thin woman with a pale face and globular glasses teetered up the walk. She wore a long black gown, like a grad would wear, and her arms hugged some silver and black instruments. She leaned with her elbow on the doorbell. I ran to let her in.

“Madame Tussaud?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said in a smoky voice. “You must be Jenna.”

I nodded and stepped aside so the woman could enter. The taps from her spike-heeled boots on the front tiles echoed throughout the house. She handed me what appeared to be a tape recorder and a digital thermometer. She held onto a couple of other strange devices that looked electronic, but that was about all I could make of them.

“We need to measure the psychic energy in the house, my dear. The temperature usually drops along with some other interesting environmental changes when there’s a discarnate entity. Otherwise, we may be dealing with your run-of-the-mill poltergeist.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking that a poltergeist hardly seemed run-of-the-mill. “The piano’s right this way, in the living room.”

Madame Tussaud followed me closely, her husky breath like a warm breeze on my neck. She gave a slight nod to Rosie and Char, then tapped over to the piano. After laying her remaining instruments on the floor, she rose and her fingertips, then her palms drifted over the piano’s mud-brown casing.

“Odd,” she said. “So odd.”

“What? What is it?” I asked, venturing closer to the woman, despite the creepy feeling she gave me.

“It’s closed to me,” said the medium. “Like a closed casket. I feel no energy at all.”

I looked helplessly at my friends who just shrugged. Rosie stifled a giggle. “Well, what does that mean?” I asked.

“I can’t be sure. I’ll have to run some tests. First, though, there’s the matter of payment.” She smiled and looked at me expectantly.

“Oh, of course,” I said.

I shot up the stairs to my room, and dumped the contents of my purse onto the bed. I had twenty bucks stuffed in my wallet. Along with Rosie’s five and Char’s ten, we still didn’t have the fifty the woman had asked for. So I tiptoed into Joey’s room. He was so zonked that he didn’t even raise his head from the pillow when I grabbed his piggy bank and ducked back into my room. I managed to squeeze another fifteen from his crumpled bills and scattered coins. Then I raced back downstairs and handed Madame Tussaud the money. An oily grin painted her face as she slipped the cash into her pocket, and it made me wonder if this woman was for real. But she set immediately to work, seizing the first instrument on the floor.

“This is a Geiger counter,” she said as she tapped on some buttons. “It checks the radiation in the room.”

I frowned. “There aren’t any nuclear bombs in here, you know.”

She smiled and shook her head. “There are a lot more things that give off radiation, including the sun. If I get a reading between 2 and 7, that might tell us if a haunting is occurring in this house. Most man-made radiation sources are higher and natural levels are below 2. Even a quick spike might tell us if there is a concentration of paranormal energy.”

She pointed the instrument at the piano, aimed it around the room, at the coffee table, the abstract paintings on the wall and the beige leather couch, then back to the piano again.

“Nothing,” she finally said. “Only a 0.9. We’ll try something else.”

She put down the Geiger counter and picked up another instrument with gauges and dials. “The electromagnetic field meter. It traces a moving magnetic field, even that made by a human body, since we have electricity flowing through our nervous systems. If the needle moves when I point it at the piano and there’s also a high-pitched tone, that would indicate the presence of a discarnate entity.”

She swept back and forth, over and around the piano, but there was no movement of the needle and no sound from the device. Finally she put the EM meter down and turned to me.

“There’s no entity here, my dear. How old are you?”

“Fourteen. I told you.”

“Yes, on the cusp. Some parapsychologists might say ‘too young.’ But I’ve seen it before.”

I gritted my teeth. “What are you talking about?”

“Your abilities, my dear,” said Madame Tussaud. “Have you had a quarrel about the piano? Something that irks you deep within?”

I paused, not wanting to tell her, but if she could help . . . “I had a . . . bad experience . . . at a recital, but what has that got to do with a ghost? There’s something haunting this piano.” I slammed my hand down on the top, shaking the instrument just a little, but it still didn’t eke out a sound.

“Really?” said the spiritualist. “But I haven’t found any evidence of a haunting. Let me demonstrate, my dear. Then perhaps you will lay your skepticism aside and trust me.” She looked pointedly at Rosie. “I am surrounded by skeptics.”

“I believe you,” said Rosie, trying her best not to giggle again.

Madame Tussaud took the thermometer—what she called the thermal scanner—from my hand and waved it over the piano. “Seventy-three degrees,” she murmured. “It’s not very cold.”

“So?” I said. “It’s only cold when it plays.”

Then the woman held a pendulum over the piano, suspended by a thread. It swung back and forth, steadily, with no change in direction. “No disturbance in the flow of energy.”

I rolled my eyes. “And that means what exactly?”

“There is no ghost, my dear. No displaced spirit. If there were, it probably wouldn’t disguise itself in the piano, unless it had some potent connection to it. Spirits usually haunt the place where they took their last breath. They can’t move on, because they’ve been done an injustice that they feel must be corrected. Often they wander the place for years or centuries even, moaning or screaming, trying to be heard. Some can use the energy around them to manipulate or move objects or even in some cases can transform that energy to make themselves solid for a short time, but that takes a lot of concentration and skill that most of them don’t possess. But even the strongest among them don’t usually play nasty tricks. Poltergeists, however, like to play with objects.”

“So there’s a poltergeist in my piano?”

Madame shook her head sadly. “The poltergeist is you, my dear.”

I stepped back, my jaw unhinged. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a ghost, or a poltergeist, or whatever. I’m alive.”

Madame Tussaud swept around and placed spidery hands on my shoulders. “Of course, you’re alive. Poltergeists are troublesome spirits that focus their noisy pranks on one particular child or adolescent. The child is usually very gifted with psychic powers and . . . ” She paused.

“And?” I prompted.

“And the poltergeist activity is usually caused by the adolescent. Unconsciously, of course.”

I goggled at the woman in horror. What a ridiculous statement. She was saying that somehow I had made the piano play by itself, that I was tinkering with the instrument even when my greatest desire was not to touch it. That I was driving myself crazy.

“I am not a poltergeist,” I said loudly. “I am not making the piano play with my mind, although it is playing with my mind!”

“Calm down, dear.” The woman patted my shoulder, trying to soothe me with her buttery tone. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It means you have extraordinary abilities. All you have to do is harness them and the piano will rest easy again.”

“Really? Well, I’m not satisfied with your explanation. You came here to talk to the piano, and you’re going to do just that. I didn’t use up all my allowance just to get ‘harness your abilities.’ We’re going to sit down and you’re going to conduct a séance. I want to hear what that piano really wants.”

Madame Tussaud was flabbergasted. Her pasty face seemed to whiten even more. “Séance, my dear? But I haven’t done one of those in years.”

“What?” I said. “Then what do you do?”

“She reads your future,” Char broke in. “She tells you about the past using her psychic abilities. You just phone her and she tells you everything about yourself.”

“She’s a fraud,” I said.

“No, no,” Madame Tussaud objected. “I am a genuine psychic and a registered parapsychologist. It’s just . . . I’m a little out of practice with the séance business.”

“Well, you have to get back into practice.”

“I . . . I suppose,” she conceded.

I motioned for the woman to sit in a circle with the other girls. We lighted candles and incense, and the air was soon clouded with the cloying scent of cloves and vanilla. Madame Tussaud fumbled through her bag and withdrew a container of salt—sea salt, she said it was. “If there is a genuine haunting, it should turn brown. It’s an old fashioned method, but still quite effective.” Then she clasped our hands and began to hum, tilting glassy eyes to the ceiling. We were told to wipe all thoughts from our minds, particularly me. Then she called on the piano to play a note if there was some restless soul within its strings.

The piano stood silent, as if it were once again a dead thing. I gritted my teeth and begged it to sound off, to tinkle or to moan. Something to prove that it was more than just the imagination of one girl, or the restless poltergeist stirred from within her own troubled mind.

Finally the medium stopped chanting and shrugged her shoulders. “Empty, I told you.”

“The piano is not empty,” I said. “It keeps talking to me, playing music that I used to play, and waking me up at night. It even got mad at me when I said I hated the piano and dumped me on the floor.”

The medium frowned. “It reacted directly to your speech? The entity must be very strong.” She stared back at the piano, her dreamy expression gone, replaced by a look of fright. “Perhaps it’s a cold spirit and that is why it’s closed to me.”

“What do you mean by ‘cold spirit?’” I asked.

The woman’s lips twitched. She blinked and looked away. “Evil, dear. Deserving of death.”

At her last words, the room swelled with sound. The keys depressed in harsh stacatto rhythm, pounding out a miserable version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The notes bounced off the walls and echoed in our ears. It was so painfully loud we hunched over in agony. I tried to crawl away and tripped over the Geiger counter—reading a five—and the EM meter, its needle jumping all over the map. The air in the room was so frosty I could see my breath. Char scrambled behind me and knocked the sea salt from its container. It was an earthy brown.

Together we crawled out of the room, sobbing as the vibrations throbbed through our bodies. Just as we got to the hall, the front door exploded inward and the piano’s notes cut off in midstream. In stumbled my mother with wide eyes, my father with narrowed ones and my uncle with a look of sheer fascination on his face. The smoke haze was still in the air. The sharp scent of incense lingered. Madame Tussaud lay sprawled on the floor.

“What in heaven’s name is going on?” asked Mom.

Suddenly the spiritualist sprang from the floor, and, thrusting aside the three adults in the hall, she fled out the door.

“Wait!” I called, brushing aside my family as well. “Wait!”

Madame Tussaud was opening the door to her car with trembling hands.

“How do I get rid of it?” I yelled to her.

She looked back at me, her eyes bulging and her face as pale as snow. “You can’t!” she screamed and slammed the door. Then she gunned the car backward, spun around, and sped off down the street.

Setting—How to Paint the Quintessential Backdrop

Characters shape the story, but setting places you there, as a reader, in the midst of blue-white glaciers or spitting pits of lava. I could never forget seeing the barracuda while snorkeling, lurking beneath the surface of a turquoise ocean, framed in a grotto with a coral gateway. Its long narrow snout seemed magnified beneath the water, along with a precise row of jagged teeth, grinning, or contemplating whether I would make a nourishing snack. Can you picture it?

Setting is a physical place and time. It is intimately interconnected with your character or characters. Can you think of examples of settings that you found unforgettable? What was it about the writing that made the setting so memorable, so real?

Describing simply copies what is seen. Some budding writers tend to include everything, as a visual. But that would bore your readers to tears. Describing includes everything witnessed in an attempt to elicit emotions by filling in every blank spot on a canvas. But it doesn't work.

"Setting selects details that are essential and places only them on the page. Setting is intentional and careful, choosing the details that will lead to a deliberate response."

                                                                       —R. Andrew Wilson, Write Like Hemingway

The small boys came early to the hanging.


It was still dark when the first three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots. A thin layer of fresh snow covered the little town like a new coat of paint, and theirs were the first footprints to blemish its perfect surface. They picked their way through the huddled wooden huts and along the streets of frozen mud to the silent marketplace, where the gallows stood waiting.

                                                                    —Ken Follet, The Pillars of the Earth

What emotion does this elicit?

Setting certainly incorporates location, landscape, but its more than that. It's a crucial part of the story including aspects of geography, characters daily activities, and the time and atmosphere in which the characters live.

It also includes action! Think of setting in terms of film production. The story unfolds and the combination of background and action within the movie creates drama. Setting is alive, it moves!

In Ken Follet's excerpt, boys are moving through the snow and there is no activity yet in the village. As readers, we sense both the movement and the silence. We understand that this is an earlier time period, with the word choice of "hovels" and the description of wooden huts, along with the mention of hanging and gallows. We get a clear sense in just one paragraph of the time period, the place and the atmosphere.

It is your job, as a writer, to bring your characters to life as part of their surroundings.

"Overloading a scene with static description can pull away from the narrative. Move through the scene in three-dimensional space, describing how people interact with it and how parts of the environment interact with each other."

                                                                —R. Andrew Wilson, Write Like Hemingway

Have you read the Robert Jordan series? I absolutely loved the books, loved them, at first. But as the series progressed each book became bulkier, filled with extraneous characters and such an abundance of description it bogged the story down. I finally put the series down. I never read another book after Eight. And occasionally I felt like screaming "get on the with story" as I read the last four books. The imaginative world and intriguing beginning kept pulling me forward, but the static description ended my journey. Always remember the reader, and don't get caught up in your love of words and your own ability to paint a glorious picture with them. Never forget the story.

To create an effective setting, it begins with careful observation, but you also need an understanding of how tapping into the senses creates emotions in your readers. Simply by how the scene is described, the reader is given a sense of awe, pain, joy, fear or other strong emotions.

Description with Dialogue and Action:

And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead. It towered over them as they sailed nearer to the cliff on which it stood.

‘Heads down!’ yelled Hagrid as the first boats reached the cliff; they all bent their heads and the little boats carried them through a curtain of ivy which hid a wide opening in the cliff face. They were carried along a dark tunnel, which seemed to be taking them right underneath the castle, until they reached a kind of underground harbour, where they clambered out on to the rocks and pebbles.

                                                —J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Does this description of the castle at Hogwarts evoke a sense of awe and wonderment? Do the children seem like ants in its presence?

Description and Action:

When I landed on the top of a lamppost in the London dusk it was peeing with rain. This was just my luck. I had taken the form of a blackbird, a sprightly fellow with a bright yellow beak and jet-black plumage. Within seconds I was as bedraggled a fowl as ever hunched its wings in Hampstead. Flicking my head from side to side , I spied a large beech tree. Leaves moldered at its foot—it had already been stripped clean by the November winds—but the thick sprouting of its branches offered some protection from the wet. I flew over it, passing above a lone car that purred its way along the wide suburban street. Behind high walls and the evergreen foliage of their gardens, the ugly white facades of several sizeable villas shone through the dark like the faces of the dead.

                                                                   —Jonathon Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

Don't you feel as drenched as the blackbird? Can you picture a gloomy November day in London? Does it heap on your shoulders a rather oppressive feeling?

Another thing to consider is that setting must enhance the conflict. Not only is it connected to your characters, but also to plot.

Think of Moby Dick vs Captain Ahab on the high seas. The Summoning takes place in a half-way house for the mentally challenged—ideally suited for conflict and relates directly to the protagonist's problem. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway uses Spain in the arena of bullfighting and nightclubs with the occasional drunken brawl.

Another way to enhance conflict is to use confined spaces. In Ice Tomb, the settings include a moon base, small, prefab buildings in Antarctica, and a tunnel beneath the ice sheet. Sinkhole takes place in an extremely dangerous network of caves.

Style and structure are very important to keep the reader glued to the page. Remember to describe your world without making it sound like a grocery list. As shown in the examples above, mix in action, dialogue, and description. Vary sentence length. Too many short sentences will make it sound juvenile, but action sequences work well with short sentences. As often as possible, without becoming tedious, use all the senses.

The little Bed and Breakfast just outside of Hilo on the active island. She could still see the lush tropical flowers in brilliant hues of lavender and pink, crimson and orange, swaying in the warm sun-drenched breeze. Erica walked through the garden of cream and butter orchids and tangerine bromeliads to the gently swaying hammock where David was sleeping, tied between two spiked palm trees. A scarlet Apapane was twittering near his head. The little honeycreeper kept brushing his nose with its tail feathers as it sipped nectar from an o hi’a-lelua, a pretty purple cluster flower. He absently twitched and dusted his hand over his face, still caught in the tight embrace of dreams.

                                                                      —Deborah Jackson, Ice Tomb

Notice how the above paragraph uses sight, touch, sound, and taste (to a certain degree).

You may have heard this quite often, but it seems the most difficult thing for some writers to grasp. Use the "true" word whenever possible. Details have to be specific and concrete—not just a bird, which bird and how does it match the surroundings (Hawaii). It will give your reader an impression of the uniqueness of your setting. But it also depends on point of view (POV). If your character doesn't possess the knowledge to describe with correct terms, use similes or metaphors. I was using the word gumbo limbo for a tree in Florida, then realized my character wouldn't know this term so I called it a pretzel-shaped tree.

Some writers tend to include so few details, the work is dull and unimaginative. Some tend to overcompensate with an obese piece of work that loses sight of the story. Include just enough details to give a sense of place, elicit an emotion and then let the reader's imagination take over. That's why I don't emphasize the physical description of characters to any great extent, because it robs the reader of the opportunity to imagine the character.

"Telling" details, no more.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

—Stephen King, On Writing

How to Balance Writing (or any home-based business) with Kid's Summer Vacation

Tip 1: Get up early, especially if the kids are a bit older. They'll sleep while you have two or three glorious hours of writing/work.

Tip 2: Project. Involve your children in a project, something they enjoy like creating artwork or gardening. Have them plant seeds, nurture them and watch them grow. They may not like the weeding, but it's a good lesson on sometimes having to do unpleasant work along with the fun stuff in order to experience the satisfaction of a job well done, along with the wonder of growth and beauty. My son is growing unique plants from seed that I'd never attempted to grow myself. It's amazing what weird and wonderful things we have bursting to life in our garden. He also took it upon himself to create a Monopoly game using local street names and his own imagination: Teleportation Booth instead of Reading Railroad and Nuclear Power Plant for Electric Company.

Tip 3: Excursions. Work in the morning, do an excursion in the afternoon, or vice versa. Promise the kids an outing if they occupy themselves for a few hours while you work. A picnic, a swim, a hike, a museum, a water park.

Tip 4: Job for kids. If they're old enough, get them a job watering the neighbours garden while they're on vacation, or cutting their lawn. They'll make some money and they'll learn responsibility, plus it will keep them busy.

Tip 5: Entrepreneurship. If the area supports it, encourage the kids to set up a lemonade stand or a garage sale. When my daughter was younger, we had a hot summer and construction occurring around our house. She sold iced tea, lemonade and cookies, and made a fortune (for her). Of course this will need to be supervised to some extent, but it can still be done while typing on the computer or ipad.

Tip 6: Pick fruit: strawberries, blueberries (especially the wild kind while on a hike), visit a farm, in the morning when it's cooler. Thoroughly exhaust the young 'uns so they want to rest in the afternoon while you write/work. Of course you may want to rest then, too.

Tip 7: Write on the fly. Take along your notepad, ipad or laptop, and jot down ideas while taking your kids to the park or for a shopping expedition. Never ignore them, though! They don't like that.

Tip 8: Send the kids to a movie on a rainy day. If there's an older child in the neighbourhood to supervise, or if they're old enough to go on their own with friends, it will give you a couple of peaceful, productive hours.

Tip 9: Coffee Break or as they say in Dutch, Koffee Tijd. Take a break while out on excursions and sit down for a coffee or iced tea. The kids will probably want a smoothie. Chatting with your kids can give you great ideas for books, articles or short stories. Sometimes listening to your kids is greater inspiration than all the time spent on "deep thought."

Tip 10: Take a longer vacation. When you're all going a little crazy, take a break, if feasible. A week camping or a trip to relatives. Anything to break up the summer.

Please add tips below, if something worked for you.