Piratecat said:
Here's a fifteen minute draft for a picture I'd never get a chance to use. I may well edit this later; then again, I may not. Click on the photo first, then read the story.
-------------
How much of ENworld's savings account do you want to spend on legal fees?
Amusing as this story is, I am not certain it is worth baiting The Mouse.
There are things in this world scarier than undead. The Mouse's lawyers are among them.
Barsoomcore--that was fantastic. Brilliant voice. Now I have to go catch up on your storyhour.
Orchid Blossom--I'd love to swap story writing mechanics with you, but you have to bear in mind that the tricks I used resulted in impossibly long stories than cannot be completed within the current word limits.
One of my techniques was based on a moment that I fell in love with in one of Mythago's earlier Ceramic competitions. She introdcued what seemed like a decription of the photo, only not quite exactly right--so the reader would pass the shot and forget about it--and then she came around and whammed us with the exact shot later when we weren't expecting it anymore.
It was extremely compelling because it both relieved us of the tedious predictability of working endlessly towards the shots, and also, it established that all of the elements of the photo were present in the world
before all the pieces of the photo came into play.
So I always made sure that before I used the things in the photo, I put them into the world.
As far as themes go--I think writers always reveal a bit about what is really going on in their minds, even when writing fantasy. You just can't help writing what you know, even if you are writing about things wholly imaginary. It's the way our minds put dreams together. They're never literally about what they are about, and the images that are meaningful to you are often meaningless to anyone else.
For example, I have recurring dreams about my fish swimming out of my fishtank--they fly around the room, and I keep trying to chase them back into the tank before they suffocate or dry out and die, because they haven't the sense to realize that they can't live in the air, even if they can swim in it.
These dreams always come at times when I feel like my responsibilities are getting to be more than I can handle. That seems obvious when we're awake and I'm explaining it to you, right? But not so clear before I said so, or when I'm asleep, 'cause I fall for this every single time as if I'd never had the dream before.
Good stories are like that--they are obviously about something that is important to the author, even if the author never tells the reader what the literal truth behind them is. We instinctively feel that there is something important going on, and each person reads thier own anxiety or hope into it, drawing signal from the noise. Surreal or fantastical stories are fun because they are blurry, vague, amorphous and leave lots of room for people to recognize their own issues. They also allow the author to write without recognizing what she is putting down, only to look at it later and recognize wehre it came from, what it was all about really.
The set of illustrations for a Ceramic round is like a Rorschach. You just stare at them until you see the signal in the noise. Then you try to find a way to describe what you found well enough for someone else to find it, too.
Of course, as barsoomcore points out, a good snarky narrator and well developed characters is a good place to start, too.