Flashback to my now closed blog Father Nature's Corner, only this was actually taken in real time during the month of October. T'was a warm day when the photo was taken.
Ever try writing a story that is way out of your comfort zone?
As an example, I write adult fiction. I enjoy writing adult fiction and I really can't picture myself writing anything else but adult fiction. However, a number of years ago (the late 2000s I believe), I decided to challenge myself by writing a story out of my comfort zone.
It was a pure wholesome G-rated story that was ultimately published in a now defunct e-zine called "Beat To A Pulp", before being republished in this small short story collection. This story is called "Cedar Mountain," and it remains my one and only G-rated story.
I bring up this topic because once again I decided to challenge myself by writing a story that is very far out of my comfort zone. Yes, believe it or not, I still have a comfort zone for other types of stories, besides G-rated stories.
Small info dump: back when I had started my writing adventures in the mid 2000s, I was a very angry person. "A very angry person indeed," to quote Marvin the Martian. So I wrote very angry stories, with angry over-the-top violence and mayhem.
Smarter and more discerning people than myself rightfully pointed out that I should rein in the amount of anger and vitriol pouring out of my pen before I turn others off to my writing. Which, after a number of years, I was finally able to rein in and tighten its focus.
With that info dump out of the way, we now pivot back to the topic at hand: challenging myself, this time writing a very angry story.
As most of, if not all of, you know that I've been busy as a soldier ant rewriting a select group of my two to four page (and beyond) short stories for yet another short story collection of two volumes in length. The story that I chose to work on was originally titled "Syringe." The plot wasn't much: you have a junkie looking to score another hit of heroin (I think), and his sister rides to the rescue to give him an overdose and he dies.
Brief, simple, straight to a point that still escapes me. Even after I spent several minutes trying to make sense of a story that had almost no lot. But during that eighth minute, I found a plot in which turns this story upside down.
"What if I rewrote the story from the classic 'golden child syndrome,' which is quite popular on YouTube and Reddit these days?" asked my brain.
"Absolutely!" answers I.
In the span of two calewnder weeks (one for writing, one for transcribing), I had a very plausible nuclear revenge story that went something like this:
A woman involved in illicit activity finds out that her parents, who she was a caretaker for the past few years, left their estate to the golden child older brother, who was a junkie. After going over the will with a fine tooth comb with the estate lawyer, they find a proviso that states she gets it all if he ceases to be.
You can probably fill in the remaining points w/o any help from me.
Like I said previously, this story was not only way out of my comfort zone (think going from a gated community to the inner city), but it became easier to write the further I went along. Why, you may ask?
Because I had all three parts to easily rewrite a story available to me.
I had a beginning and a middle, even though they were presented in a different order originally, and most importantly, I had an ending. With all three components available to me, it really wasn't that hard to come up with a decently constructed story that stretched the boundaries that I had to work within.
Even though I managed to construct a nearly eight thousand word story out of a two page short, I'm not quite sure if I want to revisit that part of my imagination anytime soon.
It's one thing to add certain components to a given story (say like an epic fantasy of some kind), but to construct an entire story around a particular component that you already use judiciously is a whole level of daring do.
So my friends, what about you? Have you ever written anything out of your normal comfort zone, just to see if you can?
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Lay it on me, because unlike others, I can handle it.