Writing Trick for Remembering Details

Writing is hard enough. Then you have an ongoing condition that you have remember… and inevitably forget. (or maybe you don’t. I definitely do.) Sure, it’s the kind of thing that editing is for, but it can cause some major pitfalls.

Even minor things, like the main character sustaining an injury, can snowball into a big Oopsie. For example, let’s say the main character has an arrow in the back. It’s okay if you don’t constantly mention it. She might forget the pain while in the heat of battle. But then you have her sit in a high-backed cushiony chair without removing the arrow or receiving any form of treatment for any injuries. Let’s say that you make a point of not healing anything. And let’s say that since you’ve already forgotten about the arrow in her back, you describe her sitting in the chair with comfort and relief.

Oopsie.

Pretty much everything is fixable. However, I have a trick that will help keep immediately relevant story facts on your mind while writing, so this kind of thing doesn’t happen. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than simply trusting your memory.

Get a pen that you don’t use for anything else (so you don’t run out of ink) and a stack of post-it notes. I prefer the ones that aren’t freakin’ tiny, but if you write small and have to keep track of a lot of things, then you might want the bitsy ones. Higher up on the list would be getting varicoloured ones, again if you anticipate a lot of must-remembers cropping up.

Then just make a note whenever something happens that you’ll need to recall for an extended period of time. For me, this is a must whenever someone is injured or if there’s an animal around. (I’m terrible at pets.) Some might also like to use this for keeping track of character’s looks and clothes, especially for characters who change clothes and/or hair.

Once you’ve written up your note, whether longhand or your own version of shorthand, stick it to your desk, monitor, anywhere that it will be in your peripheral vision. If you’re worried about cluttering your view of your writing space, then put together some facsimile of a cork board. (I am too cheap to get a real cork board. Also I hate hanging things on the wall in flats and we don’t have a house yet.)

Important note: I know that there’s a Windows program that mimics post-it notes, but I do NOT recommend it for this. The point of this method is to have your reminders in very quick view. I don’t know about anyone else, but my desktop is never in easy view. Alt-Tab-ing is really disruptive to my writing. It’s also much easier to remember to turn your head to catch sight of a NEON PINK post-it than to look at the desktop.

It’s raining

While the storm buffeted the trailer like a sardine tin in a washing machine, Edie wrapped a fresh bandage around her foot. The stink of ointment filled her small room. If her foot didn’t heal soon, the pink paint was certain to peel. The thought dragged her eyes to her Back to the Future poster. The paint had already been peeling before they’d moved in. Doc and Marty may not have been anyone else’s first choice in covering a small blemish, but she didn’t have any other posters.

She hung other things on her walls. Mostly old dance shoes and jewellery she had made. She fastened a pair of purple clasps to the bandage, then hobbled over to her bed. She stuffed a throw pillow under her foot, and then folded a much larger pillow behind her back.

There wasn’t a television in her room. There was barely a television in the living room. Edie slipped her arms in between her head and the pillow. From the creaking and near thumps, she figured that the storm would soon take out the electricity anyway. She wiggled the toes of her uninjured foot and stared up at the ceiling, stained by previous storms.

It would have been nice of any of the stains had resembled an animal or even a country. Clouds had more experience in that department. However, as the clouds were in the middle of work, Edie made due with the oblique brownish stains. There was a particularly large one that could have been a horse. If she squinted. A lot.

Sighing, she reached for the silver chain around her neck. Her newest creation. The chain had taken almost as much work as the charm she’d strung it through, each link sturdier than it seemed. The pendant resembled a warped door. She had meant to shape it like a crystal, the vague, overly symbolic kind in video games, but something had gone a little wrong.

Thunder rocked the trailer. Edie jerked up, releasing her pillow so that it fell to the floor. In that same second, the lights winked out.

Heart hammering, she gripped her pendant and rummaged for her flashlight. It ought to have been right beside her. Unless someone had borrowed it without asking. Too sore to bother, she flopped onto the bed, flat on her back. It bounced back slightly, jarring her foot.

The pain dragged her up, like a marionette on its strings. As she straightened near the window, something caught her eye. The storm had knocked out the entire park. The only lights still braving the battle were the lampposts on the sidewalk, just outside the entrance, and far away from Edie’s family’s trailer.

She pressed a hand to the window, wincing at the cold. There was something out there. Someone walking in the rain. She huffed, glad that they didn’t have a generator to try. Old Mr Bennet’s generator always had some issue, and he never even tried to fix it until a monsoon had hit and the power was gone.

And yet. Mr Bennet was a tall man. Almost freakishly tall, like a guy in the circus with his name in lights. It was difficult to tell with almost the whole world dark as the inside of a top hat, but the dark figure didn’t look tall.

Careful of her foot, Edie knelt so that she could bring her face closer to the window. Definitely not tall. Short, even. Maybe someone her age. But she was the only kid in the park. Everyone else was either single or too old to even have young grandkids. And even procrastinating Mr Bennet didn’t go out to fix his generator without a poncho or an umbrella. This person wasn’t even wearing a coat with a hood.

Still, as wet as it was out there, hair plastered down may as well have been a hood. Or a skull cap. Edie shivered and moved away from the window. Her dad must have been asleep, or he would have come in to check on her by then. She checked the gap under the door for the weak flicker of candlelight.

Nothing.

“Dad?”

Wind rattled the window in its frame as it picked up speed. Raindrops splattered hard against the wall. They sounded like bullets striking iron.

“Dad, the power’s out and you took my flashlight again! I need it!” She heard herself shouting over the sudden rumble thunder. Multiple claps stacked over each other, invisible cards that buried her voice.

Then the blinding flash of lightning that followed revealed a human face just outside her window.

Free-Writing Descriptive practise

A tree on its own was silent, dignified. But just like people, when trees got together in large groups, silence was out of the question.

Andy picked her way through the forest, wobbling as she tried to tiptoe in her Wellies. Detritus covered the forest floor like the remains of a messy sneeze. She imagined each snapped twig bursting into flame as she leapt away from the misstep.

She paused at the lip of a small ravine. It was deeper than she was tall, though streamless and bare of rocks. Stretching her arms out like a little red scarecrow, she held her chin up in rigid pride. A little hop, toes curled, saw her into the ravine.

A cave would have been better, she thought. Caves were dark and wet, like a black mug filled with water waiting for a tea bag. Nearly as dangerous. Sticking her hand in the mug would have meant getting burned. Caves in her backyard, vast as it was, were never big enough to do more than sit in and get extraordinarily dirty.

She amused herself for a time, marching from one end of the ravine to the other. Her arm punched the air as she tried to remember how soldiers paraded.

Wind whistled through the tree branches. Offkey, like a kid with a tin ear attempting composition. Andy rubbed the tip of her pink nose. Soldiers found shelter in poor weather. She clambered up out of the ravine on the side opposite her initial entrance.

A copse of tall trees lay a few yards ahead. She gave up marching and broke into a run. Pretended urgency set fire through her veins.

When she reached the trees, she squeezed past the outermost to deposit herself near the middle. She pressed her back to the rough tree trunk, straightbacked, unslumping.

Dew and seasonal rain soaked her jeans through within seconds. Her hands, white with winter chill, patted the sodden grass. She swept away fallen leaves. Thus situated, she rested her head against her tree.

Sitting on the ground changed the world. She felt like a toddler, just beginning to walk. Bushes at eye level, the sparse wildflowers imitating sunflowers. Peeking past the tree’s guarding her position.

If she looked up, she would have seen nothing but branches meeting trunk, foliage stretching out in a natural radius. It was like staring up a very large nose. Not a sight that had been illustrated in her Jack and the Beanstalk book, but one she closely associated with giants.

Andy shivered, gritting her teeth to stop them chattering. The sun had risen, in theory. But the cloud cover was so thick that the sun might as well have ignored astrophysics and stayed its orbit for a few hours. The air hung wet and heavy, pregnant with the promise of rain.

Dad had promised they would go fishing. The weather was better at keeping promises. Soldiers knew things like that.

Description Practise with Caro

My major weakness lately is descriptive writing. I used to write it sparingly-yet-enough, but now it seems like I never put in description at all. It’s almost as bad as Jane Eyre having too much description. It doesn’t help that I’ve been reading a lot of really good description recently, and I don’t think I’m soaking up any learning.

So while writing in 750 Words this morning, I grabbed Caro, changed perspective, and gave it a shot.

::

The city stretched out beyond the point below my feet, elongated through the fisheye lens of too much vodka. Too much cheap vodka. My wallet hurt either way, but my teeth were cleaner than if I had been sucking down bleach all evening. Although that might have tasted better. Ah well.

Evening had come and gone. Long shadows melted into a dim dark that coated the street. Even the most minuscule crack in the pavement became a bottomless pit. It gave me a craving for chocolate.

I pulled my hair back, wishing I had something to tie it with. I must have been neon in the falling night. Pink, Easter-egg hair in thick liquorice whips, bright lipstick, and a blue dress that could have directed traffic. The idea had been to stop it, but then I had gone inside, and traffic had ceased to intrude on my thoughts.

There wasn’t any traffic in this part of town. Not at two in the morning. I was grateful. The wind was cool and grating on my freckled arms. My skin prickled with gooseflesh. I felt like a hedgehog standing to attention.

I sat under a lamppost and tried to imagine it was a sunlight. Then I realised that it wasn’t working, and if anyone had been around to see me, they would have imagined that I was a prostitute. I rubbed my arms and clomped on towards my flat. A block later, my heel caught in one of the cavernous pavement cracks, and snapped off.

Someday Serial 3 – Siobhan

Siobhan was up to her elbows in blood. Sweat drenched her forehead, threatening to slide forward and blind her. Her left eye twitched.

But she held still.

Mum worked the needle back and forth while Siobhan held the patient still. He was out cold, but he wasn’t paralysed. If he moved at all… She ignored the ache in her muscles. He wouldn’t move.

Someone banged on the door. Her back twanged with the repressed reflex to look up. She kept her eyes and hands on her work. One day, she would do the stitching and someone else would hold the men down.

“Almost done,” Mum said. Almost too soft to hear.

Shame burned under the heat of pressure and bad weather. Siobhan didn’t need reassurances like that. They were for kids. She bit the inside of her cheek rather than mouth off about it.

Stitches finished, her mother cut the thread and went for the bandages. Siobhan let go of the man’s leg and moved back. Almost the instant that her fingers lifted from his bloody skin, he gave a slight jerk. She had certainly been needed. No one on this entire dusty, craphole planet could sit still for love, life, or money. Especially not for life.

She moved to help with the bandages, but mum shooed her in the direction of the sink. Siobhan had gotten bloodier than her mother. The man had thrashed so much that she felt guilty about calling Finn twitchy the other day.

Once her hands were washed, she left the op room. The stupid, impatient people waiting impatiently for the patient would keep banging on the door at the worst times, but her part was done. Mum never liked her to deal with the healthy. Probably because Siobhan would have ended up making them less healthy.

They were all so annoying.

She wandered over to the monitoring equipment and flopped into the spin-chair. Blips showed her where everyone was. Everyone, everyone. Each of their clients and each of their retrieval agents.

Siobhan watched the blips move. They looked like rats in a feeding frenzy. Another fight, then. If the stupid explorers were going to call them in whenever raiders or beasts attacked, then they should have just hired mercs to protect them. She leaned back in the chair. Next client, she’d raise the rates.

Someday Serial 2 – Finn

Finn curled up in a part of the jeep that no one else fit into, and tried to sleep. He envied Siobhan. That girl could sleep anywhere. He could barely sleep in his bed.

They had both grown up on this rock, although he suspected that his circumstances might have been better. Siobhan had always lived in the compound, with her mom. He’d lived in a house, more or less. It was more like a tin can, with all of his brothers stuffed inside it.

A rock punched beneath one of the tires. Finn jerked out of his place, scraping his nose on the edge of the seat in front of him. One of the others grunted. Dale, probably.

The alert had been a deep one. They wouldn’t get there for another twenty minutes at least. Finn sighed and pillowed his arms under his head.

Business had been a little too good lately. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten any sleep. They’d had a green alert–a retrieval alert–at least once a day for a week. Or once a night, as the case might have been.

More people had been going out into the wastes. And nobody went out into the wastes without some insurance. Their retrieval agency was the only one with medical personnel built into the deal. It gave these crazies an extra sense of security.  Hopefully someone else would figure that out, and Finn could get some sleep.

Dale thumped on the side of the jeep just as Finn was dozing off. He kicked the seat, cursing under his breath.

“Looks like fighting time.”

“Oh, piss off. This is the same reason as last time.” Raiders taking potshots at explorers. They’d only been preying on people since before Finn was born. Why didn’t the explorers ever think about raiders before going into the wastes? “We’re retrieval, not merc fighters.”

Nobody was listening. They never did. Half of them liked the fighting. Finn sighed and found a weapon.

Someday Serial 1 – Siobhan

Sirens blared throughout the compound. Siobhan opened one eye, then let it drift shut again. Green alert. Not her territory.

The walls shook as boots thundered about. Men liked to run. Had the alert been blue, she might have run a little too, but only to make her mum happy. It wasn’t that she didn’t need to hurry as much as the rest of them. She just had something the rest of them didn’t.

An irregular thud prompted her to open her eye again. Finn had tripped, just inside her field of vision. He was already scrambling to his feet, one arm in the sleeve of his dust jacket. She opened her other eye, but stayed where she was, curled up on the ratty brown sofa. “Haste makes waste.”

“Stuff it. Where’s my gear?”

She waved a lazy arm toward the lockers. “Where else would it be?”

He clumped over to his locker, jamming his other arm into the appropriate sleeve. This must have been a good day. Usually, his jacket went on backwards at least twice before he managed to right it. “I keep it in my room.”

“That’s a stupid place to put it when you’ve got a locker right here.”

But he didn’t hear her. He had already yanked his rucksack out of the locker and slammed it shut. He had to come back for his headset, but by the time he did, Siobhan had rolled over. As far as Finn was concerned, the only thing that Siobhan had that he didn’t was a pair of breasts.

The sirens wouldn’t calm for another few minutes. They’d be gone before the lights switched off. Another girl might have whined and moaned to match the wailing sirens. Maybe even smothered herself to stop the lights slicing through her eyelids. Siobhan had lived with the alerts since she was a baby. They were like a lullaby.

The only alerts that would wrest her from her napping place were blue and red. The latter meant a direct attack on the compound. Those were rare, but the threat was enough to justify the extra bulb.

Droning hums added themselves to the alert. Siobhan stood before she had quite left the sofa behind. A blue alert. Blue meant that it was time for her to work.

She pulled her hat off and dropped it onto the floor as she left the room. No hats in the op room. One of mum’s many rules. As Siobhan made her way to the op room, she braided her hair. Strands of brown stuck out like thorns from a squashed bush, but “out of her face” was the only requirement.

The rusty sink beckoned to her just inside the op room. Mum was already there, scrubbed pristine, standing erect. Like a statue, made of ruddy stone. Siobhan nodded a professional greeting and set about washing her hands.

The guys would be out in the sandy wastes, seeking out one of their clients in distress. She and mum had the more immediate work.

“What do we have?”

After a quick critical scan, Mum opened the door. A truck had already parked, haphazardly. Three burly men and women carried a writhing man on an improvised stretcher. “Call said a panel fell on his leg.”

Siobhan stood at her place by the op table. If the leg was crushed, they might have to amputate. But in all the time she had seen her mum work, the woman had never lost a leg. One day, Siobhan hoped she could hold to the same reputation.

What Siobhan had was dignity.

Some crappy freewriting

I spent my 750 Words session for the day free-writing a character that popped into my head about ten minutes before I started writing. The idea was to write some patches of things for her and her companions, but I don’t know if I’ll actually do that after this. I ended up liking the dynamic between the two characters, but it’s not really anything new. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

//

Raising a hand to shade her eyes from the setting sun, Samora squinted into the northwest. “I don’t see what you’re getting so worked up about,” she said, her reedy voice light.

Much about her was soft. Supple curves that might have yielded to an incredibly brave hand, rich brown hair that shone in the right light and when soap and water were plentiful. She was muscular, but in the same way as a selkie. Her less womanly lumps were evenly distributed throughout her body.

She tended to stand to the best of her advantage out of of habit. Rook could not have been further from impressed. Very little impressed Rook.

His downy black hair was too short to move, even as the breeze picked up, showing an inclination towards becoming a proper wind. Rook’s square jaw was set in a determined yet somehow neutral expression. Samora didn’t bother to ask him what he was thinking, or if he had even heard her.

A moment later, he surprised her by answering. He lifted a large hand and pointed in the same direction they were already facing. “That’s why,” he said, his voice booming softly, like shy thunder.

There was a phrase to describe her friend, Samora thought to herself as she tried to understand what he meant. Shy thunder.

After a moment, she dropped her hand and turned on her heel, as if to return to the forest. “It isn’t there, Rook.”

“It is. You just aren’t looking right.”

“How can there be anything you can see that I can’t?”

She looked back at him in time to see his shrug and bewildered expression. “Maybe you’re just tired,” he offered.

Not to be outdone by a paladin of all people, Samora strode back to the cliff’s edge and glared past the blinding effects of the horizon. A moment later, she let out a small sigh. Smoke curled up from yet another forest. Everywhere they went these days there were forests. This one that they had just left ended at the cliff.

“All right,” she said with a sigh. “We’re on the right track then. Now how do you suppose we get down?”

“I thought climbing was your thing.”

“It is. But how will both of us get down there? You’re not exactly light enough for me to carry.”

He grinned, showing off straight teeth that she often imagined punching out. No man should be that clean after a trek through a forest. Any forest. She felt anew the sweat and fatigue of travel, and began to dislike her companion.

“You go ahead. I’ll find a way down.”

Shrugging, she did just that. If he didn’t make it, then she would just go on to find the town by herself. She needed a bath and he was not going to get in the way of that.

Thoughts not yet actions

There’s been this merry mishmash of ideas in my head for the past couple of hours. I figure now is a good time to expand on them. At the very least, it might be entertaining.

The first was this short story idea I had while washing the dishes. It was one of those times that I had some lines just pop into my mind and went with it aloud. Let’s see if I can remember what came to mind.

It started raining. The window above the sink was jammed open. Amelia Rice stood elbow-deep in suds, smiling at the heavy green-grey scent of the weather. Her auburn hair blew back against her face as if she were standing in front of a wind machine. Droplets of water aided her efforts to rinse the pot and ceramic mugs.

The sound of the doorbell ringing brought a smile to her face. Amelia was not the sort of person who smiled often. Those who saw her smile would have said that this was for the better. There was an eerie quality to the expression. As if she herself were unaware of why she was performing it.

She opened the front door to see a pair of police officers standing on the ivy-patterned welcome mat. One was very old and haggard, his partner pink-faced and twitchy. They greeted her with tipped hats and polite smiles that faded quickly. “Mrs Rice?”

“Yes. Call me Amelia.” She invited them in.

They looked rather silly sitting on her tasteful love seat. Neither slumped, although she imagined that at least one of them would have very much liked to do so. The younger one with the pink face cleared his throat. “Are you related to a Mr Daniel Rice?”

“He’s my husband.”

The pink-faced man cleared his throat. She was about to offer them a spot of tea when he said, “I’m sorry to inform you, ma’am, that your husband was found dead this morning.”

She fixed him with one of her eerie smiles. “Oh good.”

Both officers looked at one another, then back at her. One was astonished, the other suspicious. The haggard officer put his hand on his hip, as if reaching for a weapon that he was not carrying. “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh no need. It’s just that I’ve been waiting to hear that for two years.”

The younger officer held out a hand as if to stall his partner from further action. “Waiting two years,” he repeated, as if to himself. “Are you a clairvoyant, Mrs Rice?”

“Nothing of the sort. My husband was a notoriously horrible man, officer. I’ve expected him to run afoul of something more awful than he is–haha, of course I mean was–ever since I married him. Quite frankly, I’m surprised it took this long.”

Anyway, it turns out that she’s eighteen and they were married in Denmark. I’m not sure why they married, but I’m sure the reason is either cool or creepy. I’m not sure if this is a world where clairvoyants have more clout than they would in the actual world, but that may be worth exploring.

The other stuff I’ve been thinking about have to do with something else I mentioned today. Namely, the idea of using the medium of a fictional blog to write accounts from supernatural students. I picked up the app Surviving High School the other day, and I am surprised by how much I like playing it.

I love seeing my character bumble through his decisions and the things that happen to him. He’s not the most proactive guy, but some cool stuff happens to him. He got in a fight on his first day of school, started dating a goth, joined the football team, and eventually made friends with his enemy in some rather long and heart-warming circumstances.

I was kind of thinking that it’d be fun to marry those two things. The narrative style of the game with the supernatural aspect. Again, it’s pedestrian and tired, but fun.

Stream of consciousness

Sometimes when I open up 750 Words to write, I don’t know what I want to write. This can get so severe that I put off writing for much of the day. Usually I can think of something, but it’s always a little bit funny when I do.

Today I got started because I’m probably not going to have any time to write anything today. It’s my niece’s birthday party, and we have to drive out to West Jordan in ten or twenty minutes. You’d think I could have written about that, heh.

Instead, I wrote about this weird dream I had. It was bizarrely calm. Just these two guys talking about their love lives in the basement during a sort of personal apocalypse. One mistook the other for having a crush on one of the girls in their party, and upon learning that his friend had no romantic leanings towards anyone at that time, allowed himself to be coaxed into talking about his own failed relationship with one of the other girls with them.

Writing about it got me a much clearer, more interesting and rather wordy understanding of what had been ‘said’, and I decided that while I probably didn’t like this girl that they were talking about and did find the guy talking to be rather more appealing as a character, it wasn’t because of the topic the two guys were discussing. He wasn’t dumping on her, but I had a feeling I just didn’t like her.

What he said about her was that neither of them understood the other well enough to make a relationship work, and that she was the one who had broken it off, that she had given reasons he didn’t believe to be accurate but that he didn’t think she was lying about them. Just wrong in her assessment of what had gone wrong.

Anyway, yeah. I guess I like writing off the top of my head, but I don’t think it makes for very good fiction. Probably not very good blog posts either.