Stevenson is all hunched over now. I ask him to take off his hat. He does. We take off his watch, his ring, which sticks. He complies without looking at me, except for a glimmer when I ask him for his belt. He unthreads it slowly after rising to his feet.
I notice the precinct is totally silent. Even the inevitable, loudmouthed hooker, who'd been swearing in the corner like a movie cliché, is mute. I realize they've all heard it. I look at Stevenson with his hat off, bald, vulnerable head bowed. I try to take the little shoe from him but he won't let go.
"It's evidence," I plead. In the end I don't have the heart to take it. Joe takes it, gently, when we get him to his holding cell. We give him his own cell because word has already spread that we have a child killer. Innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply downstairs.
In his cell he sits on the narrow bench, head in hands.
"Are you all right, Mr. Stevenson?"
It's funny. I mean he killed a little girl and left her in the rain. That makes him lower than the lowest sort of monster. But he's so pathetic. I start to walk away because he hasn't answered.
"Officer?"
I stop and turn.
"Whenever it rains she comes to me. She leaves little wet footprints all over."
"Uh, yes sir, Mr. Stevenson." The hair is prickling up my arm. I don't want to hear the rest of it. I cut him off. "Look, sir, I have to take care of this report now, if you'll excuse me."
"Quiet little thing," Stevenson keeps on talking. "Officer, she just stands there all wet with one shoe, crying with no sounds, no words. Big eyes, wet hair. Just stands there after she leaves all these lopsided footprints."
"Gotta go, Mr. Stevenson. You try to rest for a bit, okay?"
I run up the stairs, two at a time, to the lady in records. "Minor female, Saturday afternoon, Maple and High. Hit and run. Coroner dispatches?" She's slow to start, stares over her glasses at me. Unaccustomed to getting orders from another woman, I'm thinking. Minutes go by and she finds nothing. I'm starting to get nervous, then annoyed. Elaborate rookie prank? On my way back to my own desk I peer at faces. No smirks.
I'm finding out about him on my computer. Banker. Divorced. Childless. But there's nothing to indicate a reason to flee the scene the way he did. Shock, I guess. Guilt.
My phone buzzes. "It's Nina from records."
I try to control my breath. My breathlessness. "Yeah?"
"Well, it's not manslaughter. It's an injury. Maple and High, Saturday afternoon, hit and run. I've got a comatose child, name of Kelly Massery, at County General Hospital."
"Oh my God," I burst. I nearly drop the phone. I need to tell Stevenson right away. I run to the stairs. They're all backed up with cops. Joe comes out of the crowd to me.
"Sorry, kid, we've lost him."
"Lost? What do you mean? Escaped?"
"Heart attack or something."
We walk over to the cell. Stevenson's on the floor. He's holding the shoe. "Hey," I say to Joe. "I thought you took that shoe to Evidence."
Joe looks at me strangely. "I did take it. I thought you gave it back to him." Joe pales. We look at each other. "I'll go to Evidence and check," he says.
I go back to my desk. I pace up and down in front of it for a moment. Then I get a burning urge to call County General Hospital. I have the head nurse of pediatrics on hold when Joe shows up at my desk. A pink floral shoe in each gloved hand, and an expression of utter bafflement on his face.
My mouth hangs open. I'm staring at Joe when the nurse gets on the line. "Who did you say, Officer Derry?"
"Kelly Massery," I whisper.
"Well, what a coincidence, Officer. She's just created quite a stir. She opened up her eyes fifteen minutes ago, sat up, and asked for a soda. We really didn't think she was going to come out of it. But, well listen, Officer."
I hear a little girl's laughter in the background. I hear a little girl's voice saying, "Look, Mommy. Look at all that rain out there."
Lisa Lutwyche received her MFA from Goddard College in 2013. Poet, playwright, novelist, and memoirist, she has been published in the US and in the UK, publications including Mad Poets Review, Image and Word, Poppy Fields, Piano Press, Pitkin Review, Falklands War Poetry, Minerva Rising, and the Cancer Poetry Project, Volume 2. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2000. She is the recipient of the 2013 AROHO “Shakespeare's Sister” Fellowship for playwriting. Lisa has taught creative writing (and art) at community arts centers for over twenty years. She is also an instructor in the Fine and Performing Arts department at Cecil College.
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Writing Tips
The Bus Test: A Simple and Merciless Method for Improving Characters — by Mike Cluff
The Sins of Short Story Submissions — by Dan Hope
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The Bus Test: A Simple and Merciless Method for Improving Characters
by Mike Cluff; published June 15, 2013
Do me a favor and read this first paragraph from a story:
Alley sat on a park bench. She sat there eating a taco. She hated tacos. Just like she hated Jim. But she couldn’t resist either one. They were both so beefy and greasy. Alley had to call Becky and tell her how much she was looking forward to going shopping. She needed a new pair of skinny jeans. Alley started texting instead. She stood up, and as she crossed the street a bus rounded the corner and flattened her. End.
I imagine you're wondering a few things. How is that a first paragraph? How is that even a story? Where the heck did that bus come from? or maybe Did Alley need new jeans because of the tacos? And would they really be all that skinny?
Sorry. The answers for those questions are just as relevant as the questions they belong to. They aren’t.
This is the question that matters: Do we really care that this character, the main character, was hit by a bus? And the answer is an obvious and resounding NO.
Alley did not pass the "Bus Test."
While very simple, and possibly childish, the Bus Test is extremely effective in measuring the strength of your character and, consequently, your story. Here is the simple three-step breakdown of how to apply the Bus Test and measure its results:
--Take a character at any point of a story.
--Have a bus run over the character.
--Ask yourself that important question: Do I care that a bus just hit this character?
Just that simple. Let’s run over that again with a little more detail.
Take a character at any point of a story.
And I do mean any point. The first or last paragraph, it doesn’t matter — saying it is too early or too late in the story for the Bus Test is a lie. Yeah, writers are liars, but good writers tell lies we care about.
This test is not only applicable to main characters. Make your minor characters stronger by running them over too. And don’t forget the bad guys — nobody wants a weak villain, so run them over as well. Relish in the vehicular assault.
So step one, pick your character that will be put to the test at any point of the story. Then move on.
Have a bus run over the character.
Don’t get hung up on what kind of a bus. Just make it a generic yellow school bus. Don’t make it a space bus if you are writing a space opera, don’t make it an orcish scream-rock band tour bus for your urban fantasy, and definitely don’t make it a Winnebago for your retired-but-not-really-retired-detective mystery. If the story is written in a time, place, or even a world where buses don’t exist, that is even more of a reason to use a bus. You want the bus-meets-character situation to be abrupt and even absurd. Something that should be out of place.
But make sure that you actually type it out in the body of the story. Write "and a bus rounded the corner and flattened her/him/it/them." Then read it out loud. Make it a group activity with your writing group or with your alpha readers. Laugh or cry. Then get the results.
Ask yourself that important question: Do I care that a bus just hit this charact
er?
What I mean is, do you wish that this character was still around? Did you want to see and hear more from them? If you say yes, then the character passes the Bus Test. Simple. No matter if you loved or hated the character. If you or your fellow testers feel that the character’s untimely death was indeed untimely and left you wanting, congratulations, you have succeeded in creating a character worth caring about. A character that people want to keep caring about.
However, if, as in the case of Alley, the answer is no, then that character failed the Bus Test. And you have some work to do.
As an author you make promises to your readers. Promise that must be fulfilled. There are few things that piss me off more than when a character I have spent time with fails to meet their potential, be it fortuitous or tragic, and then fizzles out. Such cases only tell me two things: The author gave up on the character, and the author didn’t care enough about me, the reader, to follow through. You might think that I take it all personally, and you would be absolutely right.
Don’t cop out on your characters. Don’t waste your readers’ time.
It is your responsibility, your authorial duty, to make the reader feel something about your character or characters. Each character must have some relevance, not just to the story, but also to the reader. But how? Alan Heathcock, author of Volt: Stories, said it this way:
"The only true way to make someone care about your character is by allowing them to become your character. Not to just look at the character. Not to glimpse them. Not even to just understand them. Full and deep care will only be won if your story enables a full empathetic connection, enabling the reader to live, in full — to see, hear, smell, feel, think, imagine, hurt and swoon and hope and hate — moment by moment, as the character."
You build the bridge, that "full empathetic connection" between your characters and your readers. Every sense, feeling, and experience your character has must be relevant and honest. You can’t skimp on this at any point or you will lose your readers and your character will fail the Bus Test. But when you put in the effort and create a well rounded, flawed, three-dimensional character that is mercilessly exposed on every page you will ensnare and even possess your readers.
So even if you are done with all of your edits, all of your grammar is perfect, and all of your plot lines are full of twists and wonderful ups and downs, make sure to throw your characters under a bus and see if they pass the Bus Test.
Mike Cluff is the Editor-in-Chief and Chief Annoyance Officer (which are two ways of saying the same thing, but who doesn't love redundant titles?) of Fiction Vortex. He has spent years in the writing and editing trenches, and he has earned every last red-ink stain on his uniform. Now he sits at a financial institution and can feel his creative soul slipping away
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The Sins of Short Story Submissions
by Dan Hope; published June 19, 2013
The time has come, the editor said, to talk of many things: of spaces, docs, and bad old tabs, of attachments, and code strings.
There seems to be too much confusion about the proper way to format and submit documents for publication. Depending on how bad you flub the formatting, you can send the HTML fairies into complete disarray. And the fairies like everything to be in order. You don’t want to see them when they’re mad. They’ll make you fly, all right, straight out a window.
So we’re pulling out the teaching stick and doling out a few healthy swings of wisdom. Even if you memorized proper formatting techniques in the past, read on. Things have changed a little bit since the digital revolution, and many offenders are just well intentioned writers using outdated rules.
There’s one resource that is most often cited for short story formatting. Most publications have mentioned it at one point or another, and many link to it in their submission guidelines. It is William Shunn’s masterpiece, Proper Manuscript Format: Short Story Format. The name isn’t that exciting, but the contents are invaluable for any writer. It’s short, informative, comprehensive, and even a little funny. If you go in for instructional humor.
Now, Shunn’s guide will get you 95 percent of the way to proper formatting, but there are a few things that require updating if you plan to submit your story electronically. If you’re submitting a paper copy via snail mail, stop reading here, and let Shunn be your guide.
For everyone else, pay attention. The HTML Fairy Defenestration Squad is real, really serious, and seriously just around the corner waiting for you to mess up.
Here are some additional guidelines for submitting digitally.
Attachments Are the Devil’s Spawn
I know we're starting off strong, but it’s true. It doesn't matter what kind of word processor you wrote your story in; it doesn’t matter what manner of conversion or exporting process you put it through. We want plain text pasted into the body of an email. There is a fresh set of fingernail marks in my desk for every email that contains an unsolicited attachment.
I know there are a few publications out there that request an attachment (usually the ones that have a dedicated external submission service), but almost all the rest prefer your first contact to contain exactly zero attachments. If you aren’t familiar with the dangers of attachments, they include transmitting viruses, corrupted documents, obscure and useless file formats, and complete and utter loss of sanity.
We don’t want your cyber-chlamydia, so keep the document files to yourself unless we request them specifically.
Unusual Page Layout or Symbols Are Hard to Do and Pretentious
I know you want to go all e e cummings on us and show the world how clever you are with paragraph design and/or crazy punctuation, but keep in mind that the modern browser still doesn’t handle this stuff easily.
The browser is like your old cranky grandpa who doesn’t want to take his pills. You can make it happen, but it involves elaborate deceptions, and even then he still might throw a fit. Getting text to show reliably on every browser usually means that you have to stick to traditional paragraphs. Getting fancy is possible, but it can turn into a headache quickly. Also keep in mind that symbols such as , %, and & can actually make the HTML fairies think that you’re writing code, not prose. This can lead to a lot of confusion and a late night for an online editor. Like I said, there are ways to trick the HTML fairies, but we’d just rather not.
Tabbed or Spaced Paragraph Indents Were Invented by the Nazis
This isn’t exactly true, but since we jumped right in with the Devil’s Spawn thing, I figured more hyperbole couldn’t hurt. But really, stop using the space bar or Tab key to make paragraph indents. We at Fiction Vortex cry ourselves to sleep at night over the injustice of this one. And that’s really not as hyperbolic as you think.
This is a holdover from the old typewriter days (and seems to have a particularly long half-life among the Word Perfect crowd, you silly ninnies). Back then, the Tab key was the only way to make a good paragraph indent. Nowadays, errant tabs create problems for our system. Instead, use the Paragraph formatting menu (or the little slider arrow on the ruler above the doc) to set a “First Line” indent. Half an inch is still pretty standard.
Two Spaces Between Sentences, a.k.a. Giving the Middle Finger to Editors
This one is clearly outlawed in the Geneva Convention, and still people are committing first-degree offenses in this area.
Stop it. Just stop it.
I know, I know, you’ve got any number of stylistic and historical reasons for giving that spacebar a double-tap after every period. I’m here to tell you that you’re not a bad person. You’re just wrong. First of all, there’s a surprisingly long and sordid history of the debate between single- and double-spacing. So your arguments might not be that concrete, anyway.
Here on the Internet, we single space. That’s it. Case closed. Whine all you want in your own writer’s lair, but so help me, the next person who puts two spaces between sentences will hear from the HTML FDS. I know I said they were more con
cerned about coding symbols and layout, but we can convince them to start policing this one, too. They’ll do anything for an apple fritter.
Withholding Vital Information from Allied Forces Is a Punishable Offense
This one isn’t exactly specific to digital or print formats, but it’s worth saying again. Every publication wants you to tell them certain things. If you neglect to include these details, editors are annoyed when they start reading the story; that’s not the mood you want them in when they read your story.
The most common information is the type of story and how long it is. If you don’t know what type of story you wrote, don’t bother submitting. The length is expressed in the number of words rounded to the nearest hundred. Don’t tell us how many pages it is. Don’t tell us how many minutes it takes to read. Tell us the number of words. We want to know what we’re getting into here. Also, and this should be obvious but people still do this: Don’t put this information after the story. Put it at the top, before the title. Please.
Minor Infractions and Other Things to Consider
There are myriad other things to consider when submitting a document. Font, for instance. Don’t fret about this one too much, it should be really simple since you’re pasting your story into the body of an email. Just use the natural email font.
If you’re particular about the type of font, make sure it’s something commonly supported, and easily readable. You’re not making your story cute or whimsical by making the font Comic Sans. And Papyrus does not make your fantasy look more authentic. Just stick to the default, or use Times New Roman.
Other people worry about whether they should double-space paragraphs (as in double spaces between lines, not between sentences). It usually doesn’t matter in the body of an email. Just make sure that it’s easy to distinguish between paragraphs.