by Bojana Stojcic
You’ll bet me 50 bucks there’s some deep shit at the core of my next story, right? Well, kind of. My initial thought was to write about a heavy snowfall that made my travel impossible or I wish I could tell you how lonely I am while the logs crackle and pop in the fireplace and such, but I think I’ll go for something more tangible this time, like mankind’s innate love of hot dogs and how I nearly choked to death in an eating contest once.
The thing is, if you want to be a writer, besides having to get used to secret admirers who keep sending you gifts, you have to get something down on paper every now and then. Otherwise, you’ll get rusty and by the time you figure out how to replace a rusted door hinge, the door may be pretty hard to open. Sooo today I’ll hit the ball into the net and write “I.”
“Doh! Come on, B, you can do better than that,” my inner voice is nudging me. “Use your noodle for a change.”
Ok, ok, I’ll write “he, she and they.” Easy as pie! I’ll deal with the protagonists and conflict some other time.
Another thing I’ve learned about writing is that it’s not about what, but how. A good story has to catch you off guard like a good spanking and linger in your head like premature ejaculation. That being said, I tend to concentrate on details later, seeing them as disparate regions that are beginning to knit together under the king, and scribble down whatever pops into my head first, which is mostly trash, but hey, who’s looking?
The bottom line is your
writing needs to be realistic to draw in your readers, like when my grandmother
caught me cooking up dope on a cold winter’s night, or true for that matter,
like when George Clooney was hitting on me. I know what you’ll say. “NO
frickin’ way!” What if I told you he wanted to dump Amal for me? Then he dumped
me. For his own wife! Yeah, family shit happens.
Now, let me tell you about a time when I got this agent to sign on the dotted line. Well, I slept with him first but that’s totally irrelevant to the story.
Bojana Stojcic teaches, bitches, writes, bites and tries to breathe in between. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over 30 publications, Rust + Moth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, The Opiate, The Blue Nib, Burning House Press, Mojave Heart Review, Okay Donkey, Spillwords, and X-R-A-Y, among others. She blogs at Coffee and Confessions to go. She is @BoyaETC on Twitter.
(And check out Bojana’s story My Grandpa Knew Mr. Parkinson from the October 14, 2019 Weekly. – Elephants Never)