ideas into stories

 In my trawl of my short stories I’ve now got down to what I see as the dregs.  Most of these are stories I wrote in around the year 2000.  There are some excellent ideas there, but the execution is poor.  They aren’t rounded stories.

My biggest mistake was just stating the idea through action without giving the story any depth.  But it is the characters who carry a story, they are the way the idea is worked out.  And it’s characters we remember, not the details of a twisty plot.

A case in point is a story I wrote about automated manufacturing facilities being attacked by Luddites.  I described the attack in five short lines, and I didn’t explain the character’s motivation for destroying the manufacturing robots.  This is an idea on the page, not a well-rounded story.

In another story which is probably as old I had people with the mental ability to turn the winds.  They were protecting an over-populated colony from destruction.  Here too I’d just talked about the idea, and hinted at the politics.  In the re-write I made things personal.

I had my main character’s mother dying early from over-use of her gift.  My character is determined not to follow her.  She is, in effect, enslaved by the government, which forces her to use her talents to protect the colonists.  In the re-write I played up her recognition of her enslavement.  The colonists are crammed  into overcrowded towers, and drug their days away.  I made the point that they too are enslaved, in a different way.

Another old story is about a game I’ve called arrowball.  There are two storylines there.  The first is a player forced to keep going by a gangster who has kidnapped his sister.  The second storyline is about a sensory feedback system which sends the players’ vital statistics in real-time to the fans.  Which works just fine, until the star player has a heart attack and dies on-rink, taking out a huge number of fans with him.

I always liked the action of the story, but something was missing.  I hadn’t worked out the theme of the story.  In the re-write I’ve stated it explicitly.  The gangster is forcing the player to go on because of greed.  And the stadium uses the sensory feedback system because it makes big money from renting skullcaps to the fans.  

To deepen the story I’ve now added that the second character knew the sensory feedback system could kill fans if a player died on the pitch.  He fought against its installation, and lost.  In both storylines the issue is the evils of greed, and now I’ve made that explicit.

These changes have turned my old ideas into fully-fleshed stories with a point and a purpose.