lisa rabey writes stuff issue #15 hybrid

Jun 07, 2023

Dear Internet,

When I look for lit mags and sites to publish to, I tend to hover towards fiction. Even though my fiction writing is sparse (and often needs a lot of work), I have somehow convinced myself that if I’m going to submit any work, it needs to be fiction.

The problem is that I struggle writing fiction. A lot.

The basic premise of a story is:

Introduction
Action/conflict
Resolution

This glosses over how large a structure functions, but you get the gist of it.

When I write fiction, I typically start with the seed of an idea and more than likely a first line. I don’t outline the story, rather, I let the story take me through. I write scenes and fragments of time and try to flesh it out in that story structure. It doesn’t always work and I get frustrated because it doesn’t feel like a story rather it feels just as it is, a scene.

Yet sometimes a scene can be its own story.

Several pieces I sent off recently to a lit mag with 90% acceptance rate rejected both pieces because they were “not feeling it.” And gave me advice to follow a more standard story structure. I bristled because at 90% acceptance rate, and you’re the only “editor” it’s more about personal taste then a critique?

Do I even have the right to be miffed?

I have a few fictional short stories that are finished and out to one of my editors. I have no lit mag to place them to in the immediate future so he’s going to get back to me in mid-July. I’m excited to see what he comes up with. Maybe not all is lost.

Thank you for reading Lisa Rabey Writes Stuff. Share me with your friends and enemies!

A new spin on creative non-fiction I’ve been seeing is hybrid. Lit mags I’ve come across who use this genre describe it as non-fiction with a hint of fiction thrown in. Since I write my life every week, non-fiction is totally my wheelhouse so maybe I can do hybrid. An example of a hybrid piece I recently wrote is about a walk Mr Lisa and I had. The conversation is not 100% exact (I got as close as I could) and I could not remember the main roads we were near, so I used two county roads in the area instead. That’s hybrid.

Those of you who read my primary newsletter may find that this sounds awfully like an unreliable narrator in play and you would be correct.

An unreliable narrator is described as someone(s) credibility is questioned. When I started using AMUN as my tag many years ago, I felt it was pretty accurate description: What I write is as I see it, my truth, which may, or may not, reflect your truth. In Issue #152, I write about the meaning of truth using the Rashomon effect:

Our whole lives are nothing but Rashomon events.
(If you’re not familiar with the movie, a bride is raped and the story is told from various perspectives. The catch is all the perspectives are true. It’s from 1950 and a really good movie.)
We are messy individuals.

Monday night I cranked out a few hybrid pieces around 1000 words each. One is about a walk in the woods I had that weekend with Mr Lisa and the other is about a relationship I had before Mr Lisa. (One was submitted under my government name and the other under a nom de plume.)

Those pieces were easy to write. The first line is the arbiter and then the story quickly follows. I step away for a few hours and come, make edits, or word changes, and once satisfied, I submitted it for publication.

Writing creative non-fiction / hybrid / whatever feels comfortable to me. It feels natural and easy. Whereas writing fiction feels like a struggle.

And I’m trying really hard to overcome that struggle.

To that end, in addition to the sexy time writing classes, I’ve also signed up for classes on suspense and plot.

As a reader, you can feel the story’s flow, mostly, as you read. You want to know what happens next; you want to care about the character(s); you want to be invested.

But writing that is much harder than reading it.

If this seems like a topic I drone on about, it is because I want to do well. I don’t want to struggle, a lot, when writing fiction.

A good example is Aubrey Jones Gets a Life, I have an idea of how I want the ending to go but her journey is still up in the air. I’m just sitting writing and hoping it will come to me.

The instructor for the plot class talked about surprises and gave us homework to come up with 20 animals. I didn’t think I could think of 20 animals without googling it. But I did indeed come up with 20 animals I could keep going.

He also suggests that we write ourselves into the corner. Who knows what we will discover there?

I am a tad bit excited of what I’m learning so far!

(I also joined yet another org. I should add them to my author page. (RWA, Sisters in Crime, Hearts Through History, Contemporary Romance Writers, and Kiss of Death))

Now poetry? Poetry is a whole ‘nother beast.

A Most Unreliable Narrator

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