Strawberry Lou
This is a story that deals with the fear of rejection. Of course the fear of dying is in there, too, and the fear of losing a loved one. But the real theme is rejection, and I love the small act of kindness that Lou’s brother does at the end to ease his sister’s path into heaven. I have read this story out at many literary events and it has drawn a strong reaction from the audience with many people telling me how much the story affected them.
People have also asked me if this story was based on a true event. It wasn’t, although a friend of our family did die of leukaemia a few years ago, and I saw how devastating this disease was on the people around her.
Sometimes giving characters little eccentricities – like wearing bicycle helmets in cars – can make them seem more real, because real people often have unusual quirks. When I teach story writing, I emphasise the importance of emotions in stories. All stories should make us feel something. It might be excitement, joy, romance or sadness, but a story that doesn’t move us in some way has failed.
For the emotion to really resonate, it must be honest, it must be real. Otherwise the reader will feel like they are being manipulated. You can’t expect every story to achieve resonance for every reader, so the best you can do, as a writer, is to make each story feel true to yourself.
This story still moves me every time I read it.
Sins and Griefs
I think it is a strange human condition that the fear of embarrassment is sometimes stronger than the fear of death. That is really what this story is about. It’s quite an old story; I wrote it during the 1990s, long before I was a published author. The youth group camp was based on similar camps that I went on as a teenager, although I am happy to say that nothing like what happened to Richard ever happened to me.
This is one of the few stories in this collection that sticks to a standard story structure: a main character achieves an important goal after overcoming a number of obstacles.
That is exactly what happens, although I do try to fool the reader into thinking that Richard’s short-term goal (that of seeing Madison in the shower) is his real goal. Of course it’s not. His true goal is to be one of the ‘beautiful people’. To be accepted. That goal is achieved, if accidentally.
This story was partly inspired, at least conceptually, by a 1970s movie called Taxi Driver in which a character, played by Robert DeNiro, sets out to commit a crime and ends up becoming a hero.
Shooting Stars
I wrote this short story for a competition, and it didn’t win. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and I suppose really I wasn’t, because judging is always such a subjective thing. But I guess I was hoping for it to do well because it was my favourite of all the stories I had written at that time. I liked both the main characters, and no matter how many times I read it, it never failed to move me. Hopefully you like it, too!
When rewriting the story for this collection, on advice from my brilliant editor, Kristy, I made some major changes to the story, specifically the ending. In the original version, Matthew dies, but his death inspires his mother to take up writing again.
I think the new ending turns the story into even more of a tragedy. That may seem strange, considering that the main character dies in the other version. However, in the original version the mother’s life is turned around by the death of her son. In the new version, a great genius is lost to the world.
The biggest difference between this story and the others in this collection is the point of view. You will have noticed that the other stories are told from the perspectives of a child or young adult. But this story is told from an adult’s point of view. I was a little reluctant to include it in the collection for that reason, but somehow it felt like it belonged here.
Smile
In my opinion, this is one of the most tragic stories in this collection. And despite the collection’s name, there is only the tiniest seed of hope in it.
Can you imagine a life spent staring at the same ceiling, day after day? Would it drive you insane? Would it horrify you to think that you would never again see sunshine, or the ocean, or go dancing, or eat a nice meal? Rather, you would be subjected to decades of nothing.
And for Benny who knows what torture his brother is enduring but can do nothing about it. That is a tragedy also.
The only hope, and it is a slim one, is that Benny will find a way to ‘cure’ his brother and give him some kind of life back.
There have been several articles in the news recently about ‘locked-in syndrome’ (LIS), but the story was actually inspired by a conversation I had with a nurse who looked after girls with Rett syndrome. Rett syndrome is a little different to LIS in that the patients (in severe cases) are still able to communicate, but only by moving their eyes to look at letters and slowly spell out words.
I was quite moved by the work the nurse did with these young girls, and this story was the result.
Lockdown
This story almost didn’t make it into the collection because of its confronting subject matter. It is based on an experience I had at a school in the US (it was just a drill) and was inspired by the terribly tragic school shootings that have occurred far too often in the US.
I wondered what it would be like to be in the middle of a real-life lockdown with a killer stalking the school grounds. How would that affect the kids involved? What kind of terror must they go through?
And on the other side of it, what factors would cause someone to flip out so badly that they want to resort to violence? What goes through the mind of the person who causes the lockdown?
For this story I chose to stick with the point of view of the victim, to try to create a claustrophobic effect where the reader only experiences what he experiences, hidden in a dark cupboard as the killer roams around outside.
The Local
Ha! Got ya! I always wanted to write a story with one of those jokes that go on forever. Just when you think you’re getting to the punchline, there isn’t one! This story is based on a classic example of a shaggy dog story about a businessman who stays overnight at a convent (it’s quite clean!).
The key to this story is the voice of the narrator. I wanted his voice to be noticeably different to the way the rest of the characters speak.
I chose Southern US because it’s an accent that can be achieved through dialect, rather than by the phonetic spelling of an accent (which I hate – I find it hard to read). Let me explain a little. In the phonetic spelling of an accent, you write dialogue the way it sounds. So a Scottish accent, for example, might say something like ‘Ah doon’t noo what yer talkin’ aboot, mae laddie’. It’s difficult to read, isn’t it? With Southern US, you can express the accent simply by using grammar and by including words such as ‘anyways’ and ‘y’all’.
I felt the voice was important as it helped accentuate the fact that the narrator was an outsider (even though he had been born in the town).
Santa’s Little Helper
Stories can come from anywhere. Sometimes from other stories. ‘Santa’s Little Helper’ was based on a concept that I wrote for Amazon Rapids, a new platform where stories are presented to children in a graphical message format.
Amazon passed on this concept, but I loved the sweet simplicity of the idea behind ‘Santa’s Little Helper’, so I turned it into a traditional short story.
I think you can see the origins of this story in the back-and-forth nature of the dialogue. Really it’s about the loss of innocence as we grow up and become world-weary and cynical. Sometimes all that is necessary is a moment of beauty in our lives to remind us that, despite everything, the world is still a wonderful place.
Stop Reading, You Die
In my notes for ‘Strawberry Lou’ I talked about the importance of making the reader feel something. (In ‘Stop Reading, You Die’ I hope it is fear.) But almost as important as emotion is the need to
keep the reader in a state of suspense. Suspense doesn’t mean the story has to be action-packed and exciting – sometimes quite the opposite. All that is needed is for the reader to want to know something, which isn’t revealed until later.
The foreshadowing of Lou’s death in ‘Strawberry Lou’ is an example of suspense. So is the ‘secret’ of the dam in ‘The Local’ (although this one is a cheat and never pays off the set-up). So, too, is the opening of ‘Stop Reading, You Die’. I don’t mean the opening line, but the end of the opening section: ‘I can tell you when you’re going to die. It’s when you finish reading this story.’
Whether believing these words or not (and I hope they make the reader at least a little uneasy), the reader is held in suspense. How can reading a story cause them to die? How they will die? What is going on?
By making the reader wonder something like this, they keep turning the pages. Back that up with believable characters and real emotions, and you have the makings of a great story.
If you have been reading these author’s notes because you are a writer, then I wish you all the best with your stories.
If you survived this book that is …
First published 2017 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
[email protected]
© Brian Falkner 2017
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
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no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
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Cover design by Astred Hicks, Design Cherry
Author photograph: Courier Mail
Typeset in 12/16 pt Bembo Std Regular by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
The University of Queensland Press is assisted by the
Australian Government through the Australia Council,
its arts funding and advisory body.
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
Falkner, Brian, author.
That stubborn seed of hope / Brian Falkner.
ISBN 978 0 7022 5969 2 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5928 9 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5929 6 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5930 2 (kindle)
For young adults.
Fear – Fiction.
Short stories.
NZ823.3
Stubborn Seed of Hope Page 13
