Fill your back pocket with monsters

One of the universal truths of writing is “If your keyboards not rockin’, they’ll come a knockin’”. The best anthology opportunities always come along whenever I’m bereft of stories. I’ve either shipped ‘em off somewhere else or changed them so much they don’t work as a short, or even a remotely sensible idea.

Good opportunities rarely send word ahead, instead they arrive kicking your door down shouting things like “Up to 7,000 words! Two weeks! No reprints!”. They’ll kick your desk over, unplug your monitor, and activate ‘Sticky Keys’ on your keyboard before you can open your word processor.

And then before you can compose yourself and remember how to disable those pesky keys, the deadline has passed and your sitting their keyboard in hands, wondering if you ever heard a knock in the first place.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’ve probably seen it happen. A social media notification or a sneak peak at Duotrope, the theme sounds perfect, something right up your alley, but the deadline is this Thursday. No amount of coffee or Red Bull is going to get those words out before it’s all over.

And that’s why you should always have a monster or two in your back pocket, ready to tweak and reshape to fit the opening.

Some invites are spotted too late, some are just damn short no matter when you hear about them, and sometimes motivation doesn’t quite kick in until the last minute.

So if you can reach into your pocket and pull out an idea rather than lint that’s always a deep blue – why is it always blue – then isn’t that more appealing?

It’s great if the theme is “hospitals” and you have a couple of killer doctor stories and one about a Mongolian Death Worm attacking a field hospital in the Gobi Desert, but it’s also pretty damn neat if you have a few thousand words about someone losing their mind and you’re open to it happening in a hospital.

Polished is best, Clean is great, Roughly Assembled is fine. But each of these is better than Not Started!

It may seem a little disingenuous to pull out a mostly formed round peg of a story and try and jam it into the square hole of a theme, but a good idea is always malleable. It’s better to have to squish a mostly formed clay pot back into clay than it is to have to dig down into the earth and mine the clay in the first place!

A tale about a haunted space station can become a story about a haunted school with less effort than starting a whole new story.

Of course you don’t have to rejig all your babies to suit every shiny new idea that catches your eye, but if you have a back pocket full of stories at any one time – you have options.

I dunno, maybe this is more of a me problem than a relatable thing. I like to have a junk drawer full of nonsense in case the lights go out so I can fashion a writing set up from an old birthday candle, an IKEA pencil, and an old takeaway receipt to write on…along with the idea I found in this analogy of a drawer.

Plus making sure your back pocket/junk drawer/idea factory (I dunno, it’s been a long week!) is tearing at the seams means you’re always writing. When you’re not rushing to meet a deadline, you write with ease and comfort and the benefit of being able to experiment. To try random things and see what works. You don’t have to suit the theme until the theme comes along. And then it’s up to you if you want to mush your babies into a brand new monster.

A monster ready to unleash!