I seldom get feedback, but today someone decided to send me a nasty gram that my stories suck because I do not take the time to write the slow build.
I do sometimes write a slow build. I call it greek tennis. It's a bunch of plodding back and forth until I can tell the story I want to tell. I write stories that I would want to read, so I tend to write perverted filth, and my rule of thumb is I write what I would like to read. I wanted to share that.
I tend to write "No shit, there we were" stories. That start off in the middle of something interesting and give you the backstory as we go/when you need it.
My Uncle shaped my ability to tell a good story in my youth. He told me raunchy stories, war stories, and sometimes raunchy war stories. He used to say it was "All true, except for the bullshit." Which is why I attempted to write a "Mostly True Bullshit" story not too long ago that was based on my real life.
All of his stories began with "No shit, so there we were." It didn't matter if it was a donkey show down in Tijuana on a three-day bender, or in Vietnam. He was in Vietnam, and all of his stories began at the most interesting part. He could catch you up to all the shit that happened before that in the course of the telling.
"No shit, so there we were, three clicks deep behind enemy lines in the heavy canopy of Cambodia, completely cut off from our main element. The XO had ordered us to conduct a standard recon patrol along the river, but routine mission, my ass. This was suicide and he knew that we didn't give a rat's ass about dying. We just wanted to gut some gooks, and Di Di Mao."
I am paraphrasing from a rusty memory of over forty-five or fifty years ago, but you get the idea. My Uncle changed details and every time he told it, it seemed like he did more. I do not know how to spell Di Di Mao in Vietnamese or what it means exactly, but to him it meant get the thumb out of your ass and get moving.
My Uncle was also in the SCA. He had all these raunchy stories about Pennsic, which is the big war up in Pennsylvania where thousands of people recreate military battles but fight with rattan swords wrapped in duct tape.
I wrote a story once about a character that is half my uncle and half me, and his stories were larger than life. They were fucking impossible. Tuchuks were these Gorean Barbarians taken to extreme parody level. They were muscular berserkers that my Uncle could call upon because he had the best fucking whiskey and a keg of Killian's back at his tent, and they knew he had smokes and the best Kajira. Kajira are slave women in Gor, and some of them were nearly naked at Pennsic and even skinny-dipped in front of men.
My storytelling style comes from that. I like to jump in and start at the no-shit zone. I can hear my uncle saying this if someone told him to tell stories that begin at the very start;
"I will catch you up to speed with the details. Details don't fucking matter. Stop worrying about those. Do you want to tell the story? were you there? Then shut the fuck up, sit back and listen, Kid. Yes, we drove the van, yes we brought the duct tape, yes we fucking set up the camp. Do you want to hear about all that bullshit, or is the fact that I have a camp not enough to know I set it up?"
I haven't been writing much here lately, because I haven't been very inspired. The unnecessary kick to the balls today wasn't a motivator for anything other than a blog post.