So you've finally received that anthology invite. Or you decided to try for that themed anthology open call you recently saw on Duotrope. Regardless of the source, you have a prompt, the nugget of your story. What do you do next?
This is the part that trips up many a good writer, especially those who haven't published before. How do you coax that story nugget into pages and pages of full-blown story? It is both easier and harder than anyone will ever tell you.
Prompts are both the seed of your story and the constraint upon which your story has to be framed. For an anthology about the world's crappiest jobs, a tale of a young teen who joins the rebellion to free the universe from the evil empire is inappropriate. You could, however, write the tale of that teen's job as a moisture farmer on a desert planet where the tech is always rusting and he never has enough money to paint the town red. This idea would definitely be within the constraints applied to the anthology. Of course, you better have George Lucas's approval before you try to get paid for ripping off Star Wars.
To give you a more detailed example, I'll use my short story "Another Day, Another Labor" from A Career Guide to Your Job in Hell (also available in Kindle). The anthology invitation prompt was "A 5000-6000 word short story about the world's crappiest jobs. The job can be real or fictional." (Didn't see that one coming, did you?)
When I read the prompt, I immediately thought of some poor guy shoveling circus elephant dung (or as Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs would say: "poo"). Pushing aside the thought as juvenille, I tried to come up with another crappy job more in the intended vein of the anthology. Because I'd never had a really bad job for longer than a week, I found myself unable to fulfill the "real job" part of the requirement. So, fictional piece it would be. And I just couldn't get big tops, elephants, and "crap" out of my head.
That's when I broke down and asked the editor if any of the other authors had taken the prompt literally. He said no, and was willing to let me take a shot at it. So that's where I decided to start–with a story about crap. But the elephants and the big top just didn't say "drama" to me. There are lots of stories about elephant crap and the people who shovel it. I wanted something different. That's when I grabbed my significant other and started bouncing ideas off of him. I mentioned the elephant thing and tried explain what I wanted. We spent an hour talking back and forth, him giving me suggestions, me shooting them down, when he made a crack about a Greek myth he couldn't quite remember.
I'm a big mythology geek. A lot of my writing contains references to myths, legends, or folk tales. When the SO made his crack, I corrected him with a comment about Hercules' twelve labors. Now, I don't know how this works with other writers, but when I find an idea that I like, I get this sudden emotional firework going off inside. I can't think of anything else but the idea. Hercules' twelve labors was one of those moments that everything crystalized for me. My story would be a retelling of the Augean Stables labor.
Background: Hercules had a crap job once. Within the course of one day, he had to clean out stable full of firebreathing bulls that killed anyone who came near them. Well, anyone except their owner, that is. So there was years worth of accumulated crap in those stables that no one could clean. Hercules was given the task with the expectation that he would fail and quite probably get himself killed. Instead of confronting the bulls, though, he diverted a river through the stables and flushed all the poo downhill.
This is a great story about innovation under adversity. But how could it be retold? I couldn't just write it down word for word and expect it to be accepted into the anthology.
I decided to modernize it. A little research uncovered modern equivilants of many of the main character names (though I did throw in an easter egg for those who've seen Hercules: The Legendary Journeys). My biggest writing problem was the protagonist, Cole. Turning Hercules into a believable human being in modern times required understanding the original Hercules. The guy is an idiot. He goes from being a braggart and a hero into a mindless killer with a massive depressive streak. After a couple of days of re-reading Hercules stories, it finally occurred to me that Hercules is bi-polar. I did a little research to verify the disorder and its treatments, was happy with what I'd found, and thus Cole was born. And so was my setting. Given what I planned to do with the bi-polar angle, I couldn't set the story in today's time, so we ended up in 1950's Wisconsin (dairy territory).
After that, the story practically wrote itself. I had the characters, the new setting, and one the reason why things kept going wrong for Cole. At this point, I just needed new character backgrounds while retaining the more interesting mythological bits and keep the realism from destroying the fantasy and the fourth wall. After several edits, I had a good comic tragedy that I wasn't ashamed to hand over to my editor.
I'm the strongest man in the world, and my boss is a bitch.
She's also my stepmom, Eunice.
Uni, I call her, even though she hates the name. Yeah, it's petty, but I can't fight back any other way. She's a tiny slip of a thing, and I don't hit women. Not even when they've tried to kill me.
I'd quit if I could, but with a crap-shoot job market and a manslaughter conviction on my permanent record, I couldn't get another job if I tried. So work for the family business it is.
Every morning starts the same. Shower and breakfast before dawn. Pop my lithium, after making sure it hasn't been tampered with—I'm paranoid that way. Fix a couple of sandwiches for lunch. Then walk the two miles along the gravel-strewn side of State Route 31 until I reach Olympus Contractors. Sorry, make that "Olympus Contractors, trademarked, registered, and copyrighted" according to the business sign. Uni even made sure it got printed that way on the letterhead.
The lights are on at Olympus. No matter how early I get up and get into work, Yuri always gets there first. It's like he's playing some sort of game to which the only rule is "beat Ercole." I'm forced to duck and half-turn to get through the door. The bastard chuckles, a shrill echo that haunts my dreams.
"You need to lose weight, Erc," Yuri mocks. Pipe smoke hangs thick in the air, half sweet and half bitter. My nose catches a whiff of mint as Yuri leans back in his cracked-leather office throne from behind Dad's old oak desk. A snarky grin stretches across Yuri's face. That's when I know my day's gone from bad to worse, because he's found another bad one.
