Deciding What’s Possible in Your World

At last, Spring is here. Now I’ll have time to work on my own stuff.  My first order of business is to complete some of my spec fiction stories, many of which have languished unfinished for years. After scrolling through my short stories folder, I decided it was high time I finish a story about some little aliens who landed in the sandy red desert of SE Utah. 

When I started the story, I figured the location would be easy for me since I’ve lived around Moab for decades; plus, I enjoy reading science fiction. The incomplete story features a small UFO that’s hiding in an abandoned uranium mine near Lisbon Valley.  Somehow the ship lost its power source and the aliens are trying to utilize the remaining energy in the mine to get enough power to take off. The process is taking quite a while.  

To add some human elements, I created a guy who loves to walk the desert while narrating his sci-fi novels. One day he stumbles into this dusty mine to find the small ship.  He doesn’t tell his friends about the encounter, but he regularly returns to the old mine.  Before long the guy’s personality changes and no one seems to know why. I introduce a few other characters, including his acquisition editor.  I also introduce two of the aliens, who have watched the wandering writer from the ceiling of the high drift.

That’s pretty much where I stopped writing two years ago. As a notorious pantser, I didn’t have an outline for the story. I had tossed around a few ideas, but wasn’t sure what I could do after that mid point.  Now that I’ve resumed work on the story, I need to find out what stopped me back then. Whatever it was, it stopped me cold.  I scoured a few spec fiction articles and books until I stumbled across a likely cause for this resilient writing block. 

I think the lack of pre-writing for the aliens stopped me.  Before I started the story, I drew up a character sheet about the wanna-be best selling author, his friends, his job, the layout of the land, and the size of the little ship and its short crew.  But I never determined which supernatural or alien powers these visitors would have (besides the ability to fly here from outer space).  Once I introduced them hovering near the ceiling, I found that I didn’t know what else they could do. Did they move like humans or could they zoom around like Speedy Gonzalez or were they able to fly?   

Thus, in the middle of the story I had been stopped by questions like:

• Can these aliens become invisible if they want?
• Do they have genders? Since they’re in space suits, how could a person tell?
• What do they usually eat? 
• If they levitate, can they make people and other objects levitate?
• What kind of emotions do they have?
• Do they use ray guns that make things, even people, disappear?
• Since they’re ship wrecked, will they continue to hide in the rocky tunnel? Are they afraid of this world, or will they brazenly wander the desert? 
• What if they run into a cow or a coyote?  Will they fight, kill, run, or disappear?

As they were written, my reviewers found the existing chapters exciting. Most of them nagged me to finish the story, yet I couldn’t proceed.  Now, I realize I wouldn’t have encountered that paralyzing roadblock if I’d established more details about my aliens before I became so deeply involved in the story.

In the future, I’ve determined to fill out a separate character sheet for any aliens, ghosts or monsters invading my tall tale.  

Ann Gordon