The Secret to Writing Donald Trump as a Short Story Subject.

It's really simple to write about Donald Trump in a fictional context because, ultimately, he is a living work of fiction. Nothing about him is genuine except his unerring propensity for absolute, unadulterated self-promoting horseshit. So really, he is the very essence of a caricature of a real person. The problem lies in knowing how to handle this knowledge. He's such an easy target that one could be accused of taking unfair advantage or going for the cheap shot with practically every sentence. He isn't a protagonist I would normally attempt in my writing except I happened to read about an anthology looking for parotic tales starring his royal orange majesty.

How did I figure out what to do? I decided to let the man speak for himself. Only a first person narrative could come close to capturing his word salad, nonsense diatribes. I also decided it was better to avoid turning Trump into a parody since he already is one. To try and take a ridiculous character like him and make him more ridiculous would be...well, you know.

So, it works better to let Trump be Trump and make the situation ludicrous or impossible. Directly quoting him is a good method as well, but it's also fun to write new dialogue that sounds enough like him to fool people into wondering whether or not he actually said it. I first cut my teeth on that one by using the Fake Trump Tweet app. Only the ones that insulted me as a writer were obvious to people.

The story is clipping right along and will probably be finished soon. Then the beta reader(s) get to read it and tell me how much it sucks so I can do a rewrite or two or twelve. Then I'll send it to the anthology and hope for the best. If it's rejected, I'm going to do something I don't normally do and self-publish it since it's far too specific to send elsewhere. That's why I rarely send to anthologies that want such particular submissions, but this was too much fun to pass up.