Story Starters: The Writer’s Idea Bank

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When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”

My brother-in-law, whom I will here call The BiL, was at the time an electrical engineer. As such, he too knew some things about programming. Like me, he also had (has) a flair for, umm, let’s say for an anarchic sort of jokes. And so we entertained ourselves for a brief time with a a thought experiment: an idea for a proposed software package, never built, which we called “BellPorn.” (In the post below, rather than use the actual P-word and attract all manner of unseemly traffic, I will indicate it thusly: p*graphy.)

It was a simple idea, or so it seemed:
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Bookwormed

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Ron Arad's Bookworm bookshelf (click for more info)Seems I have been “bookworm tagged” by Julie Weathers.

“Bookworm Award” rules:

  1. Open the closest book — not a favorite or most intellectual book — but the book closest at the moment, to page 56
  2. Write out the fifth sentence, as well as two to five sentences following
  3. Tag five innocents [or more]

With the assumption that “book” means “published book, not your own manuscript, Mr. or Ms. Writer,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be interesting, in fact, to apply to writing friends’ manuscripts, Julie has added another step:

4.  Repeat steps 2 and 3 for your own manuscript.

So, umm… okay.

I’m going to disregard tech-reference books, which are stacked over and around my computer. The closest other book I can put my hands on without getting up and looking around is a well-thumbed 1967 paperback edition of Catch-22, which is still on my desk from when I reviewed it for MoonRat’s “celebrate reading” series back in June.

In this passage, the protagonist, Yossarian, is talking with his friend Hungry Joe about nightmares. Hungry Joe is speaking sentence #5 on page 56, and the conversation continues:

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Line Burners

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You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

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“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”

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Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.

On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?

And yet, and yet…

In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.

Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.

(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?

A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):

The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.

Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.

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The Sum of All Fears

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From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008:

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

White would be stuck in the elevator for 41 — forty-one! — hours. A “security” camera captured his entire stay in the Hotel Car 30. Afterwards, he managed to obtain a copy of the tape:

He has watched it twice — it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

Here’s the video, the whole 41 hours viewable in about three minutes:
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Attach Imagination to Mouth. Turn Ignition. GO.

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When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)

For instance, a story (told, and told, and told… from the back seat of a car) might go something like this:

Once upon a time Frankenstein was walking through the woods AND THEN it started to rain AND THEN Dracula flew down and got Frankenstein AND THEN Dracula and Frankenstein went to a party and monsters were all there AND THEN the sun came out and it was like Sesame Street…

And so on, and on, and on, all the AND THENs providing the transitional links between hundreds of what might otherwise seem, to my unimaginative adult mind, to be discontinuous stories. (They also, and perhaps by unconscious intent, made the plot as a whole uninterruptible.)

I loved that.

This urge to free-associate stories seems a common phase which kids go through — not all kids, but many of them. Should you need evidence I offer, first, this brief and enormously popular (over nine million views and counting!) video from earlier this year: a three-year-old little girl summarizes the plot of Star Wars, Episode IV (this was the original film in the franchise, remember, first released in 1977 simply as Star Wars).

More recently, along came the next one — likewise destined for online-video classic status. (I encountered it the other day, among the weekly 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks entries.) The monologue (a little over four minutes long) is in French, but the clip also includes English subtitles. Some of the characters will be familiar (vaguely) to anyone who’s been around little kids in recent decades. But as far as I know the plot is based on nothing at all other than what emerged, spontaneously and moment-by-moment, from the storyteller’s mind.


Knock me over with a feather. Plucked from the wings of a hippopotamus — in HEAVEN.

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The Internet and Dogs

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I was working on the weekly whisky river-driven rumination — which I’ll deliver a little later — when I came across something I just can’t keep to myself. Actually three somethings. And *WARNING*WARNING*: these are spit-take funny.

Most recently, and the item which led me to the other two, we have this: an Open Letter to President-Elect Obama, re: Goldendoodles. Excerpt:

I’m sure the first coupling of a Golden Retriever with a poodle was an accident, and likely the fault of the dogs themselves. Then, some idiot without a social conscience sold them by saying that the dog is similar to a Golden Retriever, only smarter.
…
A smarter Golden Retriever? This just means that you have a dog that is obsessive-compulsive about retrieving to the point where nothing else exists. Nothing. They don’t want affection, they want to chase a ball. Toby plays fetch while he’s eating — he has his own personal game of jacks where he drops his ball, grabs a mouthful of food, drops the food on the floor, and eats however many kibbles he can before the ball stops bouncing (For science, I once threw a ball while he was taking a dump… if you do acquire a Doodle I strongly advise against this).

A comment on that post led me to 2007’s I Has a Sweet Potato. This is simply an account of the author’s adventure at home while “Best Beloved,” the author’s S.O., is elsewhere. It is presented “in conversation form.” Excerpt:

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.

[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.] [From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Finally, reaching way back to 1999, there is the classic Dogs in Elk. This has been reproduced at various locations around the Web, but according to the author, originally appeared on Salon. (She also affirms that yes, it is true.) However, I read it here. It’s a transcript of a forum conversation; the subject is how to handle odd dog problems. Excerpt:

Anne V – 01:01 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Okay – I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

AmyC – 01:02 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?

Anne V – 01:12 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – They’re inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.

Have fun, but remember: swallow beverages first. No liability here.

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Bart Seinstein

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Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…

A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.

(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)

Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.

(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)

Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:

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“A Guy I Know Once Told Me…”

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The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)

But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.

I suspect I’m not alone in my certainty that many of these have influenced my understanding of the universe, of people, of life. And I may have lots of company, too, in having no idea what portion of it might actually be true, as opposed to simply fun, convenient, or dangerous — and little intention (or time) to check it all out.

In the rest of this post I thought I’d try a little experiment. What follows are three urban legends, two “true” (in the sense that “a guy I know once really DID tell me”), and one made up just for this post. Furthermore, I won’t tell you which are the real ones and which, the impostor.

(One interesting possibility: that someone, somewhere, will (a) find this post via a search on a keyword which figures prominently in the bogus urban legend, (b) do a “find” within the post itself, looking for the keyword and hence skipping over all this background, and eventually (c) spread the false rumor as his/her own bit of “a guy once told me” folklore. Ah, posterity…)

Here goes:

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