Starting sometime in the mid-1980s, I wrote a series of short stories featuring the same protagonist, known only as Webster.
(It was never made explicit whether that was his first or last name, although I always thought of it, oddly, as his first. And the mid-’80s TV show of the same name? Forget it. Never saw it. My Webster was not that Webster, trust me.)
I’ve written about Webster before, in the first post which talked about David Gerrold’s 1990 writing workshop. (Webster was the character I “met” and subsequently talked with in the darkened-room exercise.) In my mind’s eye, he was tall, a little stoop-shouldered (as if to deny his height), wore his brown hair long enough to part (on the left) but not long, and had a strong, classic Roman nose. Invariably, at some point in each story, he appeared in a two-piece suit (even if the story never said so explicitly). It was gray, and it was undistinguished.
Which was the effect Webster wanted to achieve: invisibility, to the extent possible. He hated attention. He hated it so much, indeed, that he was constantly floundering around, forward and back, in an effort to avoid it — with the result, naturally, that he drew attention, further embarrassing himself. He could seldom decide on the best course of action to achieve maximum noticeability; when he did decide, it was reliably among the worst possible choices. (But I’ll hand it to him: his choices were never the obvious ones, either.)
Aside from Webster himself and the outlandish situations in which he constantly found himself (and without fail made worse), his stories had one other thing in common: their titles. Each title was a two-word phrase, the first word of which was “the.”
Here’s an overview of some of them:
