{"id":686,"date":"2008-09-01T11:54:38","date_gmt":"2008-09-01T15:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=686"},"modified":"2008-09-01T11:54:38","modified_gmt":"2008-09-01T15:54:38","slug":"short-fiction-the-cabin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/short-fiction-the-cabin\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Fiction: “The Cabin”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I said, I’d try to incorporate into the story — somehow — a picture of the two sentences’ author.<\/p>\n

If you’d prefer not to know in advance what the two sentences are, and don’t care to see the picture of their author, you can read the first section here<\/a>. (At the end of that page is a link to a PDF version of the whole story.)<\/p>\n

If on the other hand you do want to read the details, the original challenge was here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And, finally, if you want to read more about my experience of writing a story to these specifications, well, just keep reading below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As I mentioned<\/a> last week, after three weeks I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to get from I ask your forgiveness<\/em> to I am a mountain tiger<\/em> — but had had a sort of half-awake revelation.<\/p>\n

\"\"The form of that (again, rather blurry) revelation was simply an image of a man in a snowbound cabin. The cabin wasn’t his; he’d been stranded there, by accident. And somewhere in the cabin, over the course of the story, he would discover two notes — presumably left by a former inhabitant — which said, of course, I ask your forgiveness<\/em> and I am a mountain tiger<\/em>. He would also find an old photograph, not a color painting, which would depict the woman (Ginevra de Benci) in Da Vinci’s original. I didn’t know how the photograph would figure in the plot.<\/p>\n

Which implies that I knew how those first and last lines would figure in the plot. Not true. I had a vague sense only of an old-fashioned horror story — something Saki<\/a> might have written, maybe. Old-fashioned not in the language or setting but old-fashioned in the sense of slightly surprising, slightly weird, and slightly (to use Wikipedia’s word) macabre. Particularly, I wanted to contrast the indefinite hints supplied by the first sentence with the quite startling specificity of the last — and wanted that last sentence to be taken literally<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This last decision led me to a sort of Cat People<\/em><\/a> scenario.<\/p>\n

The story would be better (a) without the given first\/last sentences or, at least (b) if I’d just given myself more than a week to write it. (Heh.) The problem, of course, is that in having to rush the writing, I didn’t really<\/em> make the connection between the two sentences, and left hanging all questions which might persist in a reader’s mind about what exactly had happened. As it stands, this is sort of a cheap deus ex machina<\/em> in reverse: a protagonist is not miraculously saved by some convenient supernatural force, but dispatched by one.<\/p>\n

(And as you can see from the final result<\/a>, I also stretched the given-last-sentence rule, albeit just a little.)<\/p>\n

Ah, well. It least it had me doing something besides career-twiddling for a few days!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,5,105,372],"tags":[298,384,385,386,387],"class_list":{"0":"post-686","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-short-fiction","9":"category-style-and-craft","10":"tag-writing-exercises","11":"tag-the-cabin","12":"tag-saki","13":"tag-cat-people","14":"tag-horror","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-b4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":691,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}