I re-read the full story a few times and every time I read it, the parts I hate get worse. I hate those parts because I was lazy about them when I wrote them the first time. Remembering back to the original writing-session, I rushed through most of the story because I only bothered to work on the ideas I really loved. (Writing Note: You can’t get away with lazy writing. You’ll always have to fix it later.)
So the process that created the draft went something like:
- I spent a few weeks trying to come up with an idea for a story (for a writing class)
- Inspiration struck and I wrote down my favorite ideas in a notebook. About two pages worth of a moleskine.
- I found a spot in the library and wrote the story in about six hours, I think, until the building closed and I had to walk home.
- ~2 hours in, I had written 5 pages, I was content with the quality of the writing, and I had finished taking ideas from my notebook. The next hours were spent trying to fill in junk to make the story longer, and make the story more like what I assumed stories were supposed to be like.
- The walk home was one of the best experiences of my life. Terrible as the story is, I had spent so many hours with it, inside it, trying to form it, that it stayed with me as I walked through silent streets. My mind kept handing down suggestions, like “What if this happened? Wouldn’t that be fun!”
The most important thing is that this process actually got a story written down. Clearly the story can be vastly improved, and the process can be (and will be) tuned indefinitely. But I’m glad that I have these pages, even if I hate the actual content. This should be helpful to remember the next time I’m afraid of composing. (Here, ‘composing’ means the part of writing that is not editing/revising).
For the story itself, I’d like to scrap everything after the second bullet point above. Strip the story down to words that interest me, and start over from there. So here are the parts of “Anywhere But Here, V1.1” that I would like to keep alive:
- The ambiguous ending. I need to execute it better, but the final lines were the spark that came before everything else. Character is tossing a cap to themself, each time tossing it in such a way that the catch is a little more dangerous. The actions are both conscious and seemingly not their own. It can be stopped at any time… but the character lets it keep going. A ‘plan’ of sorts develops: Character tosses the cap a bit too far, tries to catch it but fails, loses their balance, and falls. Character knew this would happen; and yet it was never inescapable. The story ends in the tension of the cap being thrown one more time – is this toss the failed catch that will pull the character overboard? Or will the character just let it fall, making a complicated kind of ‘release’? (Cap as part of character’s identity, for better or worse, and by dropping cap, character loses that part of themself but saves the rest)
- Blurrring the line between Free Will and Determinism
- I wanted there to be layers of seeming inescapability. The balloon is tiny, with nowhere for privacy. The balloon is in the air, with no quick way to safely get down. (Only Options: wait or jump) Character lacks the knowledge to operate the balloon, so is entirely dependent on the operator. I put the character in a relationship with the operator, but not for any reason other than it being a bad one. (From a reader’s perspective, it is a bad relationship: nothing about it makes sense and it’s all so forced.)
- Big stakes, tiny impetus. How can something so small, like an idea that seems to come from outside the thinker’s mind, have such a drastic consequence? Big changes are not always precipitated by obvious causes. And Big obvious causes don’t always pan out into big changes… sometimes no change, sometimes tiny change, sometimes plans backfire.
- Hot-air balloon. It’s weird, interesting.
That said, Murder Your Darlings and all that, so none of this is cemented.
In fact, the hot air balloon might be too weird… and this character might do better as a minor character feeling trapped on a ship at sea for months, driven insane by their own head while the other sailors, crew, and guests seem totally fine.
A boat at sea… hmm…
Raconteur 