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“It was a dark and stormy night.”
(first line from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time) Today’s story comes from a vision I had when I woke up this morning, of a little girl (a princess, it turns out) navigating a sailboat over the ocean all by her self. Basically, I started with that image and the rest just sort of fell into place, descended from the ether. It’s a pirate story, another one for my eventual book of kid’s stories. The only real difference I find between writing kids stories and not writing with kids in mind, is that I tend to want to end kids ...
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“The line consists of an infinite number of points,…
the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes… No–this more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale.” (first line from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Book of Sand) As you might guess, the inspiration from today’s story draws from Borges’ The Book of Sand. In that story, a man encounters a book, like an encyclopedia, but with infinite pages–if you turn to an illustration, you should look well because you’ll never be able to turn to that page again. ...
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“Ask me a riddle,” Blaine invited.
(first line from Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass.) Today’s story is inspired by nothing more than the title: Exquisite Corpse. For no particular reason, I woke up this morning with this title in my head. (The term exquisite corpse refers to a collective poem or work of art, made by several people.) I also woke up with the idea of a ghost, or zombie that comes back from the dead to turn in his master thesis. Something about the constant confusion and oppression of writing a seemingly interminable thesis strikes me as Kafka-esque, so that’s probably why Franz makes an ...
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“The station waggons arrived at noon,…
a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.” (first line from Don Delillo’s White Noise) Today’s story has two major points of origin. First: yesterday I heard the poet Carol Frost give a reading. One of her poems was about her mother, who suffers from dementia, and how she wasn’t able to read a clock. I’ve been turning over a story in my mind for a while where I wanted to have a character who suddenly was unable to recognize symbols (numbers, words, letters, even images that represented other things). I always envisioned this story as an absurdist ...
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“The final dying sounds…
of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.” (first line from Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road) Okay, I’ve got a reading to be to soon, so I don’t have much time to comment on today’s story. I will say I wanted to do an exercise in having a character do a task while thinking about something. It’s a literary trick called Juggling by some. It’s realism, nothing fancy. Hope you enjoy it! April 26 — The Right Kind of Onions
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“Their father never took them to resaurants,
because he though it was a waste of money when they could open up a can of beans, sprinkle on Tabasco sauce, stuff their bellies, and it would all shit out the same way anyway.” (from Daniel Chacon’s and the shadows took him.) I’ll start by saying I’m exhausted. And rather than deliver a drawn out story of my long day, (which by the way was a very good day) I’ll just enumerate the reasons for my tiredness: a: woke up at 5 am to run a half-marathon this morning b: went to Newport Pizza and got pizza and beer ...
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“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
…first lines from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer prize winning Beloved. The inspiration from today’s story comes from a real life tragedy about Alicia Parlett, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, who was only 28 when she died of cancer. I won’t go into all the details, (you can read about it here) but what struck me most about this was the fact that she quit treatment knowingly, and even though she knew she would soon die she had a commitment ceremony with her boyfriend, who gave her his mother’s wedding ring. Something about this stuck with me…not so much the ...
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“In the beginning there were thirty-six of them…
thirty-six droplets of life so tiny that Eduardo could see them only under a microscope.” (first line from Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion) To be perfectly honest, I had a little trouble with today’s story. Trouble insofar as I couldn’t think of anything to write about. I’ve been wanting to do something with clones lately, so I figured now was as good a time as any. Once again, I had the magazine Space Squid in mind when writing this–which means it’s an attempt to incorporate science fiction (cloning) with humor. After writing this story, it feels more like ...
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“No, the cat had not come back”
Although this isn’t the first line, it is among the first pages of Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle. The genesis of this story is simple: our good friend, Brodie, has told us on several occasions that Amanda and I have a ghost cat living in our apartment. Admittedly, I have never seen the ghost cat for myself. However, this morning I half-dreamed that something had pounced onto the bed, something like a cat. It kind of freaked me out for a few minutes, then I realized I probably had to write about it. In fact, I’ve been having some ...
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“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
This is the first line from J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit (which was written specifically for children, by the way, unlike his later, six-book saga). For a while now, a few years I’d say, I’ve been wanting to write a book of fantasy stories for children. I don’t mean fantasy strictly in terms of the quasi-medieval, elf and troll infested milieu of The Lord of the Rings. I mean fantasy in the most broad sense: a story world that could not physically exist. Although, I concede that by this definition, Kafka’s, The Metamorphosis could be viewed as fantasy, since in ...
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It was a wrong number that started it,…
…the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the vioce on the other end asking for someone he was not.” (first line from Paul Auster’s City of Glass) Today I’m trying my hand at noir/detective fiction. Sort of. I think I’ve been indoctrinated (by MFA programs and manuals on writing) to avoid genre fiction (like Sci-Fi, Mystery, Romance, Western, Fantasy, Hard Boiled Crime, etc…) over the years, and I’ve long wanted to dabble in such genres. The trap in writing in these genres is that they are usually highly formulaic. For example, many genre stories comply with ...
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Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K
…for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” (first line from Franz Kafka’s, The Trial) Coachella was a success! I even got a little bit of writing done in between band sets and visits to the beer gardens. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t easy writing stories with so much going on. Sure there were tons of interesting people and art installations, a place where you might think you could pluck stories out of the air…but the reality is, writing is a solitary act and it’s hard to get anything done when overstimulation is coming at ...