Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” The answer, for me anyway, is pretty much everywhere. Here is the inspiration fora piece that I posted as a serial last year, Rock the Baby.
Last summer I was looking for a new writing challenge. I combined a few ideas into what became Rock the Baby.
Although I like the short forms of flash fiction and poetry [which is why I mostly write in those forms] I wanted to try my hand at something longer. At about the same time I was reading some of the serialized stories propagated by PJ Kaiser and Tony Noland through Tuesday Serial. That seemed like an obvious match to keep me on a schedule.
I had a rough outline of a sort of science fiction story that centered on a tiny perpetual electrical fire. But what to do with it? I read a magazine article that suggested trying to write in the style of a favorite author as a writing exercise. [Wait, I had to do that in my high school English classes too....] One of my favorite authors is Kurt Vonnegut and his Cat’s Cradle seemed like a natural fit for my sparky idea. Actually, I probably got the sparky idea from Vonnegut’s Ice Nine — I’ve had this outline in the back of the drawer for a loooonnnnggg time.
In Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut uses the children’s string game as a metaphor. I played off that by choosing Rock the Baby, a simple yo-yo trick. I extended that by using names of yo-yo tricks as the names for each episode in my serial. In Vonnegut’s book the narrator is a journalist documenting the events leading up to an apocalypse. I made my narrator write in a journal beginning right after an apocalypse.
All that gave me a structure on which to begin building my story. I added some bits to my outline and jumped in. Oh, wait, I added another degree of difficulty for myself. I gave my narrator a speech impediment. He can’t pronounce the “J” sound. As a result, he never uses words with the letter J or a soft G. Even though this is supposed to be his written record and there is little dialog [another challenge, as it turned out] I figured that if he avoided words when speaking he would avoid the same words when writing.
It was difficult, in a good way I think, to write in his voice. I would revise sections and find words that I use but he wouldn’t and then have to figure out what he might say instead. Using “icebox” for “fridge” or “refrigerator” was pretty easy, as was “only” in place of “just,” but try explaining combustion without “oxygen.” And as a private joke as much as anything else, the leading female character is named Gigi; he calls her Doc. Even though I had the character explain that he never spoke words with the “J” sound, I rather like thinking he might not be aware that he doesn’t write them either. But I doubt anyone else would notice and I think I made the work much harder for myself for the sake of a joke that no one but me would ever get. Fun, but not very productive.
A common dilemma for writers is deciding how much to outline and how much to let the story develop as you write [planner vs. pantster]. Since most of what I write is very short I tend to be a pantster. After all, when the total word count is just a few hundred words I can rewrite the whole thing from a different POV just to see how I like it. This came back to bite me a little in Rock the Baby. My characters wanted to go in a direction that was inconsistent with earlier episodes and I wanted to let them. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that with the earlier parts already posted. Had they not been posted, I would have kept writing and made notes on what needed to be revised in the earlier parts. That, and a change in my schedule, is why the story remains unfinished.
I haven’t decided whether I’ll go back and finish writing Rock the Baby. In many ways it has served the purposes I wanted it to serve: it gave me something new to post on a regular basis for several weeks, it gave me practice in writing a longer form, and it gave me a new appreciation for the difficulties of writing serials. If I do go back to it, I won’t post pieces as I go. And if I post another serial, it will probably be either limited to a few episodes [so there's less room to stray] or I’ll finish it before posting any of it.
Do you read or write serial fiction? If you’re a reader, do you notice when the actions of a character are inconsistent with earlier episodes? If you’re a writer, what do you do if characters want to go in some new direction you hadn’t planned on? If you’ve read Rock the Baby, do you think I should revive and finish it?
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