TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
I thought I might have another entry for the the New Year's contest in me, but the story has petered out after about 400 words.
Ah, well, I should go back to some of my unfinished ideas . . .
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Reminds Me of a Rusty Warren Joke
A newspaper received quite many angry letters from their subscribers when they ran the following headline on their sports page:
Team Will Play Without Peters
The newspaper ran a retraction and reprinted the story the following day with a new headline:
Team Will Play With Peters Out
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Bailiff: "Hear Ye, Hear Ye. All Rise, The Court ...
is now in session, the Honorable Judge John Smith-Smith presiding."
Bailiff: "You may be seated."
Judge: "First, Court apologizes for the fire alarm that ended our session yesterday into a very hasty recess. Plaintiff, please rise.
"I have reviewed all relevant documents presented by the man currently known Mr Robert (or Bob) "Shorty" Peters, and I am granting his name change from his current name to the name he has requested in his documents. Bang! Court is Adjourned."
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Can you believe that I >researched< my piece of fluff: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adjourn
Not all story ideas will, or can, or (perhaps) should ...
work out.
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My personal record for '"isn't working out" is when my Haiku Muse dropped this on me:
"Four-space Tapestries"
And has not given me any help at all for the 12 (lousy) syllables needed to finish the haiku.
And that was nearly >forty years< ago... and She is not answering her "Supplication phone" ...
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Here's the thing (OK, one of the things):
The way to have good ideas, is to have >a lot< of ideas. Grab them from anywhere. Oh, and keep a notebook - ideas, good and bad, can be just as fleeting and evanescent as dreams (are supposed to be.)
Dreams,
Supermarket checkout (till?) lanes tabloids,
Many authors (including here), 'give away' their excess ideas,
Extend a story, or sequel it. Come to think of it, I have tickling my mind, a story set in Ray Drouillard's "fae and were" universe, that he set the M.Y.T.H. universe ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming. A good session might yield a winner, 2-4 maybe's and a thousand+ post-its into the recycle bin. Brainstorming, like many other activities, is better with friends ... but we can do it alone. Come back the next day and bang your imagination against the whole list,
Go for a walk or a drive, preferably in nature. Some forest preserves near me are set up so the road winds thru the preserve, from parking area to parking area. So I can drive, park and be less than 10 meters from the nearest tree,
'Bang' two or more stories together,
Take any news item (or 'Wired' or Scientific American article - OK, I'm a geek) - and 'run away with it' - build a world where the news item is 'every where' (flying cars (uhm, they now exist), cars that run on local streets, but 'latch onto' a moving roadway for long-distance/highway travel (oops - Heinlein, "The Roads Must Roll"), 3D printers that can 'print' a restaurant-quality meal - in the works, ...
Build a Utopian future - Eolwaen is good at this.
Tell a story, and at the end, wreck our expectations and stereotypes (many of us have taken such a "Bru-ising" ...)
Look at things sideways, or reversed (all the time at BCTS), or upside down ... "Stand up" and "Improvisational" comedians are good at this. Steal the idea, file off the serial numbers and run with it.
Oh wait -what an act that would be - a comedian/escape artist telling jokes while hanging upside down and getting out of a straight jacket....
See how it works - I banged 'look at it up-side down' against stand (right side up) comedian ... Oh!
Heck, get one of those 'flip chart' pads and hang it on the fridge or by your computer: Here's one of too many: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/8024487/Office-Depot-... ... and a 'dozen pack' of colored pencils
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Oh, and maybe your 400 word story - is really meant to be only 400-500 words. Maybe the last line will be "What is our World gonna look like twenty years after (story) happens?"
~400 words ...
Dorothy, now that I have a 'pause and percolate' interlude for my Contest story ...
How about please sending me your 400-words-that-don't-work story, and let's see if I can 'Do Something' with it.
Thanks!
You Can Always Come Back To It
Let it marinate. It will always be there for you to come back to.
And you're free for whatever the muse delivers next, including the possibility of some idea for the story roadblock that you hadn't thought of initially.