Starting Little Fictions

Story ideas come and go, but they all start out as stereotypes. I nursed one according to rules laid out for me by one of the writing “manuals” I house in my priority bookcase.

The pitch was this: if you get an idea for a story write it out quickly, and then begin to exaggerate each theme or impulse in the tale, making it unlike the stereotypical account dreamers usually mount. (As in riding a “nightmare”, a kind of horse.)

I tinkered with a tale of a captured soldier who is set to the work of a bomb-defusing specialist. Each morning a number of his prisoner colleagues are shot, just to remind the group that the captors are intent. Keep in mind the warden knows he’s running out of food and wants to intimidate the surplus survivors, hoping those subjected will more easily accommodate themselves to reduced supplies.

No one in the oppressed group is trained in defusing bombs. It’s a matter of teach yourself as quick as you can. The area where bombs and shells are mixed with debris is sectioned into same-size parcels, and each parcel becomes the domain of a captive/defuser. There are dozens of these parcels, and from time to time one hears a pop or a boom as a defuser is blown to bits by a mistaken effort to shut off the detonator in an assembly. All to the good, says the warden. One less mouth to feed.

As things proceed it becomes clear to the dreamer that he is lucky to be alive and even more fortunate to be learning a skill that will come so quickly to good use. He has become a student not only of explosives but of the defensive thinking applied by designers of bombs, shells and booby-traps. Many bombs have screw-in detonators and are designed to go off if touched after charging. That’s a problem with bombs that are mass-produced. Others are home-made and offer no consistent solution. In some of those cases, he learns the bomb may be designed to go off if a test-probe is applied to the detonator from the right. Clearly, the assembly kills defusers who are right-handed, or think right-handedly. Other bombs may be designed to detonate if addressed from the left. Or precisely at the middle. Figuring out what the designer expects, should his/her missile turn into an apparent dud in a field of still-live ammunition, is no small task for the amateur defuser.

But the larger topic here is that a story idea can be plain vanilla, and become interesting only after changes are made at the turns of the original plot. I spent a half hour, while wakeful last night, trying to change each of the corners in this story, to test the quick-change principle espoused by one writing-manual author. The author’s advice (Janet Barroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 3rd Ed.) was to develop three scenes in any short story idea, one of the scenes handling a transition. I’m not sure I got that far. I just kept changing changes. That’s where the right- and left-handed detonator fixes came from. I’m not sure they were worth the trouble. Seems to me a larger fix was intended. Like switching from detonators to tumors.