rushthatspeaks | Nov. 28th, 2012

I noticed

papersky taking a look at the results she came up with in the recent I-will-give-you-a-sentence-from-something-I've-never-written-if-you-prompt-it meme, and since there's nothing I love more than analysis of that sort, I thought I'd look at my results myself.

I got seven prompts. Of those, I responded to three with answers which I consider complete in themselves, to which no other story can be attached; one of those was a literary joke, and the other two are I think real micro-fiction. The one about the intelligent bat boycotting Madeleine L'Engle is, obviously, the joke; the one where they took the person's larynx out and replaced it with a music box, and the one around the word 'labyrinthitis', are stories.

She's got tunes for all occasions now, bought off eBay, bought in thrift shops, hand-carved commissioned from craftspeople on Etsy, rock and pop and antique tinkly sounds that aren't identifiable but still say something, a mood, a feeling that catches in the space between the notes; and if the conversation's slower than it used to be, cryptic in the gaps as she cough-inhales cylinders and spits them up again, well, she doesn't seem to mind it in the long dark nights when every breath of her breathes out a slow Brahms' Lullaby.

There's really nowhere to go from there, but I think everything we could possibly want to know is implied.

All the cabinets have to be connected, don't they, even if the hole is tiny, and so, deciding that the old ways had the right idea, you're throwing a ball of string through the gap in the back of the fifth shelf to the right in the third cabinet in the hall closet and wondering where it will come out when the doorbell rings. The mailman hands you the ball of string.

I am kind of side-eying this one because there is one way in which there might be more of it-- it could maybe have more things in front of it, and be the final paragraph. Maybe. It would still be a short-short, and it would be difficult, and it would certainly be the first time I have ever worked from the end backwards. But it can't go on after that last sentence, because anywhere it could go would ruin the sentence as a punchline.

Of the rest of them, the one for the prompt about gryphons, swordplay, and a picnic is, inadvertently, fanfiction, and came straight out of my head that way. It's set in an extrapolated future of Wilanne Schneider Belden's lovely and completely unnoticed Frankie!, which does not have the swordplay but certainly has the gryphons and the picnicking. I wish I weren't the only person I know who's read this book. It's not great, but it's extremely charming, and its portrayal of a small-town Midwestern family of whom half happen to be born as gryphons is warm, friendly, and plausible in the small details. It also seems to be my default setting for domestic with gryphons.

The one everyone wanted more of is This is how we learned that manta rays are sacred to the Kindly Ones, and while it is obviously a real story, and there is obviously more there, I have no idea about what it is. Setting, character, plot... can't help you. All I've got is a certain spare simplicity of language and the notion that it cannot really be set in Greece. I will hold onto the line, and maybe someday it will do something, because it's a good line, but it appeared out of thin air and needs more than that to grow on.

The one which was most difficult was my girlfriend asking me about the story I would write if I were to listen to nothing but Laurie Anderson and the soundtrack of True Stories for a week, because really I have no way of knowing except by doing it. This was a very odd writing process as it involved meditation on my own possible future state of mind and then free-associating, which was brain-breaky and I am not confident in the results. There is no more of it than the one sentence, of course.

And then of course, as I should have expected, there's the one which is filed now in a certain place on my computer as OH DEAR along with the other things I am going to have to write at some point and wasn't particularly planning on or expecting, because it's the first paragraph of a novel which I think I could probably just sit down and write now if I wanted to, except that I want to finish the novel I am writing dammit. The prompt was 'that hardboiled detective/romance novel with the alien invasion in Renaissance Venice'.

The Queen of Cities has never been invaded from the land, can never be, her swamps and her malaria her armor, eternally rusting yet still unremovable from inside or out. Her uncrowned kings have won immunity from ocean, if marriage-lines provoke immunity; five hundred years she's ridden on her islands yet unburned, so if not entire immunity then at least generation after generation of unmolested, dripping, seeming-quiet time. So it is a rumor as dark as the worst fears of La Serenissima, a rumor like a sewer, a rumor in a plague year which comes to whisper in the marketplace: the Doge and the Patriarch have met in deadly secret, and the one asked of the other, Do you keep your ancient charge, as the other answered back to him (this happens every year). But when one had sworn the safety of the roadways and the other one the safety of the sea-roads, one said, and which one rumor does not mention, There is a thing we have forgotten we must fear. We can blockade the armies, we can sink entire navies, yet I have seen a dark star falling towards us. What care shall we take now for our city, who can neither shut out nor poison nor wed with the sky?

That one came with all the worldbuilding, half the plot, several of the characters, and a narrative voice. This is fairly consistent with how I work generally, in that of seven things one is a joke, one is fanfic, four are things I enjoyed doing and am variously fond of with various chances at going somewhere, and one has decided to be A Huge Complicated Deal, if I want to make it so, though I don't know if I do. Honestly that is about the usual ratio. I suspect other people of having different ratios and processes, which is why I did this analysis.