Writing Report December 14, 2019

Ideas are funny thing.

They take their own sweet time to germinate, to flower, to blossom…

…or =BANG!= they’re here in an instant.

I’ve got story ideas that I’ve been noodling around with for…wow…decades now.

And then I’ve got some that arrive fully formed.

Late Sunday, I read a toss away line in a science article that mentioned two early pioneers in rocketry met briefly in the late 40s / early 50s for a private discussion behind closed doors.

I’m enough of a rocketry fan to know of the two personalities involved, to know their histories, to know their baggage.

And while there’s every indication in the public record that the meeting was amicable and the two liked and respected each other after that, the fiction writer in me saw it was possible for the meeting to have had a far darker turn.

Well, why not?

I’m not pretending to be writing journalism or history or even historical fiction.

I have a story inspired by two real life individuals that regardless of their actual personalities and history, nonetheless presents a core truth: Getting what you want doesn’t make you free, but often even more of a slave.

And =BOOM!= basic idea / concept / premise / conflict popped into me widdle head 1-2-3.

Thought about it on and off for the rest of the evening; didn’t get a chance to actually write anything on it because of family commitments.

Finally got a chance to sit behind the keyboard and write up my idea around 5pm Monday; wrapping it up around 7pm.

(Didn’t know how it would end when I started it, just knew what I wanted to write about…and by the time I got to the last page all the pieces fell into place. A single throwaway line early one turned out to have vast implications for the rest of the story. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my writing career, it’s when I come up with a seemingly unimportant concept, keep it -- it invariably turns out to be crucial.)

Conceived it as a play. It’s basically two guys talking to each other about their histories, their choices, and why the one with very, very little is a lot better off than the one who thinks he’s succeeding.

I attend a writing group every Tuesday evening and thought I’d share it with them, but when a single person reads a stage play, it often breaks the rhythm of the story telling.

Okay, turn it into a short story, replace character slugs with “he said” and change the tenses on stage descriptions. Add a little bit of descriptive detail.

That took about thirty minutes.

One play.

One short story.

Two and a half hours.

Not bad, if I say so myself…

© Buzz Dixon