Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The art of the micro
My home-schooled son only ever has one question for me: “Are you going to make me write tomorrow?” The kid has a major phobia. The annoying thing is, he’s good at it. He has my talent, I think, but he doesn’t have my love of writing.
Not that I love writing much lately. Remember that Twilight Zone episode where the comedian gets his wish to be funny, not realizing it’s a pain when folks laugh at everything he says? I feel like I’m living in the mirror image universe. Nothing I write is funny anymore.
(I’m not striking out completely, though. My audiologist showed her husband my spaghetti string camisole video. She says they were both cracking up over it, and for the rest of the day, one or the other of them would say, “I’m speaking Japanese!” and they’d start laughing again. Hmmm. Maybe I should go find more videos to poke fun at.)
Back to writing. I want to break my son’s aversion. It occurred to me that he might enjoy constructing one sentence stories; since I thought he’d appreciate examples, I googled “one sentence story,” and found — duh! — One Sentence Stories.
Seems like the highest rated stories are the jokes (When I asked my son how hitting his brother in the eye could be “an accident,” he replied, “I was trying to hit him in the nose.”) which, in my opinion, isn’t fair. These are supposed to be STORIES, not JOKES. Better was youloveme’s “Friends don’t give friends seven orgasms.” That really does speak volumes. Not that I expect my son to come up with something like that.
I wonder if I could manage a one-sentence story. (Exactly how dry is my muse?) The key, I think, is to have a much bigger story in mind, and then distill it to its essence.
I’m going to sleep on it.
D.
don’t know about one sentense stories, but why don’t you try writing something that’s not suppposed to be funny?
maybe you need to exercise some other muscles beside teh funny.
Yeah, what Skippy sez. Being funny isn’t far off other forms of writing, I don’t think. Maybe the blockage isn’t in the funny.
I’m trying to think of a funny analogy, and failing. Maybe I have my own blockage. Damn!
Didn’t we do something similar on the Writers-BBS way back when? Wasn’t there a 100-word story contest at one time?
I loved rod sterling
as usual, the skippy is wise.
Give it time. You’ve been plunked down in a new world. Maybe you ought to write something with blood and thunder and death and the extermination of the earth.
and distract yourself with twitter. 140 characters will teach you to write short.
here’s mine. https://twitter.com/KateRothwell
When mike saw I was playing on twitter, he lost all respect for me and has since told me so a buncha times. Oh well.
Hey, we should do a 50 word fiction blog challenge or something.
I have a lot of projects that I really want to want to work on, but I can’t seem to find it in me. Recently, though, I found inspiration in, of all places, the title of a Flickr photo. I immediately started writing a short story titled “Falling Home”, even though I didn’t have a defined ending yet.
Well, when I have no ending, my stories tend to fade in my mind. But then I crossed the “Falling Home” idea with a new one — the opening line “Every time your heart beats, a ghost spins off” — and found an ending, too. The story is now called “Once I Was You” and the first “chapter” is titled “Falling Home”. The story has grown to 3300 words in four days, and I find myself excited to work on it, a feeling I’ve been missing for whatever reason lately.
You never know what’ll inspire you.