tooth soup

photo credit: Un ragazzo chiamato Bi

Complete list of prompts:

stagnant/clown/train & seesaw/terracotta/snarl — Emma and Sam

purple/apocalyptic/tortoise & periodic/hunchback/slalom — Josh and Dan

man/swims/upstream & raptor/carnation/JC Denton — Jon and Johannes

insane/lapel/augury & water/comets/Cambridge — Aditi and Dino

platypus/starving/vintage & mekons/sunset/pines — Irene and Zak

potential/consider/light & Byzantine/refrigerator/alley –  Jaime and Matt

Tunguska/detrimental/vacillate & silver/scarecrow/eat — Todd and Lucy

nebulous tenacity birthplace & falling man/closed room/two-heads — Steph and Amber

And now for the motto-of-the-story/things I learned section:

• It’s fun to riff. All of these were written on the fly, after a minute or two of thinking about roughly what the story should be about. I don’t have any intention of expanding any of them, and I don’t believe they will ever find publication anywhere. But if I spent my life only writing things I thought would get published, I’d be bored as fuck.
• That said, vignettes are not really writing. I mean, they are, but they’re not. They’re not because I don’t have to justify anything in any of these, not to any appreciable degree anyway. As a friend asked me in a discussion about the set, `Why do I care about the hunchback? What’s the point?’ The answers to those questions being `You don’t, unless you’re very empathic’ and `There is none, other than the painting of a fleetingly pretty picture’ respectively. The definition of a vignette is, according to the free online dictionary, `A short, usually descriptive, literary sketch.’ And while I don’t want to claim that what I’ve written is at all literary, they are kind of descriptive and very sketchy.
• I often love the process of coming up with ideas more than the act of writing them out. It’s a classic symptom of too much imagination. As a kid I used to get very frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t draw very well in art class, and all these images I had in my head were never represented anywhere near what they should have been on paper. The act of forcing myself to take these wild ideas and try and put them into words was very illuminating.
• Also illuminating was the fact that I could come up with (what I think are) serviceable story plots in an incredibly short space of time with only minimal input. I guess it made me feel a bit more confident about my ability to continue coming up with ideas for stories. Obviously the vignette form is easy to hack things into, but still.
• Finally, I’m still able to write. That’s reassuring. Even more reassuring was the fact that a whole bunch of people that have never seen my writing before came along and participated, which was really encouraging. Even A.Dick (you know who you are) despite not writing your story (oh come on, ‘moist, woody, climax’? I’m not a Mills and Boone novelist) it means a lot, so thank you all.

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