Writing original stories

So how does one write an original story? I've decided to construct a guide to this, and the first tip is to watch what happens in your own life, and try to figure out the fictional possibilities of any unique little incidents that happen, particularly those which can be viewed from two different perspectives. For example, let's look at an incident from my own life which happened yesterday.

I bought a slice of pizza in a bakery near a railway station here in Japan, and, when the woman at the cash register rang up the purchase, the receipt vanished into thin air. She looked for it and it had gone. I certainly hadn't taken it: I wasn't near enough to the cash register to have done so.

Her surprise was evident, but I'd seen what had happened. For some reason (perhaps a draft of air) the receipt, on emerging from the cash register, had made a little jump and had vanished over the side. (If you'd caught it on video it would have looked quite amusing.)

Anyway, I retrieved the receipt, which had fallen into the narrow gap between the cash register and the adjacent wall, and showed it to the woman at the cash register, and she smiled, and that was the end of it.

But what if I hadn't seen the receipt? And what if I'd been a little bit paranoid? I usually collect cash register receipts so I can keep my personal accounts straight. Now what if I'd decided that the woman had deliberately made the receipt vanished to thwart my accounting? And what if I was feeling lost and alienated amidst the strangeness of Japan?

(Actually, since I've been in Japan now for about six years, it feels normative rather than strange. But the story, if I were to write it, wouldn't be about me. It would be about someone who hasn't made the adjustments that I've made.)

Anyway, that's how one story might start. An innocent incident happens, and a paranoid personality takes it as a threat.

Another story might involve the woman. Suppose she was a little bit superstitious. Suppose things had started vanishing from her life - a child dead in an accident, a husband gone in a divorce. Suppose she took the vanishing of the cash register receipt to be a dreadful omen.

That's how another story might start.

I've actually come up with a third idea, a third way to use this cash register incident, but this "this is how you write an original story" story that I'm planning to use it in might take a while to write.

Anyway, the first tip is to watch for unusual little things that happen, novelty incidents, and then try to figure out how different people might react to that incident in different situations.

The next tip is to play with permutations of the idea itself. Cash register receipt jumps out of cash register and vanishes: that's one option.

Or:-

Cash register receipt is deliberately made to disappear by a pointy-haired boss who wants to test the adaptability of his staff.

Or:-

Cash register receipt jumps out of cash register and bursts into flames.

Or:-

Cash register receipt jumps out of cash register and there's a prophecy written on it.

Or:-

Cash register receipt jumps out of cash register at an airport and someone sees the jumping flash of whiteness and screams. The security people at the airport refuse to accept a jumping cash register receipt as a legitimate excuse for a scream, and the inexorable mechanisms of the new Social Terrorism Act (which covers such things as writing graffiti and screaming in public) automatically come into play.

Or:-

Guy is in New York and a cash register receipt jumps out of the cash register, and, when he picks it up, he finds it's not in English. He doesn't know the language in which the items are written, but he does recognize the yen sign. Subsequently, he starts to experience a variety of language transformation events (with telephone books, e-mail messages, voice mail messages.) He's been cursed.

Or:-

Cash register receipt jumps out of cash register, female shopper doesn't notice, and well-meaning guy (well, the guy thinks he's well-meaning, but, if we were to probe a little deeper, we'd find he isn't quite as innocent as he thinks he is) retrieves the fallen receipt and follows the woman out of the shop, meaning to hand it back to him. Only she meets someone, and the guy is too embarrassed to approach. So he follows the woman and her companion. Without meaning to, he's become a stalker.

One little incident, then, can be the starting point for a billion different stories. The incident might be just a "let's get going" gimmick, as in the idea immediately above, the "innocent guy becomes a stalker" idea, or the incident might be a manifestation of a mechanism which is going to drive the entire story. For example, a manifestation of printed materials unexpectedly changing into foreign languages.

(The idea of printed texts switching texts looks like fantasy, but printing technology is getting slicker and slicker all the time, and, twenty years down the track, that's the kind of software malfunction problem we might have to deal with for real. You open up your letter from your mom and it rewrites itself into Aramaic or something like that.)

Part of the training for anyone who wants to become a writer is to keep a notebook and log little incidents of the kind that I've noted above.

Point: the incident that I've dealt with is particularly suitable for fictional manipulation because it's not specific to any one person. It's a real incident which really happened, but the core occurrence, "a receipt jumped out of a cash register and vanished," could have happened pretty much anywhere in the world. And to anyone.

When I post this online, nobody in the world is going to be able to figure out which cash register was involved or which woman. Excepting the woman herself.

Now, if I was to fictionalize this incident (without posting the details of how I came by it) and if I was to change the setting from Japan to Nepal or the United States, then I would have a totally anonymous incident (although, round the world, cash register receipts surely do escape on occasion, so someone in Belgium or South Africa might end up reading the resulting story and think, "Hey, that was me in the shop, just last week!")

That's another point. To avoid causing problems for yourself, legal or otherwise, it's important to exercise a degree of wariness when using real-life incidents.

For example, if I was the manager of a coffee bar, I would not write a work of fiction in which a member of the staff loses track of a cash register receipt. Even if the inspirational incident didn't take place in the coffee shop where I was working, one of the staff members might think, "Gee, that's me he's talking about!"

When bouncing off incidents that really happened, you have to figure out, for yourself, the answer to this important question:-

"Are there going to be legal or social consequence for doing this?"

Working out the answer to that is your problem not mine. Proceed at your own risk!

(Rule for using exclamation marks: only one or two per ten thousand words, thank you very much. Anything more is probably overdoing it.)

Even if you know for a fact that you came up with an idea alone and unassisted, your supposedly original idea may, nevertheless, mirror someone else's real-life experience.

For example, when I was a kid, I became disturbed by the fact that my right hand was decidedly dominant, and I decided to upgrade the skills of my left hand, which I felt to be disturbingly underused. So I trained myself to hold my spoon in my left hand when I ate my cereal.

I never told anyone about this. This was my secret. My own unique individual quirk. So it came as a huge shock when, one day, as a teenager, I was listening to another teenager talk, and he was telling people about how he felt he was over-dependent on his right hand so he trained himself to hold his spoon in his left hand when he ate his breakfast cereal.

That was a huge shock! I'm not alone! Round the world there are probably dozens of us, each thinking that he is unique. (Just guys? Or do women do this too? I don't know. But I somehow suspect that it's just a guy thing. Maybe someone should do a survey. In fact, there's probably a PhD thesis in this for someone.)

(Actually, I've lately discovered that I've grown out of the habit of using my left hand to hold my cereal spoon. I never made a conscious habit to stop using the left hand. I just did it. But it's true that, in 1989, I did spend a fair bit of time in countries like India and Nepal where it's culturally advisable not to use your left hand when eating, and, at that stage, I did make a point of using my right hand when eating.)

Although the idea of training myself to hold my cereal spoon was arrived at independently, someone else at my own school had, likewise independently, privately decided to take exactly the same course of action.

The fact that you have independently arrived at some idea does not necessarily mean that the idea is pure fiction.

To give another example, the notion of a pointy-haired boss deliberately stealing cash register receipts to test the adaptability of his staff is, as far as I can remember, original to me. That said, there are probably at least a couple of pointy-haired bosses, somewhere on this planet, who are doing exactly that.

"Let me test my own organization by sabotaging it."

There are probably thousands of stories to be written out of that idea. But, if you work at a cash register, it's probably not a good idea to write a story about a pointy-haired boss who steals cash register receipts, at least not if you want to keep your job.