No beginnings, no middles, no ends
Three story sketches slowly taking shape... Should I write #1, #2, or #3?
Two of them have no beginning, middle or end. The third has only a beginning, middle and an end. And I only have the faintest outlines of characters.
But I’m poking a stick at these three, hoping a hot spark will pop out of the fire and onto something extremely flammable.
My mind.
Sketch #1: “Beta”
So, say, there’s a woman who owns a fancy boutique. She’s an Alpha, and she has a Beta frenemy who works for her. The Alpha is sleeping with the Beta’s husband.
The Beta begins to steal from the shop to get her back, and, when caught thieving by her own husband
— and here’s where it gets interesting—
she doubles down, letting her husband see she’s stealing, challenging him to rat on her with his lover.
We watch shame turn into a weapon.
That moment.
Right there.
The eye contact.
I dare you.
Sketch #2: “Rear View Mirror”
So, this woman picks up another woman’s child from school every day and brings him home. And every day, let’s have her start to take longer and longer to return the child, grow subtly crueler. I imagine the two looking at each other while it gets dark in the car. The child now answers in monosyllables. I’m not sure yet whether she’s ever u-turning.
Ok, so, yes, it’s sociopathic, but…
… if you stayed right on the early, fine edge of sociopathic behavior, when the character is testing sociopathology rather than committing, there’s a story: a character’s values clashing in the growing warmth of runaway rage.
Sketch #3: “Game Over”
So: Hijackers. Passengers communicating in hand gestures. Guns kicked under seats.
In this story, the bravery and violence are absurd, cartoonish. Opens right into the action, a terrorist charging down the aisle yelling out. For twenty seconds, my character is the God of Anti-Hijackers.
Then he’s killed.
Boop.
What the hell? The story rewinds.
It plays out identically to the first time, but the character gets to business class, before,
boop,
he’s ejected out an exploding exit door!
A third time, he’s right up to the cabin door shooting and blasting every which direction, galley carts sliding into toilets, but,
boop,
the character gets shot just as he — she? — is about to get into the pilot’s cabin to save the day.
Then that’s it.
Three lives.
X.X.X.
Game Over.
We never get into the cabin. She’s run out of lives.
What’s this all about?
The disappointment of being deprived the violence that is your birthright.
Lots of thoughts about these over the last 24 hours. One of which is how hard it is to whittle down to five hundred words with more than one clear idea and a self-imposed writing time cap of two hours. Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts on them.
#1: Beta
Better novel than short story. It works because it is about the slow ratcheting of pressure across this triangle. Getting caught stealing is an end of Act II plot development. After this, the relationships are on a countdown, but it's the characters under pressure that make it interesting (to me). Class, same-gender fighting for dominance, the deadly weapons of the less powerful, the tension between surface and internal relationships which are pretty interesting in female relationships at least from the outside looking in, failing publicly. The husband runs a massive risk of becoming a type-plot-tool in something like this. And if he isn't real and I'd fail there, then the whole thing might be conventionally interesting, but not gripping. The three sides of the triangle need to hold up. Sting, by the way, once said that many of his songs are about love triangles because they generate so much drama so easily. Worth noting, Self.
#2: Rear View Mirror
This interests me not because there might be active jeopardy of a child. It's horror is in the front seat. It's the character feeling they might be going out of control, sliding from dislike of a rival's child, to disdain for him/her, to something on the cusp of sadism. It's something psychologically darker. It's feeling YOURSELF sliding into horror, feeling your own values crumbling. You can return a child a minute late to its mother and seen the black pits of your soul. So, yes, horror, but maybe not the thriller kind. It only works if the reader can see themselves in the driver's seat. And, dramaturgy note, Eleanor you'll get this I think: the most horrible thing is not communication into the backseat between adult and child. It's the communication between the adult and another adult outside the car, casual conversations with the nightmare in progress. Less is deeply more once the reader feels the vise tighten. It's what you don't show that unsettles. One thing this is not, to make my big picture point: it is not the first-person narration from the back seat. I'm profoundly interested in revealing the vulnerable, not in exploiting them. Although, and this comes with the moral territory: to understand the vulnerable is to know exactly how to exploit them. Such is life.
#3: Game Over
Omg. This is the over-the-top fun one, not serious for a second. This is the one for Likes if ever there was one. Heroic male fantasies about what we (I) might do in moments of extreme danger are fucking hilarious. This one's a comic playground. Talk about a license to chew scenery, and the ability to kill the protagonist at his moment of peak heroism is priceless. It can't go on too long and it would be easy to turn into a one-note joke, but if you could get around that and really get inside male heroic vanity, you'd have something.
It is doubtful I'd every write #3 except as a throwaway. #2 is most likely a story to work through and most likely to fail. #1 is what I'd actually do best.
Ooh, that is a tough one. Which one wakes you up at night, struggling to step out of your dreamscapes, trying to jump on to the page. I know, not what you wanted to hear. #2, if I had to choose.