Story Ideas
2009; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.0.0463
ISSN1080-6512
Autores ResumoStory Ideas Robert Boswell (bio) Open with: “The moon is an alligator on the frat boy’s dark shirt.” End with: “Her fingers touch his chest like the blind reading the moon’s cankered tail.” A story about a man who is having an affair with a married woman and then discovers that she is not married and never has been. A story that merely describes a crime scene. A story about people talking, sitting around a kitchen table. They talk about their past and a blond and chatty woman reveals that she spent a brief period of her life as a prostitute. Narrator comes to understand she is actually describing their relationship. Title: “Hit Him like a Ton of Bricks.” A story that opens with a man coming home to find a helicopter in his yard (metaphor). A Play: “I lost my ear”—spoken by a head-bandaged woman. “How?” Asks her boyfriend on stage. “What?” Boyfriend walks around to the other side of woman’s head, asks, “How did you lose your ear?” Woman says, “I’m not certain. Seems to have fallen off or been misplaced.” “Your ear? Misplaced?” She nods. “Or fallen off. The jury’s out.” About how women quit hearing the men they’re with. Both of woman’s ears and boyfriend’s tongue gone by end of play. Visuals: gigantic bed with black sheets. (Guillotine blade suspended over bed?) [End Page 345] Title for a story cycle: “Level Land”—refers to the flatness of the Midwest, also to ordinariness of everyday life. “They live in Level Land, but I don’t,” she says, even though she’s talking about neighbors. They’re sitting at the kitchen table. Chatting. A story where God is one of the neighbors (his house full of old newspapers) and the narrator goes over to ask for help, a miracle, coupons. A story about going with Karla and her sister to see fortuneteller in Athens who predicts separation and a brief institutional respite. I get up courage to pass the fortuneteller note: Can I be a writer? She studies cards for maybe an hour. Her face curls into itself like a discarded shoe (a fallen cake, an old slice of apple). At last she says, “If you try very hard.” She is wary and unconvincing. Also, at college, after the first workshop, I’m crying and I run into Don Brown and Mark Harwood from high school, tears in my eyes. How I started the Club for Slow Learners. Complexity versus complication. Throw in the chainsaw story. She says, “Just how stupid can one person be?” He replies, “How on earth is anyone just one person?” “The Stand-Up Comic’s Lament”—a backstage recap of his routine and how the audience failed to keep up with him. Ars (arse) poetica. A story that opens with an obituary and is followed by a corrective letter to the editor about the real nature of the deceased, and then another person writes in to correct that letter, etc. Maybe she’s not dead at all but with another man, and she writes in to correct the corrections. “The Broken Watch”—about the unfixable, in terms of both what cannot be repaired and what cannot be pinned down or located. “It’s unfixable,” the watch repairman says, and the narrator thinks he’s talking about something else. Avoid corniness. Go for heavy. “Sometimes You Feel like a Nut,” a title for a story from the POV of a person who slips, only rarely, into madness. Second person narrator. “Litter”—a title for a story about littering, but also about a blond, chatty woman carrying twins of different fathers. She’s completely heartless. A story called “Why This Is Not a Story”—endnotes from a workshop explaining to the writer why his submission, “The Broken Watch,” is not a story. Excruciating detail. [End Page 346] A woman who slowly loses the ability to see her husband, ending with the movement of objects in a room as if they were animated because she cannot see him. Opening: A dark and noisy room speaks music into a dark and noisy night on a highway south...
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