My Short Story
Will start tender and get hard. A blithe and witty tone will be established and light-hearted folly will ensue and you may not even recognize the disturbingly dark and disturbing underbelly of my short story sitting under the story like a belly. I have a hate for myself that I own completely.
The idea for my short story will come from a wryly ironic observation made in passing by a friend at a dungy coffee shop on a Saturday morning or from a warm and disturbing childhood memory or from the short story of a superior short story writer whom I will despise for being more interesting than I am.
The narrative arch of my short story will be disjointed and non-linear. The distant past will rub elbows with the near future while the present will be a closely guarded secret. This will keep things interesting. This will also inform my short story with an ethereally transcendendent ontological existentialism which you will like. I’m not sure I actually exist.
Impossible ideas and life-altering themes will hover over my story like a hovercraft. The full weight of these profound allusions will not hit you until you are mindlessly driving home to your split-level in the suburbs or until many years later while you are sitting alone in the dark corner of a horrifically average strip joint and you need this understanding the most.
My short story will be peppered with metaphors like pepper from a pepper shaker peppering a pepper steak; or metaphors added by a metaphor writer to a metaphorical story about something that is really about something else.
My short story will be meta like this and you’ll hate me for this pretense although you secretly admire my moxie for trying such a gambit even though you don’t realize that I am a coward in other aspects of my life so you won’t know that this fear has ruined my life because it has.
The romantic relationship contemplated in my short story will be tinged with the cosmically unbearable heartache I have endured from a generically tragic love affair and you will wonder how I ever managed to claw myself out of the deepest regions of this proverbial hell-hole in order to stand and deliver such an impossibly soul-searing story of unconscionable loss and redemption or whether I am just bullshitting.
Parts of my short story will pertain to a character very similar to myself and will have a self-deprecating tone so that you will realize that I am not full of myself even though my short story is awesome.
The supporting characters in my short story will have funny personality quirks that will define them. You will find this charming and different. A best friend of the lead character will drive an environmentally-friendly car he has invented that is powered by potato skins, so you’ll know he’s sensitive and caring and probably good for the lead character. The next-door neighbor, an insurance salesman, will have a private room in his cellar dedicated to a museum of stuffed house cats. You will come to understand that no one is normal or what they appear to be. I am obsessed with lawn furniture.
My short story will be defined more by what I leave out than what I leave in. My decision to leave out important details will allow you and your unique emotional core to inhabit this space and live within my short story. You shall find meaning in this void that I could never elucidate with the insufficient tools of the English language or another language. Left out of my short story will be a true-life recollection of when I was thirteen and my dad hit me for inadvertently killing our German Shepard.
My short story will have a confessional tone like this and you will come to understand that through my fictional prose I am cathartically bearing witness to the existence of a deep unbearable pain within me that I am not able to access through a literal testimony. I have trouble controlling my thoughts.
My short story will be rife with haunting symbolism. A perpetually barking dog outside the desolate cabin of an elderly man will symbolize the inescapable, noisy reverberations of his ill-considered, illegitimate past. He will have to kill the dog. This killing of the dog will mean something.
The ending to my short story will not be happy or clichéd although its non-cliched-ness will be sorta cliché. Nothing will be solved or answered with the ending, and there will be a conspicuous lack of resolution or explanation that you will tell your friends you really admire even though you secretly don’t like the fact that there was nothing about the story that you truly understood. I am afraid of ever knowing myself.
The last sentence will be open-ended.
The idea for my short story will come from a wryly ironic observation made in passing by a friend at a dungy coffee shop on a Saturday morning or from a warm and disturbing childhood memory or from the short story of a superior short story writer whom I will despise for being more interesting than I am.
The narrative arch of my short story will be disjointed and non-linear. The distant past will rub elbows with the near future while the present will be a closely guarded secret. This will keep things interesting. This will also inform my short story with an ethereally transcendendent ontological existentialism which you will like. I’m not sure I actually exist.
Impossible ideas and life-altering themes will hover over my story like a hovercraft. The full weight of these profound allusions will not hit you until you are mindlessly driving home to your split-level in the suburbs or until many years later while you are sitting alone in the dark corner of a horrifically average strip joint and you need this understanding the most.
My short story will be peppered with metaphors like pepper from a pepper shaker peppering a pepper steak; or metaphors added by a metaphor writer to a metaphorical story about something that is really about something else.
My short story will be meta like this and you’ll hate me for this pretense although you secretly admire my moxie for trying such a gambit even though you don’t realize that I am a coward in other aspects of my life so you won’t know that this fear has ruined my life because it has.
The romantic relationship contemplated in my short story will be tinged with the cosmically unbearable heartache I have endured from a generically tragic love affair and you will wonder how I ever managed to claw myself out of the deepest regions of this proverbial hell-hole in order to stand and deliver such an impossibly soul-searing story of unconscionable loss and redemption or whether I am just bullshitting.
Parts of my short story will pertain to a character very similar to myself and will have a self-deprecating tone so that you will realize that I am not full of myself even though my short story is awesome.
The supporting characters in my short story will have funny personality quirks that will define them. You will find this charming and different. A best friend of the lead character will drive an environmentally-friendly car he has invented that is powered by potato skins, so you’ll know he’s sensitive and caring and probably good for the lead character. The next-door neighbor, an insurance salesman, will have a private room in his cellar dedicated to a museum of stuffed house cats. You will come to understand that no one is normal or what they appear to be. I am obsessed with lawn furniture.
My short story will be defined more by what I leave out than what I leave in. My decision to leave out important details will allow you and your unique emotional core to inhabit this space and live within my short story. You shall find meaning in this void that I could never elucidate with the insufficient tools of the English language or another language. Left out of my short story will be a true-life recollection of when I was thirteen and my dad hit me for inadvertently killing our German Shepard.
My short story will have a confessional tone like this and you will come to understand that through my fictional prose I am cathartically bearing witness to the existence of a deep unbearable pain within me that I am not able to access through a literal testimony. I have trouble controlling my thoughts.
My short story will be rife with haunting symbolism. A perpetually barking dog outside the desolate cabin of an elderly man will symbolize the inescapable, noisy reverberations of his ill-considered, illegitimate past. He will have to kill the dog. This killing of the dog will mean something.
The ending to my short story will not be happy or clichéd although its non-cliched-ness will be sorta cliché. Nothing will be solved or answered with the ending, and there will be a conspicuous lack of resolution or explanation that you will tell your friends you really admire even though you secretly don’t like the fact that there was nothing about the story that you truly understood. I am afraid of ever knowing myself.
The last sentence will be open-ended.
posted by David at 2:13 PM
4 Comments:
Can I just say this is one of the most brilliant things I've read in probably the last six months?
I hate to agree with Brian, but I concurr.
When is David going to put more beautiful things on this blog? Maybe a review of Martin Buber?
And when are you going to send this story out? Hmmm?
I love you.
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