HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” - Herries Anderton

Today marks the two-year anniversary of this site and to celebrate I thought I’d do something a little different. A few people have asked how I come up with ideas for these stories so I thought I’d indulge a little and discuss my creative process here. So:

Where do I get my ideas?

Plagiarism.

Call me a hack, a fraud, call me what you will, but it’s true, every single one of these stories, every word I’ve written is stolen from somewhere else (the web index I copied from an old telephone directory).

Look, I was desperate, OK? I never planned to be a thief, but I was in a rut. I used to believe that magnificence would emerge fully formed in my mind and be beamed straight into readers’ brains, but alas, that dystopia is at least another decade away. No, my work was both sub-par and mediocre. I needed an injection of creativity, some lightning bulb of inspiration. Supposedly ‘inspiration is everywhere’ and ‘you can make a story out of everything’ and yet, whilst, ‘The Many Adventures of Andy the Diabetic Colonoscopy Sack’ is technically a story, it’s also a crap one.

I digress.

I was at a low. Rock bottom, in fact, when I found myself regressing to a childhood habit of staring into TV static. You see, in the rural backwater where I grew up, there was more white noise on telly than actual channels. I became obsessed, just staring at those random floating dots I’d try and see pictures, words, even make up my own stories.

You don’t get tellies like that anymore so I was binging these autogenerated ‘twelve hours of static’ videos online. I’d stare, hoping for that spark, praying to see something in the nothing.

It didn’t work.

Instead, I got into a deep internet hole reading about static and how there’s this fact/myth about old TVs picking up the cosmic microwave background radiation of the big bang, the echoes of the early universe basically. Anyway, twelve dozen hyperlinks later and I’m at the site of this obscure research-project-slash-art-collective that I can’t name or link to obviously because of the lawsuit.

What these guys do is try to ‘decode’ the CMB, which is stupid because it’s radiation, not a message, but they came up with a rudimentary program that turns the noise into this ternary code and then that code into an alphabet and this site just nonstop churns out a meaningless soup of letters. It’s pretty cool to look at (but again, don’t because of the suit). And once again I just found myself staring into the void, but this time…

I saw something.

It was the tiniest of pieces at first, literally only a couple of words at a time, sometimes jumbled up, often in other languages. But I started to string them together, just for my own fun, make up little stories, fill in the gaps.

The key, though, my Rosetta Stone was that god damn piece of crap, freaking ‘Umbrella Baby’. It was this piece of really similar code that kept occurring over and over and I realised that it was the same piece of writing in a bunch of languages. It took ages, but I worked out that the static said, “They found the little fella, sleeping in an old umbrella, he didn’t seem to mind, abandoned yes, but dry.” I still don’t know what the hell that means but the fact that it had an (admittedly amateur) rhyme scheme hinted at some deliberation to it.

Once I’d cracked the code, all these stories just poured out like I’d struck an oil reservoir. Obviously, there were significant gaps and I had to take a lot of creative liberties to make it legible, but they were actual stories.

I read all about the sages, the truthseekers, and the hidden people (Eya, Zoe, Thaddeus, Rico, etc.) who all seemingly never existed. I read about the beginning and the end circling back to meet itself. I read about worlds upon worlds, the fantastical kingdoms of Hirun, the strange mines deep within a planet, and the mundane earths seemingly identical to our own. I read about portraits (that will either drive us mad, let us live forever or just let us dance) and geniis and great conglomerates like FoTA, CSC, and Aquatec controlling it all. And the more I read, the less I could tell whether this was our future or our past or just some elaborate hoax.

[Side note, I’ve still got no idea what in god’s green name ‘The Anax’ actually is, so please don’t ask me.]

So, for the past couple of years now, I’ve been translating this research’s garbage into something readable, then posting it here. There are some two dozen entries now (depending on how you count it), which hopefully a few of you have enjoyed and I greatly appreciate all those who have.

Of course, I never told the researchers about this site and I’m not sure how they found out (ONE OF YOU SNITCHING??) but I reckon I can claim ‘fair use’, considering you can’t copyright the electromagnetic field that literally permeates the entire universe. Unless you can. In which case I’m screwed.

To answer your question, where do I get my ideas from? I stole them. But hey, there’s nothing new under the sun, right? ‘There’s no new ideas only recycled ones’, ‘There’s only six plots’, ‘Shakespeare was a hack and a racist’, ‘First law of thermodynamics: don’t talk about thermodynamics’ and all that. What was I supposed to do, come up with something completely original? Impossible.

My advice? If you’re stuck for ideas, just steal off other people, just change it enough so that they’ll never know. Heck, steal my ideas, I’d love the exposure. Once you’ve got the inspiration (the hard bit) out of the way, then you can just sit back, relax and do the easy part yourself, the execution.

Then, step three, publish!

And that’s how you write a short story. Easy as vomit.