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.

SILENT STEEPLES

The Entropists were right. The chaos crept closer and there was nothing we could do to stop the stars from going out and the dark from getting darker and the cold between our fingertips from becoming screaming agony and although they said we should have stopped, done less, been less, lived less, what would that have done but move the still, small end three steps further from us?

The Entropists were right. No, they were correct, but they weren’t right. They handed out blame like that’s what would save us. This was all our fault, all their fault, but whose fault is physics? They took charge and slowed us down, but still that endless winter came and when it did they preached nothing and did nothing. They cowered in their temples, still as stone, hoping that their breath might not cause too much chaos, too afraid to tell others not to move lest they themselves become the last mover.

And those Truthseekers, for all their pleading with the Unknown, for all the hope we had placed in their wizened hands, not even they could stop the inevitable.

They fought, we all did, for so many millennia. We abandoned planets, we abandoned suns. We found our life in the darkness, in the black holes and iron stars. These shadowed corners became our tombs as the galaxies and the light beams between them were pulled from our reach, yet still we writhed on. We became immortal. The universe did not.

The Entropists were wrong, they should have just accepted that this would be the end, that all must end. But death was not enough for them. Their ideas had to live on. Their ideas would save us. Only their ideas would save us.

They failed.

Their silent steeples will be dust soon and I can’t say I dreamt anything different. Soon, absolute zero will be the only number. Soon there will be a universe of distance between one atom and another, between nothing and more endless nothing. We were told the end would be cold and quiet, but now it’s here… Silence screams far louder in the dark.

Our one hope is that this is not the end, but a new beginning. In the slimmest of probabilities, this world bounces back and starts anew and these thoughts shall remain, encoded in the echoes.

And should miracle bring miracle, then perhaps you, hopeful, impossible reader might not know who we were, but instead know that we had so little time and spent the last of it obsessed with not spending it. Do not remember us for how we raged against what was always coming. Do not remember us for the sorry acceptance that we’ve now found only too late. Remember us for when we lived not knowing that there was an end or a beginning but only that the story still unfolded. Remember us for when we lived.

ANAX

[To read the next part, click here.]

THE LAST WORD

Somehow, I know I’m dead.

I never thought that was something you could know, but it just feels different. I can’t describe the feeling. Not quite a dream, but the memory of a dream. I vaguely remember a crash. Excruciating pain. But it was short. And it’s gone now. I look to my hands, but I can’t quite be sure they’re there. I don’t know if I’m stood up or lying down. It all seems unimportant.

All around me is darkness. Not infinite black, but the finite, comforting kind like hiding under a thick duvet on a cold morning. The black seems to have a texture to it. A weave and a weft. Imperceptible gaps in the fabric.

I lean in. Or at least what feels like leaning. The darkness becomes more defined. Specs of white become clear between the void and it seems that the black is formed from familiar shapes. They are minuscule. Compressed together. Line on top of line. I squint and cannot stop myself from reading, “…equal equidistant foods; a man, though free to choose, would starve to death before…”

Words. Not darkness. Words surround me.

From far off it appears to be a void of black, but leant in as I am now, I can read, “…Beatrice did what Daniel did when he appeased Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath…”

Do I know these words? Is this a test? Am I to read every word and only then secure my freedom? Or maybe they’re some sort of deeper truth, only knowable in death?

I turn and find another part. I focus in until once more of the words reveal themselves. “…stretched out his arms, straining to clasp her and be clasped; but the hapless man touched nothing but yielding air…” I remember now. I’ve read this. Was it at school?

I continue reading, “…tendrils. Level of. Could you send me the pics from yesterday? Yeah, sure thing. X. Inbox. Saudade, Alan. RE: Scheduled ap. Bill due GUST…” The words now seem nonsensical. The whole thing appears as a seamless block of text, but the phrases are like snapshots, incoherently strung together.

Here’s a long passage. It seems to be a story, but it breaks off midsentence. More snippets. I recognise parts of them. A name here and there. “…Old City. 40. MG5. 48. ROAD WORKS…” Are these road signs? “Hi dear, how is the course going?” A text conversation. Is this my mum? I’m recognising more and more. A book I read on holiday. A pamphlet at the dentists. Subtitles of a film. Words from a poster on my bedroom wall, over and over, then gone abruptly.

I pull back and once again all the text becomes a wall of black. Could this be every word I have ever read? Is it possible to catalogue all that? These words. They surround me. There are so many and yet it seems like so little. Every word of my life...

There must be a start to this. Where is the first word I ever read?

It feels natural to look up and left, so I do. I move what feels like forward and find a small white space within the black. To the right of the gap are the words, but to the left is white. I try to read it, but the first few symbols are a garbled, blurred mess. They look like letters, but they’re turned upside down, warped or have extra pieces so don’t seem to say anything. I follow the line and gradually the letters become more recognisable. Soon I find amongst the gibberish, “Car.” My first word. The text becomes the strange symbols again and then only the ‘car’ over and over for lines and lines. Skipping ahead I find the single words of a picture book I grew up with. Ahead once more and here’s a book that taught me to read in school.

If this is the start, where is the end?

I pull back. I turn around and search down and right and there again is another little white gap. I crouch and lean in, but before the words become clear I stop. Do I really want to know the last words I ever read?

As I think, my eyes wander to an earlier part of the wall, “…speaking or mute all comeliness and grace attends thee, and each word, each motion forms…” As I’m reading, out of the corner of my eye I see the white space move. Text is being added.

I read a little more and every time I do, more writing appears. Worry crawls into my mind. I have no reason to be afraid. What harm could new words cause? This text, this whole place was not threatening but interesting to me. A strange object, still and fixed. But objects aren’t supposed to come alive.

I try a test. I read a little before the end and find what I expected, “…the hapless man touched nothing but air…” The words I had only just read are there before my eyes. I skip a little closer to the end, “…speaking or mute all comeliness and grace attends thee, and each word…”

I pull back. What will happen if I read the most recent sentence? Perhaps I can create a loop, perhaps that would break whatever this mechanism was. As interesting as this is, I don’t want to spend forever rereading my life. Perhaps this is the only way to escape.

I lean in once more, toward that final white space and find, resting there, the little black symbols of the last text I’d read. There, I read the final word, “Word.” As I do, another word appears to its right. Being so close, I cannot help but read it. “Word.” Another appears and so again I read it. “Word.” And so again, “Word.” And so again, “Word.” I continue, “Word.” Until, all I see forever is, “Word,” that last word, “Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word.

.ANAX.