A wealth of ideas, a poverty of stories...

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My first anniversary as a member of this site came and went without any fanfare, but the fact I'd reached that milestone with still no stories posted caused me to wonder: is it unusual for someone here to be part of the site for as long as I have, and yet contribute no stories at all?

Not that I'm lacking for ideas--I have almost too many. Observe below, at these plot synopses taken directly from my notes:

1. To Walk A Mile....

As a class assignment, the boys and the girls of a suburban middle school class switch genders for the school year. The class sessions will be filmed, and the students will be encouraged to keep a video diary of their daily experiences, emotions, frustrations. The resulting video footage will be included in a nationally broadcast reality-documentary series. Parents initially are outraged, but are won around with the promise of scholarships to the school of the student's choice for those who stick it out the entire year. It would prove a revelation for most of the kids, and the salvation of one boy (who inside was anything but).

2. Poster Child (Alternate Title: "We Are Walking, We Are Talking"):

It's 1955 Brooklyn, and we meet Matty Rosenthal, a seven-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. A seven-year-old boy, it turns out, with an aching desire to be a girl. His 13-year-old sister is understanding, providing old clothes of hers for him to wear. (With a hat to cover his mop of curly hair.) To escape the watchful gaze of their parents, and to help the shy child become less self-conscious, the sister takes young Matty out in his wheelchair in the afternoons after school. Ducking into a shed they use as a playhouse/clubhouse, the sister changes Matty into his girl clothes, and off they go.

Matty had always wanted to see a television station, so one day the sister takes little Matty, dressed as a girl, to station WOR, where the United Cerebral Palsy telethon is going on. (The sister did regular errands for the station personnel several times a week, so they let them in as a favor). Host Dennis James spots Matty, who is gradually able to overcome his shyness and is soon laughing and joking with the host. (Despite frantic signals from the sister to keep quiet). When James asks Matty his name, James mishears the answer as "Maddie", and brings the "cute little girl" out in front of the audience for everyone to see.

The sister frantically tells everyone they have to get home, but before they go, a man from United Cerebral Palsy approaches them and hands them a card, offering to make "little Maddie" the regional UCP poster child. The man promises that the child would receive any help and therapy "she" needs.

Worse still, Matty's parents see him and his sister on the air--their cover is blown. The sister has to grit her teeth and tell the folks what she and Matty had been spending their afternoons doing--while initially furious, the parents are intrigued by the possibility of letting the child be "Maddie." The family is poor, and their child needs therapy and leg braces, not to mention surgeries to correct badly turned-in feet.

The man specifically wanted a girl, the sister tells them, because girls tend to tug at the heartstrings a bit more, and make people more willing to donate money--and her "kid sister" fit the bill perfectly.

Matty breaks down, tearfully finding the courage to tell them this--a chance to be a girl--is what he so desperately longed for. Figuring their child has suffered enough, the parents reluctantly agree.

So young Matthew Robert Rosenthal embarks upon a life as little Madeline Ruth "Maddie" Rosenthal. But will it last, and what will happen if the ruse is discovered?

3. Untitled Story Inspired By "Future Tense" Challenge: In a dystopian future some 150 years from today, genetic engineering (using a specially coded virus) is the primary tool of the judicial system. Instead of being incarcerated in an overcrowded prison, if the court feels the person can be rehabilitated, he or she is regressed/progressed to a different age, assigned a new gender, or both. How far back the person is regressed, or progressed, depends on how harmful he (or she) is perceived to be. If he's hopelessly criminal (serial killer, say) he is progressed in age to a point at which he's too feeble to do harm, or regressed until he is too tiny to do so. One man, wrongly regressed and turned female, works to uncover clues that the genetic manipulation is likely being put to more nefarious purposes than originally intended.

So there you have it--several potential stories. But as the saying goes, "Potential means you ain't done it yet." They haven't been written, and likely won't be.

Why, you ask? I don't know if there's such a word as "graphophobia", but if there isn't, it should be shoehorned into the Oxford English Dictionary solely to describe me. Not mere writer's block, but several orders of magnitude beyond--a fear of, a terror of, writing.

Granted, this did not apply to anything non-fiction, or this ragtime gal's blog would be as nonexistent as her fashion sense: I wrote reams of letters as a child, a habit born of necessity as an Army brat in Germany. If I wanted to contact relatives in that pre-internet age, letters were it. It helped that I had a mania for writing implements--typewriters, stencils, labelmakers, as well as colored pens and pencils. Anything that made letters, really.

But in school, the words that made my blood run colder than liquid nitrogen were, "Write a 250-word story about...." In other words, fiction. Something I had to make up. Something that required my imagination, that was a reflection of my intelligence. That I had to somehow pick out of the literally millions upon millions of possible ideas floating in the ether and make coalesce on paper.

Something that gave clues about an inner self I was terrified for anyone to know about.

I did the assignment, but only after a good deal of tears and threats of a failing grade if I failed to do it, or had to be dismissed from the room. But I would sooner have endured half a days' paddling non-stop than that.

I have certain educated guesses (for lack of a better term) as to why or how that phobia developed--perhaps the feeling that I had to continually prove how intelligent I was, and therefore hated doing anything out of my comfort zone, anything that had the potential to make me look stupid. The disability played into it, too, I think. So many books portrayed us as having a hidden brilliance, obscured by the disability and brought out only by a caring individual. The numerous ones about Helen Keller, for instance. Or Louis Braille. Or FDR. I devoured books about them, and their message was loud and clear: if you're disabled, you'd damn well better have a compensatory intelligence or creative talent (or better yet, both.)

Or else. And you don't want to know the "or else."

Regardless of the reason, to this day I have an internal voice that guards against writing anything that will make me seem less than intelligent. My "this will make you look stupid!" voice kicked in with the ferocity of a tiger while writing every one of the story outlines written above.

All of them set off the "lack of plausibility" alarm. If it's not likely to happen, if there's any kind of problem with the logic of the story, I will abandon it, even if I loved it for all eternity the moment before.

In the case of the first story, I doubted that a teacher would be allowed to do such a thing--even though classroom experiments every bit as radical as that have been tried at various times. For instance, the movie, "The Wave", in which a teacher tries to show how Germans allowed the atrocities of the Nazis to happen by creating a fascist-type classroom organization. (Based on a real 1967 experiment in California). Switching gender roles would seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

Still, to have students actually switch gender for a year seems to be the sort of story that would have eyes reflexively rolling from the first sentence onward. Sure, people have written stories that are even less likely here, but plausibility is vitally important to me.

The case of the second was even more problematic, given the era and the convoluted setup. Using real people (such as Dennis James) as characters could prove troublesome, so I'd probably have to fictionalize it a great deal more. A lot of unlikely things have to happen for it to work--what Roger Ebert calls an "idiot plot." They likely could have gotten help without having to resort to something so crazy. I also had no idea how to believably end the thing.

I might as well tell you where the idea came from. I knew a fellow with CP who had been one of the kids in that telethon, walking in a circle with other CP kids to the tune "We are walking, we are talking, though we've never walked and talked before...." He remembered being mortified by the whole experience. I neither witnessed it nor--thank every deity imaginable-- participated in it. Just the description, however, seemed so cringingly exploitative and maudlin to me, that it begged for someone like my main character to make those responsible for such condescension look like fools.

But the historical research is beyond me, and I don't want to be seen as insulting a well-intentioned, if flawed, effort to help people.

Next....

The last seems the easiest to complete, though it too would require a head-spinning amount of research.

I've tried the "go with the flow" method, and not worry about story structure, only to write myself into a corner and can't work my way out of. Or write a howlingly bad line of dialogue. Or leave a Euro-tunnel sized plot hole. In the trash it goes. I've tried to write an outline, only to discover I have no clue how to write an outline.

So if you've been wondering why I've never written anything here save for this blog, you can now be grateful this blog is the only thing I write.

Comments

Looking through the synopsis

Looking through the synopsis and your problem I'd suggest you leave the first story for later. If you want to do it seriously it would take at least a novella sized story most likely actually a real novel. I'm not sure about the second, but you'll most likely need to do much research.
The third would probably be the easiest to write for. First you'd need to decide what kind of story you want. Prisoner escapes judical system and wants revenge, a secret agent action story, a hard science fiction story that is more about the age regression and gender reassignement process than anything else, or a story about organizing a civil protest against the injustices and failings of the system.
I'm not very good writing with the flow either, so I just write down the plot. What is actually supposed to happen. No action, no dialoge, just a short text about what you plan to happen in the story. And then you can start writing. Just do it, it's not like someone is going to grade it.

On the other hand if you really can't write, I don't think people will be cross with you. Not everyone is born to be a writer and you really don't need to torture yourself. I'd like to read one of those stories though.

Beyogi

Watching from a distance

I lurked around here for about 2 years before I registered as a member. Then I basically commented for a while then Blogged a couple of times before I was encouraged by some very formidable writers to post the start of my story. That required another year and a half. Take it easy and play with the story any story. Start a file keep it organized, add to the stories as inspiration speaks to you. Then when YOU are ready ask one of the old timers to look at some of your story. They can possibly direct you to some one to Edit / Proof your work then some one can help you encode it so it can be posted. There are several documents on this board that breaks down the process. But remember tell your story in your own voice. Also read a lot here and note in a note book what you like and dislike about the stories. This will be a good training ground to learn how to write anything in fiction, it is just the topics here are specialized to this audience.

Huggles
Misha Nova

With those with open eyes the world reads like a book

celtgirl_0.gif

I play the struggling writer

I play the struggling writer well. As I've told a few others, despite taking freshman English three times all those years ago I still cant write. I am currently working on three different stories and when I think I have enough written, I'll look for some poor soul to hammer it into something legible. No pressure, in the mean time I read a lot and work as my muse comes and goes at will (I think she's two timing me).


I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair

You can have mine

You can have my muse if you want. Really it's no problem at all. The callused fingers too if you want.

A wealth of ideas, a poverty of stories...

3. Untitled Story Inspired By "Future Tense" Challenge: In a dystopian future some 150 years from today, genetic engineering (using a specially coded virus) is the primary tool of the judicial system. Instead of being incarcerated in an overcrowded prison, if the court feels the person can be rehabilitated, he or she is regressed/progressed to a different age, assigned a new gender, or both. How far back the person is regressed, or progressed, depends on how harmful he (or she) is perceived to be. If he's hopelessly criminal (serial killer, say) he is progressed in age to a point at which he's too feeble to do harm, or regressed until he is too tiny to do so. One man, wrongly regressed and turned female, works to uncover clues that the genetic manipulation is likely being put to more nefarious purposes than originally intended.

    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine

On plausibility...

One evening I was out walking in the hills with an artist, and the sun was going down. West of us, and down a bit, was a big lake. As the sun set, the clouds turned orange and the lake, which was surrounded by dark green grass, took on a pale pink color. The artist said, "If I was to paint that, exactly the way it is right now, no one would believe it. They'd say I made it up."

The world is fun of such strange, odd things. It often happens that we hear about a real event and don't believe that it could have happened. And then we watch movies full of things that could never happen, and say, "Wow, what a great movie!"

A story is all in the telling, and plausibility is something that you build. It's not intrinsic to an idea. If you start off objecting to an idea you have, you're making it harder to write. Treat it like a puzzle. Ask yourself, "How could this happen in real life?" and an answer usually appears. Really, the biggest problem is knowing where a story is going to end. But once you have that, the rest is a lot easier.

Also, don't underestimate the power of rewrites. James Thurber, the humorist, used to start off with a small, badly written sketch that he'd rework and rework until it was good. Once his wife picked up one of his early drafts and said, "This reads like it's written by a third-grader!" and he said, "Give me time, woman! Give me time!"

Look at us; we're walking...

Andrea Lena's picture

...days of Dennis James and Jane Pickens... we're happy and we're laughing... I think that whatever you decide, you've got a heart to write and ideas. I'm looking forward to your entry into authorship here, and I'm excited for you.

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

So

So sit down and write a story I for one would love to reaad what you have to say
HUGS RICHIE2

Not Write

The English Teacher's picture

You just did, write that is. Many authors leave their stories undone a lot, just run out of gas I guess, others write so much when the story was over months ago they just go on and on and on...

You are not alone, I have subscribed to this site for 6 years and 40 weeks according to my account, but who cares, haven't written more than a few comments. I only write when I feel like it and I can find the correct keys.

So much to read, so little time and only one of me :)

The English Teacher