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An alien that speaks credit card boilerplate, a drink coaster with a rather sinister looking logo, and something called . . .
The Upside-Down Story
In the upside-down world, where the sun is black, the night is white, and the sea is red as blood, a girl met a boy.
The girl, alas, was a commoner, and the boy was a princess.
Again, this is one of those ideas that look like they might work, but don't. It didn't take me long to reach that conclusion. One minute down the drain . . . Sometimes, as C. S. Lewis once wrote, you have to build an altar in one place so that fire will fall from the sky somewhere else.
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I really appreciate this post. One of the hardest things to teach young writers is that you have to throw a lot of ideas at the wall looking for that one nugget with enough story goop attached so it'll stick.
ReplyDeleteThis notebook is chockablock with abandoned stories. Wait and see.
ReplyDeleteSo much of what experience teaches a writer is to recognize when an idea is worth pursuing and when it is not.
Which, almost paradoxically, is what makes all those dreadful unfinished stories at the outset of one's career so valuable -- they're how you learn to make that distinction.