Stories Never Written

I just read Amy's post about the Story [She's] Never Written, which is funny 'cause just today I was thinking about one of the stories I've never written. It's so annoying to have these things in my head, trying to get out, for years, while I continue to lack the energy, ambition, and sense of self-worth to do anything about it.

Once I bought a fancy blank book with the intention of filling it with ideas for, notes on, and fragments of stories, novels, plays, songs, and such, thinking it might exorcise those literary demons from my brain. I figured that someday someone would find it and at least enjoy the flights of fancy such fragments might send their imagination on--like with this really cool book by Chris Van Allsburg I once saw, which features captioned illustrations from non-existent stories, allowing you to invent the contexts for yourself.

For instance, once I saw a notice about a contest to write a one-act play. I conceived a play called The Angel of the Sea of Reeds, which had the following dramatis personae:

SENOY, an angel
SANSENOY, another angel
SEMANGELOF, a third angel
LILITH, a woman
ADAM, a man
YAHWEH, a god

And that's it. I never wrote a single line. But tell me that's not a kick-ass cast of characters. Tell me you don't want to read that play. Tell me you don't wonder mightily how it unfolds. Because I sure do. And if I found that list in a old handmade book buried on a high shelf somewhere, it would send a tingle down my spine, I'm certain of it.

I might also have included, say, one of the two pages of dialogue from my likely-never-to-be-finished screenplay entitled The Breton Summer. (Evocative title, no? I'm great with titles.) Or even just a line, like maybe this one:

She pauses and turns to the window. The late sunlight falls on her
impossibly lovely face as the French countryside rolls by beyond
the glass. Underneath, the insistent noise of the train on its tracks.
Returning her gaze to the paper, she writes, more urgently now.

JULIE (V.O.) (CONT.)

We are going to contemplate the immense and lonely sea.

But I never put even those tiny scraps in the book. I never put anything in the book.

Once, about twenty years ago, I started a novel. I had a finished outline, and lots of research, and drafts of several chapters. It's the closest I've ever come to actually writing a book. It was a young adult (or, more accurately, intermediate) fantasy novel called Wren, Robin, Raven, and its theme was one of the more common in that genre, summed up by another writer as "child finds magical world and has to save it". Had I been aware at the time just how common that theme is, I probably would have quit before I even started. As it was, I told a friend the basics of the story, and she commented that it sounded a lot like Tolkien. I had never read Tolkien, and when I eventually did I realized that, in tone and execution, his works were wholly different from what I was trying to do, but I essentially gave up at that point.

My story did involve elves and dwarfs. I won't go into all the details, but the protagonist was Wren, a twelve-year-old girl who discovers a faerie world and, yes, must save it from an evil immortal, who is in the guise of a human girl named Raven. There was some cool stuff about Wren being descended from historical (or quasi-historical) figures like Guinevere and Jane Grey, while Raven's past guises included Morgan le Fay and Mary Tudor. Of course, Wren picked up some companions on her adventure, the most prominent of whom was Robin, Prince of the Elves. There was some very mild romantic attraction stuff between Wren and Robin (conveniently, although immortal, my elves looked and behaved much like twelve-year-old humans). There were two other elves in the party, Martin (another boy elf) and Sparrow (a girl elf). Martin had purple hair. I love that detail. As you may have gathered from the names, the folklore and mythology of birds were central to the story--for example, English folklore includes the couplets "The robin and the wren/Are God's cock and hen" and "The martin and the sparrow/Are God's bow and arrow".

There was also a husband-and-wife team of dwarfs named Dimplegrin and Bumblegnat, respectively. (Female dwarfs were distinguished from males chiefly by having slightly less facial hair.) Bumblegnat was actually the Chief Dwarf, an elected position which, in the democratic, egalitarian, and labor-oriented dwarf society, was similar to a shop steward. My dwarfs found the elves a bit haughty. Finally, there was an undine, whose name was unpronounceable by anyone but another undine (it sounded like rivulets of melted snow falling on a smooth rock in the spring sun), so Wren dubbed her Trinket (because she was tiny, even for an undine, and they are a tiny species). If you do the math, you will note that of the seven companions, four were female and three were male. So take that, J.R.R. Fucking Tolkien and your cocksucking all-male fellowship.

Oops, sorry, that was a burst of anger out of nowhere. Anyway, that's not even the story I was thinking about today. The story I was thinking about today began its life something like fifteen years ago. I wrote a lot back then, including a lot of letters to friends, even to friends I saw or spoke to frequently. It was something I did just for the enjoyment of writing and reading letters. Often I would include snippets of stories in the letters--just stuff off the top of my head, not anything I intended to expand upon, necessarily, but sometimes I would like the ideas enough to keep them floating around. Once I sent someone a card that had a picture on the front of a white mouse sitting in a paper airplane. Inside I wrote about a mouse named Annabelle who wanted more than anything to be able to fly. See, her best friend was a bat (this was inspired by a Warner Brothers' cartoon featuring Sniffles the mouse called "Brave Little Bat"), and Annabelle, who lived in a cage, longed to soar through the sky like her friend.

After I sent the card I continued to think about the story. I'd always wanted to write an animal fantasy--one of my very favorite books as a child was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and as I've mentioned here before, one of my favorite books as an adult is Watership Down. I figured, though, that mice had been done, so I decided to change the focus to the bat character. She was a little brown bat named Vesper. Annabelle stayed in as a supporting character, and there was a male bat named Icarus, who, as you might guess from his name, was destined to come to a bad end. I wanted the story to have some emotional heft to it, like Mrs. Frisby did. And bats are so cool, and there weren't any books about them. Well, there was Stellaluna, which is a great book, but it's a picture book. I figured I finally had something original. Of course, that didn't last. I can't tell you how upset I got when I first saw that book a few years back. I still think my story would have been better. But we'll never know, will we?