Efficient Prose

The brevity of the story was certainly encouraging.

At some point I had become obsessed with autonomous machines. What interested me specifically were structures which, once created, were capable of tending to their own needs, fixing any defects and prolonging their existence. Due to my lack of technical skill, I was unable to further this passion in any tangible way, leaving me with nothing but writing, per usual.

If these machines were powered by chips, and the chips contained software which in practice was nothing but a system of information, I saw no reason why one should not be able to recreate this effect in a piece of writing. I set out to create a closed system of prose, one capable of sustaining itself, tending to its own needs, so to speak, answering all of its own questions. When I closed my eyes, I imagined the blank piece of paper as a neat spreadsheet, a collection of rows and columns, a sensible, organised place in which to define a system. I promised myself to start with something extremely simple, to test the possibilities. I sat down and wrote:

1. A dog had lost its toy.

Already, after just one coherent sentence, many questions seemed to appear. If a word without any context offered near-infinite interpretations, bordering on nonsense, then a sentence was somewhat limited, in a comforting way. There was some kind of universe being imagined here, with at least two objects of significance. One could safely assume the story took place in a world similar to ours, otherwise the fact would have been mentioned beforehand, with a sentence such as "In this world, dogs could talk." Therefore, the reader would be able to assume that they didn't.

The initial relation of the objects was already implied within this one sentence. Now, one could point out the vagueness of both nouns here. What I imagined was a typical brown mutt, a street dog, perhaps, the word 'dog' being general enough as to invite readers to form their own interpretation based on personal preference, so that the owner of a Golden Retriever could easily insert their own pupil into the narrative in order to increase emotional impact. Cat owners would be forced to make a slightly larger mental leap, which I was entirely fine with.

Compared to the sly vagueness of the 'dog' noun, the 'toy' noun presented a bit more of a problem. My first thought was a squeaky rubber bone, but I admit this assumption might have been entirely personal, with various readers possibly imagining a chaotic range of items. Luckily, I had just received a letter from the Hasbro corporation, which had expressed interest in my writing, offering a sort of creative partnership in which I would subtly include the names of their products in my work. I admit the idea seemed somewhat tricky considering the length of the story. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a shot, seeing as I was currently in need of funding. I scratched out the word 'toy' and wrote down 'Hasbro toy.' I couldn't think of any specific ones.

The sentence hung on the page, taunting me to write more. For the time being, I decided to go out for lunch. Being away from my study always seemed to offer some kind of freshness and I soon found myself thinking about work at a nearby restaurant. My mission statement kept looming somewhere above. A story that serves itself. Repairs itself. A self-contained piece of writing.

The problem, as I imagined it, was that I never seemed able to have such a clarity of vision. The longer the piece, the more it seemed to veer in my personal direction, fueled by my own life, no longer standing on its own. What I wanted was a singular shout, but in practice I always ended up with a short excerpt of the permanent shout of my life. Just this once though, I promised myself that things would be different. The brevity of the story was certainly encouraging. I imagined myself submitting it to a variety of flash fiction contests.

I tried to picture the dog in search of its Hasbro toy, walking around the city. I supposed it could live in the city. Did it have a collar? It was unclear. A stray would invite a different set of expectations and emotions. A collared dog out in the city streets was just on a momentary adventure, soon to return to the comfort of a moderately affluent household. Vastly different registers. I did not have a Lady and the Tramp kind of class analysis in mind, at least not at the time.

Before my meal even arrived, I found myself getting deeper into this minute detail, thinking, does Snoopy have a collar? I tried to remember. Scooby Doo certainly has one. Does it not feel humiliating to him considering he can talk? It's not like he needs to have Shaggy's number written on there in order to get home. So the collar just means he's owned by a person?

The Hasbro thing began to weigh on me a bit. I was well into the middle of a burrito at that point. I thought to myself, it's certainly not an optimal situation, but it's also something that most artists are familiar with, so I can trust them to just gloss over that part, not even registering it, just thinking to themselves, oh, of course, she had to do that in order to make some money, to keep going, while the ordinary reader might have the opposite reaction, maybe even focus on that particular brand mention and become influenced by it. The idea of a dog owner reading my story, getting up from the computer and saying to their pet, ‘Hey buddy, let's get you a new toy’ was darkly funny to me, but I doubted anyone out there actually did things of that nature. In the end, I decided I would mail a reply back to the corporation, agreeing to promote its products.

No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn't get myself to imagine more, not a matter of block, but rather, too much pouring out, hardly any of it relevant. I decided to stick to the basics, which were just, you know, conflict. Story was conflict, so here, the conflict was that the toy was missing. I looked up a handy guide online to understand the process a bit better. It seemed the first sentence opened the story in medias res, which was good, because it saved time. It was economical storytelling. I did not need to do much worldbuilding for this one.

Okay, so the lost toy was a call to adventure. The dog would embark on a journey to find it and then emerge at the end, changed in some way by the quest. Maybe it would learn not to throw stuff off the balcony. Although that seemed hardly plausible.

I struggled with the conflict, because I thought to myself, there's no implication that the dog will as much as try to recover the toy. Maybe it hadn’t been very fun to begin with? This version of the story seemed to offer some kind of inner peace, a meditation on loss, but then I remembered it was a Hasbro toy, so I did not want to suggest that it was okay to lose it. This lost object suddenly started to matter more and more in the dog's mind as well as my own. I was worried I might not get the check if I don't sufficiently praise the product. I started wondering if the dog could go on a longer odyssey to recover multiple products, increasing the potential marketing value of my work. Meanwhile, a part of me was already looking for ways in which this would be a story only I could tell, making it more impactful. My parents used to have a Golden Retriever, but she was far too peaceful to ever actually go out in search of anything.

At the end of the day all I had was this:

1. A dog had lost its Hasbro(TM) toy.

In the meantime, I went out for a beer with a friend, appreciating the time away from work, and we chatted, and I said something along the lines of, oh, you know, writing is writing, it's hard, but it's worth it, wrestling with the blank page and whatnot. Who talks like that?