Robert Waugh

I think I’ll revive an old idea of mine… write beginnings to stories, just beginnings. I read once about how children tell stories, that they jump from one beginning to the next until someone shows interest or they themselves find a particular start interesting. Once that happens they keep going. Jump, jump, jump, and then they jump into it.

In general, I should seek to write as a child would write, as I wrote in childhood. Without reservation. In play. A single day’s distraction. Some way of stringing together that day’s vocabulary words. Remember vocabulary words?

I’ll begin, and when I lose interest or the time has passed, I’ll begin again.

I’ve had a brilliant stoke of genius common to me. Stop procrastinating… okay, get this… stop procrastinating by telling yourself that you really, really need to slow down and start procrastinating. If you really are a chronic procrastinator, you’ll put it off for another day.

The key however, is to plan to do nothing. Plan any actual activity and it will never progress beyong the blueprint stage. Dreams are the stuff that dreams are made of.

So, from now on I plan to start procrastinating every day… starting tomorrow. Bright and early in the morning I will jump straight out of bed and think about rearranging my files for a while, and maybe get on the computer for a moment to check my email, and then, while I’m there open up the web browser and see if anything interesting is happening with the Internet. Good old Internet. That can keep me unoccupied for an hour or two, maybe even three. And then I’ll, well I’ll take it from there. I’m sure I can think of something not to do when the time comes.

My basic idea is to populate a database with topic-blurbs (characters, settings, actions, dialogue, bits of introspection) which would then be organized by a server-side script into uniquely queued narratives, able to respond to each reader’s preferences and interactions. Not in the chose-your-own-adventure fashion where the story changes, nor in the solve-the-puzzle fashion where you’re just walking through a series of rooms unlocking doors.

In my conception of dynamic narrative, only the focus of the story changes. The reader requests more detailed descriptions of the character, Arturo, so the script begins focusing more on Arturo’s contribution to the story. Or the reader seems interested in how Animus meets his dead parents, so the narrative begins to move in that direction. Or the reader doesn’t like at all that flowery description about what kind of flowers dot the landscape, so poof, all the poppies and peonies pop out of the prose.

In the past, I tried adapting plots from my stable of unwritten stories, but it was like trying to factor with prime numbers—those plots were designed for the old system, my mind had already converged on a single solution.

I needed a milieu with freedom, and fun, and an almost mythic feel. So, for my first set of tales I’m drawing inspiration from Richard Brautigan’s “In Watermelon Sugar.” A child’s world left to run amuck. And that is where I’m at today. Working out the characters, the settings, the stories, and of course, how the script will thread those elements into a narrative… if only I weren’t so distracted by other fascinating pursuits.