I mentioned the idea of DeviantStories back in October, and since then I've decided to switch the name to ArtStories here on the website. Not because of copyright or anything (though I imagine that there might be complications if I ever earned money off of these stories--something that gnaws at me but I'm choosing to ignore), but because I think it's a better name overall and more clearly explains what I'm trying to do.
Anyway, this essay isn't an update on ArtStories as much as it is a quick behind-the-scenes of where my first completed ArtStory came from. If you're curious about the story itself, it's found here, or you can visit the ArtStories section of my website, where there's a PDF for easier reading. I would recommend reading the story before reading the BTS, as there are spoilers…I guess… See, the first sentence of a short story is supposed to be something that hooks the reader, that sets up what's to come. And my first sentence really does that, I think: "When Randen first started his career as an artist-murderer, he never thought that his mother would be the inspiration for what would make him so well known." I mean, I tell you how it's going to end right there. How can we be talking about spoilers if the first sentence already tells you how it's going to be? I mean, the rest of the paragraph points out that he has all of the standard earmarks for being a sociopathic killer, so the ending really shouldn't come as any sort of surprise. Still, as I was writing the story, I had this weird feeling like it was easy to forget that we're reading a story about a murderer. I don't know if that's true--I can't ever read this story as anything but my own; I'll always know how it ends, what the purpose of each moment of the story is for. So the experience of reading through it is always a process of rereading, for me. It will be interesting to see if people forget where it's headed by the end or not. I think it's fair to ask why I would feel compelled to write a murder story when the image behind it is so benign. And I think that's why it worked for me. When I saw "Duckie", there was nothing about it that seemed sinister or intimidating. I mean, that is one happy duck. But what stood out to me was the number written on its chest. PrismoTheSmoke writes that the project came about as artwork to be sold during a Rubber Duck Festival. The artist's design was to show off how different media can make for different effects. For me, seeing a black and white drawing of a duck with a number across its chest, I had to wonder what the other numbered ducks would look like. And, since it's in black and white, I couldn't help but think that it almost looked like the numbers were written in blood. At first, I thought of it as a cop story: Lewy and Hutch, two grizzled detectives, find this numbered rubber duckie as a type of calling card and score counter--it's the two-hundred-eighty-first murder of this kind…and that's when I petered out. First of all, I don't really know how detectives work, aside from what I've seen on TV shows and movies. Also, how incompetent would Lewy and Hutch have to be to let a guy get away with almost three hundred murders? (In fact, part of the reason that Randen picks specific numbers for his forty-odd duckies is because I wanted to use the number from the picture without having to march through massive quantities of death. And, since it was order 281 that inspires Randen, that's why he uses that number, rather than it being sequential.) So I shifted the narrative from the pursuers to the perpetrator. Coming up with Randen (which is simply "Branden" without a b) was easy, as the news is replete with incels of his type. I'm not particular sensitive to people who view violence as the way to deal with life, so there's a callousness toward him that I couldn't help but include. What humanizes him, I think, is his mother. Their conversation--which takes up a fair portion of the story--is one that I think any parent or role model has with a charge who is feeling directionless. I've worked through these sorts of questions with former students before--though I usually try to get a better grasp of what she (or he) is after before dispensing my (probably erroneous) advice--and there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, if anything, Mama Anderton was doing the best thing she could in the situation. It's not her fault that he wanted to graphically murder a coworker and photograph the mutilation. She probably thought he wanted to, like, recreate "The Last Supper" but with rubber duckies, poor woman. I wrote the entire story in a single sitting, which is really the only way that I can write short stories. Coming back to them after being away is very much having let the iron cool and then bringing back the hammer. I've a couple of other ArtStories that I've attempted, but neither of them ended in a single sitting--the story was either too big or too ill-defined for me to finish--so they continue to languish on my hard drive. Maybe they'll come back a bit later, who knows? The last bit of "Where did this come from?" has to be traced to the fact that I'm reading a short story collection by Stephen King. I feel like the best part of the book so far (and I'm two-thirds of the way through) is the title: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. A couple of the stories have taken strange twists, and there's plenty of weird situations--as you might expect from a King story--but nothing has really struck me as 1) scary (I've yet to read a scary book, though I've read quite a bit of horror lately), or 2) that memorable. Nothing against King; short stories aren't my favorite, I guess. So there is a bit of irony that I'm putting "Duck, Duck, Death" onto my website and trying my best to write more short fiction. Well, that's about all there is to the behind-the-scenes. If you've read the story and this much, I want to thank you for devoting enough of your life to reading over four thousand of my words today. That's mighty fine of you, and I do appreciate it. Comments are closed.
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