A new project: Short stories inspired by current news
Announcing Smells Like Make-Believe
Working on a novel warps your sense of time. There is the writing, and the re-writing, and the self-flagellation, and more re-writing, and quite often you wonder if you will ever reach that mythical state called Done.
Occasionally, you get weary of your story, and exasperated by your characters, and wish you could leap into another one, if only for a little while.
And when I say “you”, I really mean “me” and also “us.”
I’ve been working on a novel for the better part of the last couple of years, slotting in time around client work and running a business and occasional forays away from the desk. Natalie Greenfield is also writing a novel, and we often commiserate about the long, winding nature of this endeavor, which I mostly love but occasionally feel flattened by.
Natalie and I have decided to experiment with a self-made cure. A side project that allows us to flex our creative muscles in different ways, explore new perspectives, and give our brains an occasional diversion.
We’ve dubbed it Smells Like Make-Believe, a series of short stories inspired by current news items.
The concept is simple: Every few weeks, we will find a news item that sparks our interest, and each of us will (separately) write a fictional story loosely connected to that item. We’ll publish the stories here, along with a summary of the piece that inspired it.
We will use a Volume:Issue structure in which each volume is based on a theme. The theme for Volume 1 is Mistaken Identity.
Anything could happen (and probably will)
We set a few guidelines for ourselves, as follows:
- We both have to agree on the news item. This one is kinda obvious, but it was important to us to make this explicit.
- Neither of us can have personal knowledge about the news items. That is, it can’t be about anyone we know or be connected to our lives in any way.
- We have complete freedom to choose any POV. The stories we write can be closely tied to the news item or only tangentially connected. They can contain people mentioned in the news item, or people completely outside the narrative that might have been affected by it, or any combination thereof.
- We will not use the full names of any character in a news item. If one of us builds a fictional character around a person named in a news item, we will only use the first name in the fictional piece, so as not to impact search engine results or reputation of that individual. This is particularly important if the news item has a negative outcome or involves a crime.
- We work on our stories separately. Each of us devises our story independently. We don’t tell each other what our stories are about before they’re finished, so as not to influence each other.
- We edit our stories for each other when they’re done. We swap stories, do an edit, and publish.
Inspired by
A Year of Mornings, by Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes, in which the two artists (one in Portland, Maine, and one in Portland, Oregon) each took a single photo every morning for one year, and posted it to a website. I loved the way this project unfolded, and the resulting book is a treasure.
Astray, by Emma Donoghue, in which she takes historic accounts of journeys — illicit and not — and spins fictional accounts around the characters. Emma’s writing here, as in her other work, is stunning and inventive, and this is a gorgeous collection of short stories.
Austin Kleon, whose own art originates from news stories, and who continually encourages artists and writers to re-mix, re-work, and create new things. Here’s a talk he gave called Steal Like a Writer.
Email me when Smells Like Make-Believe publishes stories