Instructions Not Included: Part Five

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Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

The trucks were upon them now. The winged discs stopped shooting from the back of the first, the engines sputtered out, and the doors opened. Out stepped eight men, all dressed in jeans and dark-grey jackets. They were uniforms, and each of their shoulders bore the name “Clecir.” Two of the men were carrying large briefcases, and four of them had sidearms on their hips. They didn’t draw their weapons, though, instead all eight slowly walked towards the two brothers, fanning out to keep them contained.

“Hello, boys,” one of them said. He had curly, white hair and dark sunglasses on. He grinned broadly. “My name’s Maxwell. Please don’t be alarmed, we’re not here to cause any trouble. Just to take back what is rightfully ours.”

“Yours?” Gavin asked. Curtis frowned at him.

“Yes, the beacons.”

It took the boys a moment to realize that “beacons” must be the men’s term for the strange materials.

“You’re the ones who left the box of them out?” Curtis asked, anxious to take over the conversation before Gavin could try to argue about ownership.

“That’s right. A careless mistake.”

Curtis nodded. “Well they’re in that storage shed over there.”

Now it was Gavin who frowned at Curtis. To him it seemed like a betrayal. But really the mass of “beacons” still hanging off the sides of their shed had already given that information away. It was just about appearing accommodating.

Maxwell smiled, then nodded to the two men carrying the briefcases. They broke ranks and made their way to the shed. One of them came back a moment later and tossed one of the rods to Maxwell. Maxwell caught it and peered closely at the grooves on the rod’s side. He smiled.

“Batch 18, confirmed.”

The two men filed back into the shed, opened their briefcases, and began filling them with the brothers’ work.

“How long ago was Batch 18?” Maxwell said to no one in particular. “Twelve years now?” He turned back to the brothers. “Did you two work them this whole time? You said you found them in a cardboard box?”

Gavin’s frown deepened. “You didn’t misplace them at all! You planted them.”

Curtis elbowed his brother, but Maxwell seemed pleased by the insight.

“How perceptive of you,” he smiled. “And an excellent choice of words, we call it ‘seeding’ ourselves. I’m sure you’ve found that the secrets of the beacons are extensive. Infinitely so. Some of us even think responsively so.” Maxwell’s voice grew low, reverential. “Whichever way you push it, it discloses new truths. And so it is all the better to find curious minds that think differently from our own. We let them work uninterrupted, and sometimes they come up with the most novel inventions.”

The two men returned. They had selected the most complex examples of the brothers’ work and held them up for Maxwell to see. He looked them over one-by-one.

“I see. Crude clothing applications…but you’d run into trouble once you tried to make a full body-suit of course,” he chuckled. “You’d lose the wearer inside!”

Maxwell paused to look closer at the tunic, his brow furrowing. “Still…the fact that you’re using linked pieces instead of plates…how did you get them so small?”

“Perhaps this one sir?” One of the men held forward a piece fashioned by Gavin. It was the one where he had discovered how to create increasingly larger or smaller components.

Maxwell frowned in concentration as he turned it over until understanding set in. “But of course,” he gasped. “We’ve been blind all these years!” He turned it over more quickly now. Hungrily. “And it’s dual-ended! You can scale up or down with it! And I’d guess that this node-centric approach amplifies the resultant power!” His fingers clenched against the piece and a shudder passed through his body. A moment later he relaxed, and gently returned the piece to the briefcase. “Keep that one, get the bin ready for the rest.”

“Why take it all away?” Gavin asked before Curtis could stop him. “We’ve put so much of ourselves into it!”

Maxwell turned to Gavin and took off his sunglasses, looking him eye-to-eye. “It’s too risky to leave any developers operating outside of the organization, this stuff is just too powerful. Not to worry, though. We aren’t merely seeding new beacons, we’re seeding talent. The two of you have definitely proven yourselves ingenious and persistent….”

“You’re–you’re offering us a job?” Curtis cocked his head.

“So much more than a job,” Maxwell extended his hand. “I want you to be a partner to the future.”

The two brothers paused and looked to one another. Unspoken meaning passing between their eyes. They looked back to Maxwell.

“With all due respect,” Curtis said slowly, “we don’t like your style.”

Maxwell forced a smile. “Our way is necessary, but we know that it doesn’t appeal to all. Still boys, I like you. So just make sure you stay out of our way, and we won’t need to discuss the matter any further. You’ll do that won’t you?”

The two men with briefcases had finished hauling the rest of the brothers’ work outside. They had even brought all of their notebooks, clay, and graph paper, as well as all the winged discs that had slammed into the side of the storage shed. Another two men lifted a large “tube” out of the bed of one of the trucks. It was far cruder than Gavin’s solution for making larger structures. This tube had been fashioned by simply taking hundreds of the normal-sized discs and angling them to form pointy rings. Those rings were staggered so that they could slide over one another like some sort of giant telescope. The tube was capped at both of its ends.

Without a word the men opened a hatch on the side of the tube, put all of the brothers’ things inside, then closed the hatch and pushed the ends together. The overlapping flaps slid across each other, compressing down like an accordion until the two caps clanged against one another.

Gavin gasped as understanding set in. They had made the space inside too small to hold all of their things. With an open tube that had always meant the things would just spill out. In a capped one like this, it must mean that the items were obliterated into nothingness. Just like that, all their work was destroyed.

“You boys sure you don’t want to reconsider my offer?” Maxwell asked. “There are no second chances.”

Curtis shook his head.

“Suit yourselves.” He turned to the rest of the men and nodded, then they all filed back into the trucks and drove away.

Gavin and Curtis walked in silence back to their shed and stepped inside. They already knew what they would see…nothing. The men had been thorough. All that remained were two empty chairs and desks, the power generator, the lights and the fans.

“So that’s it,” Gavin said flatly.

“Yeah,” Curtis said, walking over to the power generator. He unplugged it and waited a few seconds for it to wind down. “Or at least it would be if they weren’t so stupid.”

He ran his fingers along the generator’s cord until he found a bump in the sheath. He felt out a slit in the rubber and peeled it back, revealing a microscopic tube that they had wrapped around the electric cable.

“I forgot about that!” Gavin said, clapping his hands to his head. “From when we were trying to get an electrical charge inside of a tube. We never took it out?”

Curtis shook his head. “Sounds like they aren’t accustomed to their ‘beacons’ being so small. They didn’t even think to check.” He unclasped the tiny tube and pulled it off the cord. “Of course those winged discs of theirs were able to hone in on us once…it’s a safe bet that they’ll realize they missed something sooner or later.”

The two brothers looks at one another, silently weighing their options.

“I say we don’t give it back,” Gavin finally said. “I say we run with it and start building again. Prepare for their return.”

Curtis grinned from ear to ear. “I was hoping you’d say that! Let’s go. I’ve got a lot of new ideas.”

The two brothers slapped each on the back and hurried over to their parked pickup truck. Curtis hopped into the driver’s seat and started the ignition while Gavin went around to the passenger side. He had just stepped up onto the running board when he froze.

“Uh-oh,” he said, and Curtis looked up to where Gavin was staring.

The two black trucks had turned around and were making their way back up towards the brothers and their storage shed.

“They figured it out already,” Gavin said.

“Yeah…do you still want to run?”

Gavin grit his teeth, then swung into his seat and pulled the door closed.

“Hit it!”

Curtis pressed the pedal to the floor and spun the truck out in a wide arc. They turned 180 degrees and moved off the road, pounding across the rough desert ground, kicking up a tall plume of dust as they fled from their pursuers.

*

As I said on Monday, the ending of Instructions Not Included is only an ending of its first act. This would signify the moment of transition where the story enters its central conflict. The brothers would continue an ongoing battle with this strange corporation, the tension escalating until the point of climax. The brother’s triumph would depend on them resolving the philosophical differences that have been introduced in the first act.

In the end, I like where this story is headed. I think it could be a fun adventure story targeted towards older children and teenagers. I would like to complete it, but I’m already committed to one novel, with many other concrete ideas for other ones after that. For a while I struggled with how many story ideas I had. I didn’t want to accept that there simply wasn’t enough time to make every novel that I wanted to.

It was a tough pill to swallow, but in the end I was able to accept the truth of the matter: my productivity will never keep up with my imagination. I’d like to talk a little more about the realistic limitations of an author’s productivity, how to accept those shortcomings, and how to choose which stories one should write. Come back on Monday where we will discuss these topics. Until then, have an excellent weekend!

Choosing Your Scope

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Last week I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of the things that stood out to me was that is a long film. It reminded me of how long watching Avengers: Infinity War felt last year, and as it turns out, those two films have almost exactly the same runtime.

But while these two films share the same length of time, their scopes are drastically different. Avengers features a central cast of nearly thirty and thousands of extras. It is peppered with constant dialogue and frequent set changes. 2001, meanwhile, features four main characters, and maybe two dozen extras. It has very few sets, and extremely sparse dialogue. Avengers seems more expansive, but 2001 seems deeper.

Neither film is wrong for its approach, they are just trying to accomplish different things. Each of them are epic in their own way. Avengers makes you feel like you’ve hurtled across multiple galaxies. 2001 invites you to sit in an environment, and gain a real understanding of its weight and feel. Avengers weaves together numerous points of conflict to ratchet up tension, 2001 accomplishes the same thing by making you witness the slow, methodical betrayal of a single AI.

The idea of choosing a scope is common to all forms of creativity. In the same canvas a painter could either create a sweeping landscape, or a closeup on a pair of hands. Both option has its own intrigue and beauty.

These perceived differences are not random, there is a direct correlation between time spent on a moment and its perceived weight. An author planning out their next work needs to be aware of this fact, and leverage it wisely.

 

The Amount of Time Matters)

It is true that one author might evoke powerful emotions with fewer words than another, and there is no simple formula that can tell you X number of pages will result in a particular level of emotional connection. That being said, we generally tend to give the most value to things that last a significant amount of time. We do this in life itself, but also in the stories we read.

A character that is introduced three pages prior will not be missed like one that has been present through the bulk of a novel. A daring rescue that takes a mere page to perform will not have as much tension as one that spreads across three chapters. Merely using words to suggest extremes are not sufficient. Telling me that the situation is “very, very dire” will never impact me so much as spending a significant amount of time in an oppressive atmosphere.

Also, the amount of time spent on one item relevant to another matters. Not everything in your story can be the most important. You want to direct the reader to the things that matter most by breezing past the unimportant and dwelling on the significant. Thus a waiter that takes the main character’s order should be limited to a sparse description, whereas the main villain would be etched out in detail.

In the example of Avengers, it is an extremely fast-paced story throughout, except for the rare moments where it pauses in scenes that are intended to convey the deepest emotional impact. Just by pausing to let us breathe in that space makes them all the more poignant as a result.

 

Breadth vs Depth)

I mentioned above that 2001: A Space Odyssey felt deeper than Avengers: Infinity War. I chose that word deliberately. The viewer feels as though they are being lowered into its atmosphere and having it permeate them to the core. Every setting in 2001 feels more real because of all the meticulous detail that is in them. The viewer feels like they are inhabiting a place that actually exists.

Avengers, on the other hand, is broader than 2001. Where 2001 evokes only a few powerful emotions, Avengers runs the entire spectrum from joy to despair. Its people and places may feel more pretend, but they have a sense of extending out of the periphery and into the infinite. There is a sense that there is always something more happening just around the corner.

Breadth and depth are mutually exclusive. One cannot write both of them into a scene at the same time. The moment we pause to focus on a detail, immediately we have narrowed the scope of that scene. It is possible to transition between the two, such as having a broad montage that changes to a single scene described in detail, but where one begins the other will end..

 

Finite Scope)

The last thing to consider about scope is that it is limited by its bounds. A common consideration when writing a story is how long it will be. Once that length has been determined, there remains a great variation in what it can cover, but there are some practical limits.

For example, trying to cram an epic into a 500 word short story would test that format’s limits, as would employing a 500,000 word trilogy to cover the events of a single day. Frankly, I have been on the wrong side a few times of fitting a scope to a story’s length. Even my most recent work, Instructions Not Included, is already pushing out of its boundaries.

I am currently writing the last segment of that story now, and I have found that it isn’t large enough to elegantly tie off all of the threads that I began. So instead of having complete closure, I have had to settle for completing the first act. That inflection point brings some sense of resolution, but also begins new arcs that extend beyond the length of my short story.

I’ve run into this issue with my short stories before. Without meaning to, this blog has been a place where I can test-drive longer form stories, and see which ones I remain interested in after the first ten thousand words. Sometimes you need to start writing a story first, until you understand what it wants its scope to be. Then you can select the length that will accommodate it. In any case, come back on Thursday to see the conclusion to Instructions Not Included, and I’ll share a little more about what I think its scope and length should be. I’ll see you there!

Instructions Not Included: Part Four

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Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Curtis listened well, only ever asking the occasional clarifying question and otherwise taking the information in. At times he raised his eyebrows, not so much in skepticism, only surprise. He had, of course, already noticed things floating strangely through the tubes during the past few days, Gavin hadn’t done anything to try and hide them on his desk. If he had, Curtis would have noticed and confronted him about it all the sooner.

“So it’s not just some art thing,” Curtis concluded after Gavin closed his notebook. “It’s a…machine of some kind.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I hadn’t really thought of that.”

“But we still don’t know what it’s for.”

“No…does it matter though?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think if it did something useful that would be really cool…but really I just like playing with it and finding new things about it.”

“Hmm…yeah, that’s why you were able to keep playing with it after I got bored. Maybe if I started helping out now I’d just make you frustrated by trying to make it do something?”

“I dunno…maybe,” Gavin felt bad saying it, but it was the truth.

“No, it’s cool,” Curtis started to move away.

“No wait,” Gavin said suddenly again. “I have an idea. If we can find a way to grow discs, then we could recreate everything. Make two sets of it all.”

“Each have our own copy,” Curtis grinned.

“Exactly. Play with it exactly how we want and neither one of us feels frustrated.”

“Do you really think we can grow a disc?”

“I mean I haven’t tried, but I’ve already been able to get it to do all these other things. It seems like there oughta be a way.”

“What are some of your ideas?” Curtis sat back down in the seat, lifting one of the islands to take a closer look.

“Well I know I can make a whole rod with clay, so what if I had an already-completed rod in there, and then I made a clay disc at the end of it. So I feed the tube, it makes the black stuff, the black stuff moves down the rod, and start changing the clay into a disc.”

“Yeah, yeah, good idea. But that clay will have to hold its shape for days.”

“Oh shoot, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Here hand me that disc. Look we’ll just lay the clay out flat on top of it. It’ll support its shape. And maybe each day we have to touch it up a little bit…”

The two boys kept chatting away, feeding off of one another’s energy late into the night.

Neither of the two boys knew at the time how endless the project would be. It was probably for the best, or else even Gavin might have balked at the commitment. The fact was it would be years of experimentation and discovery, each of them with their own set, each of them doing their own tests and sharing notes whenever they found anything exciting.

It was usually Gavin who would make a new breakthrough, like when he discovered how a series of islands could be combined as nodes around a larger shell, allowing for more massive structures to be built.He further discovered that these larger shells could be used as nodes for something larger, and so on and so on, recursively increasing the scope to any dimension required. If they had had the space for it, they could have built a tube the size of the an airport terminal, the material never buckled under its own weight.

Curtis, meanwhile, was the one who found all of the practical applications. It never buckled did it? With that in mind he went the other way and began crafting smaller and smaller levels of detail, forging links that he wove into clothing. It was extremely crude, but his initial tests made clear that robust body armor was a definite possibility for the material.

Gavin never said that he disapproved of those experiments, but he always seemed bemused by the idea of taking a technology so purely alien and applying it to mundane everyday things. His approach was always to explore what he felt the pieces “wanted” to be.

Curtis understood that the operation of the pieces was lenient. It allowed for variation in the pieces it crafted, and that meant it was intended to bend to another’s will. It was a tool to make whatever the wielder wanted it to make.

In either case, both brothers found enough to fascinate them for more than a decade. At first they tried to find places in their room to hide the experiments from their parents, and then in their later teens they pooled money from their summer jobs to rent a storage unit. They moved all the material into that and worked with it in there.

High school came and went, college did too. They were bright, and already trained in an engineering mindset. As they gained education they became aware of how significant some of their discoveries truly were. They realized this was an entire science unto itself. Even so, they still maintained the secret of it all. Boyhood promises to one another were hard to break. It had always been their project, not for anyone else.

Curtis was the first to question these old commitments. He suggested that they were holding themselves back by not bringing other minds to explore with them. At the very least he said they could create commercial applications which would fund larger experiments for them. They wouldn’t have to patent the inventions, no one would be able to reproduce what they made without the material anyway, so there was no need to disclose how it was done. It could still be their secret.

There was a flaw in that plan and Curtis knew it. Gavin knew it, too, and he didn’t hesitate to point it out. Their experiments had concluded that any piece of this material could be used to reverse engineer all others. To give away one element was to give everything away.

Other people wouldn’t figure out its secrets, Curtis said.

Not most, Gavin agreed, but some would.

Curtis pointed out that it wasn’t even their discovery anyway. Someone else put these things in that cardboard box in the first place.

Probably that person hadn’t even known what they were, Gavin said. “Someone must have been throwing them out.”

But that was not the case, as the two would soon find out.

The two of them were seated at their separate desks inside of the storage unit. A power generator hummed in the corner, powering a number of lights and two fans to keep each of them cool in the tin oven. Curtis now had his own house, but it felt fairer to keep the materials in the storage unit like this. It was their No Man’s Land.

Each of them was bent over their stack of materials, absorbed in their never-ending work. Then, all at once, the silence was shattered by a reverberating clang! Something had just slammed into the roof of their storage unit. The two snapped their heads up and looked to each other in surprise as a second crash sounded from one of the walls.

“Kids?” Gavin suggested. “Throwing rocks?”

“Maybe,” Curtis said, but he appeared entirely unconvinced. He stood up and grabbed a heavy wrench from his workstation. “C’mon.”

Together they lifted the sliding door and walked around to the side of the unit. There was twelve feet between it and the next unit, but that space was entirely empty. No kids, no burglars…nobody.

What there was, however, was a smooth white disc that was sticking to the wall. It was about the width of a hand and with little wings on opposite sides to each other. Gavin stared in disbelief, knowing what it was before he even touched it and felt the way it rippled his skin.

“It’s the same material,” he frowned.

“I didn’t show our stuff to anybody,” Curtis said, as if he was anticipating an accusation.

“Sure…” Gavin said slowly. He turned to look in the direction the winged disc must have come from. “But how–” his eyes went wide and grabbing his brother he pulled them both to the ground just as two more discs came hurtling through the air and slammed into their storage unit. At the same time they heard another thud from the opposite side, and another two hitting the roof.

“Get away!” Curtis shouted, crawling as quickly as he could along the ground.

Gavin started after him, but then paused to look at the open door to their storage shed. All their work, all their secrets were on open display. He turned and made his way back, the discs continuing to whiz overhead like bullets, three-to-five impacting every second. Gavin reached the entrance and cautiously raised up until he could grip the bottom of the door and pull it down along its track. He had the door about halfway down when another of the discs slammed into it, bending the steel shutters so that they refused to budge any further.

“Leave it!” Curtis roared, grabbing Gavin from behind and hauling him away.

“But it’s all of our work!”

“If they tracked us down here do you really think a little door-and-padlock is going to keep them out of the shed?”

“They?”

Curtis jerked his thumb off to the side and Gavin turned to see what he was pointing at. The storage facility was on top of a natural rise in the land, with a single road providing the only access to it. A quarter-mile down that road, and making their way up to the facility, were two black pickup trucks.

From the bed of the truck in front came those white, winged discs. They were being flung up into the air, hung in empty space for a moment, then hurtled off in random arcs. Each disc curved through the air for a little while, and then suddenly zeroed in on Gavin and Curtis’s storage shed, each striking it from a different angle.

“You think they’re here for our stuff?” Gavin asked.

“You think they’d be here for anything else?”

“We’ve got to stop them,” Gavin’s voice was panicky.

“If they’re coming here like this…I think they mean business,” Curtis’s voice was calm.

“Then…we gotta run!”

“They seem to have accounted for that.”

Gavin looked back to the trucks, they had separated and were now approaching the brothers in a pincer. Being off the road, the trucks now kicked up huge clouds of dust in their wake, churning up the sage under their heavy tires.

Gavin stared incredulously at his brother, unbelieving of how he could be so resigned. But he was right.

“You let me do the talking,” Curtis quietly ordered.

*

Well, I said that I would finish the story today, but I’m going to need just a little bit more to cap it off. The good news is, I found out how I want to end this story! I mentioned on Monday that I would try to incorporate a couple themes here at the end. The first was going to be a theme of never-ending discoveries. The story is progressing to a cliffhanger, one where the brothers will move into a new stage of development and invention. I have that whole sequence all worked out, and I feel that it satisfies this story’s desire to forever explore the unknown.

Another theme I had toyed around with was how one needs to be responsible with their creativity and employ that power for good. Ultimately I don’t think that’s an idea I’m going to be able to deliver on with this piece. It’s a good theme, and I even sowed the seeds for it when describing the brothers different approaches to their inventions. If this were a full-sized novel, there would definitely be a pay-off on that idea later on, but I just don’t have enough time in this short-story format to give that theme its due.

This brings up a question of what scope fits a story. It is a very important consideration for an author. We often say in writing that one is limited only by their creativity, but that isn’t entirely true. There are other constraints, such as the number of words before a story becomes unwieldy. On Monday I’d like to talk some more about those limitations, and about the balance of depth and breadth that an author should consider in their work. After that I really will post the end of Instructions Not Included. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and in the meantime have a wonderful weekend!

 

Or I Could Just Ramble On and On

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Triple Writer’s Block)

It seems that every part of creating a story is tricky. Knowing where to begin is tricky, maintaining interest through a middle is tricky, and ending it all is tricky. In different stories, though, one of those three parts will be harder to pull of than the other two.

Beginnings are usually hard when your outline started with something vague like “there is a conflict between two families.” Perhaps you wrote that because you knew that your hero needed a background of strife to emerge from, but now you struggle to define just what the nature of that strife is. The beginnings of a story are usually used to establish the tone and atmosphere of a tale, something difficult to do when all you had accounted for was events and dialogue.

Middles are difficult when you know where your characters come from, and you know were they wind up…but not how they get there. This is an easy dilemma to get into, because the first ideas for a story are often based around an interesting contrast. Something like “a man wakes up with awesome power, but eventually he learns to relinquish it for love.” That’s great, there’s a beginning, an ending, and an interesting voyage suggested in between. But now you have to turn that “suggested” into something more concrete.

And finally, endings are difficult when the initial motivation for writing the story was to explore an atmosphere or concept. Writing is a very meditative exercise, and sometimes an author simply wants to hash out an idea that’s weighing on their mind, to slowly walk within themselves and process what they find. Such sojourns can be quite fruitful, leading to an entire gold mine of new discoveries. That is all well and good for a beginning and a middle, but now how does one cap off such a wistful wandering in a way that is satisfying?

Today we’ll focus on just this last quandary, how to end a story that doesn’t want to finish.

 

See What Your Story Wants to Be)

My story Does What He Must actually began with no particular ending in mind. My notes simply stated that I wanted a character who did increasingly impressive feats one after another, always rising to the occasion to do what had to be done. And then he was supposed to face some penultimate and impossible task, something the audience would feel he couldn’t do because it broke the laws of physics or something like that. But then, to their surprise, he would simply grit his teeth and do that impossible thing, simply because that was just the natural continuation of his arc. And that was as specific as my notes on the story were.

So I just started writing. I came up with his background at random, and started working through a series of escalating challenges for him. All the while I was trying to figure out what this nebulous “penultimate and impossible task” would be, but nothing came to mind. I simply continued writing until I reached the point where the final act should go, and then I paused.

At this point I reread everything I had written, looking for some subconscious arc that I might have imbued into the tale. Much to my delight, there absolutely was one. I realized that the whole piece had been very family-centric, and so the ending should maintain that theme. I also realized that I had shown my main character performing miracles for his wife, his friends, his brothers in arms, and even strangers, but still had not done one for his son, who was the narrator of the tale. And thirdly I realized that this Old-West-Tall-Tale format practically begged for him to become a legend whose influence extended beyond the grave.

As I made note of all these points the only proper ending was obvious. I needed for my character to die in one of his miracles, but then still come through as a ghost (or an angel) for his son. This end fit with all of the themes I had been writing, both conscious and sub-conscious, and it made the whole experience complete.

 

Fictionalize Your Epiphanies)

As I mentioned at the top, a most common reason for beginning a story without an ending is because you just want to explore a concept that you are curious about. It might be a new technology, a strange setting, a philosophical question, or a real-life drama. You want to wrap your head around it, and writing gives you time to walk around in that concept and get a real feel for it.

In these situations, the answer to how to end your story might be staring you in the face. The fact is, people that spend enough time exploring an idea often find out something about it, something that wasn’t obvious from the outset. Though it is easier said than done, all an author needs to do to close their story is have it teach those same epiphanies.

Currently, I am trying to find a way to take this same approach for Instructions Not Included. I began that story with the desire to explore a simple notion: the process of scientific research and discovery. I thought it would be fun to take an idea that is usually so stiff and prickly, and turn it into something fun and playful. As I did so, I found my mind coming to rest on an important principle of inventions: creativity is a great power, and he who wields it is responsible to employ it well.

Like I said, turning an epiphany into a plot point is easier said than done. I’m still trying to figure out a way to actually implement this idea in my story, but I do have hopes that I’ll figure something out by Thursday!

 

Let a Meditation be a Meditation)

If the above approaches fail for you, then my last recommendation is that you perhaps just let your story be what it is: endless. I think stories with rich endings are wonderful things, I think they are important, I think humans depend on this structure to learn some of life’s greatest truths.

But none of that means that every time a pen touches a page it has to create a story with an ending. There’s no need to be so limiting in our idea of literature. Not everything has to neatly fit into categories like story, research paper, or instruction manual. Some things can just exist within their own sphere without having to justify their existence.

One of my favorite short pieces on this blog is Deep Forest, and that particular piece really doesn’t have a proper ending at all. I began writing it by wanting to explore an atmosphere that was so ancient it had become timeless. I wanted to capture a deep and heavy nature, one that knew no civilization or history. I had a lot of fun writing it, but when it came time to finish I didn’t have a proper ending in mind. I couldn’t see any arcs that needed to be concluded and there weren’t any epiphanies that it had to offer, it just kind of was what it was and that was it. So I posted it anyhow.

In hindsight, I realize it would have simply been wrong to tack an ending onto an exercise in timelessness. The fact is the only way for that story to have ended was without an ending at all. Though I did not realize this at the time, I am glad I went with my instincts.

 

All of these solutions come down to the same root though, that first idea of letting your story be what it wants to be. If you’ve written your tale properly, then it has its own ambience and tone, its own themes and styles, its own wants and desires. By knowing your story thoroughly, you will naturally gravitate to the end that is right for it.

On Thursday we’ll see what sort of ending I come up with for Instructions Not Included. Presently my hope is that I’ll be able to incorporate that epiphany I mentioned earlier, thus giving it a sense of thematic closure. At the same time I want to leave it with a sense of ongoing adventure, and so I will want to leave the plot somewhere more open-ended, as I did with Deep Forest. But more than anything else, I want to give it an ending that feels right with its personality. Come back on Thursday to see how it turns out!

Instructions Not Included: Part Three

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Part One

Part Two

The next morning Gavin’s alarm had barely sounded a single note before he was on his feet and gathering up the tubes from his desk.

“What are you up so early for?” Curtis groaned from his bed but Gavin ignored him.

With the tubes tucked under his arms he marched to the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He plucked a fresh cup from the mirror cabinet and began to scoop out the water, then the apple juice, and finally the alcohol.

“Obviously they haven’t had as long to grow stuff as the first batch…but that’s alright, now I’ll know whether I get more or less depending on the amount of time it cooks for or not.”

No sooner did he say so than he found his answer. He had emptied enough of Tube #1 to see the dark splotches on its surface. The amount that had been there before was almost exactly doubled. Did that mean the amount of material mattered more than the length of time?

Tube #2 came next, the one with bits and pieces from nature. The black spots seemed to be made of the exact same black, miniscule threads as the first one. The amount produced also seemed similar, perhaps a bit less, but also the volume of material he put in had been less as well.

Unsurprisingly Tube #3 maintained the pattern. Black spots of the same sort of material, less in total surface area, because it had had the smallest volume of them all. Gavin also noticed that the rocks, glass, and brick had all dissolved, but the metal screws had only partially done so. He could still make out their shape inside of the third tube, though they looked worn and eaten away, as if they had been subject to decades of rust. Coating their broken surfaces were those same black, little strings. As the densest material, he supposed it made sense that they hadn’t been able to disintegrate entirely.

Gavin scribbled all this information into his notebook and then paused. What came now? For the first time in a while he wasn’t sure. He could produce patches of strange, black fibers, but where was he supposed to go from there? He was sure he could probably come up with other experiments related to feeding the tubes, but that could only be interesting for so long. He wanted something new to pursue.

He flipped back through the pages in his notebook and saw his old notes about fitting the pieces together. He had stopped pursuing that avenue for a while, and now it seemed interesting to him again. He could hear the noises of his family waking up, so he didn’t feel bad relocating back to his bedroom.

“You were up so early for that dumb puzzle?” Curtis grumbled.

Gavin ignored him and sat down, taking summary of the remaining rods and discs. He was quite sure he had fit together every piece that he could, yet there still remained 13 disconnected rods, 6 empty discs, and even his “islands” still had an unfilled hole or two. None of these pieces fit together, so he was back to the assumption that some pieces were missing from the set.

One of the holes in Tube #1 didn’t even look like it could take a rod. It had an obstruction in the middle of it, and was wider both above and beneath that protrusion. Thus there was no way for any solid material to slide all the way into it, unless perhaps the rod’s end had some spring-loaded mechanism to let it compress and then expand. None of them had any such setup.

Gavin open the drawer on his desk and sifted through his various supplies until he found his modelling clay. He took a handful and smashed it into the hole, prodding with his fingers until it filled every nook and cranny inside. Then he pulled out the top and bottom halves separately, reconnected them on his desk, and peered closely at the model.

It looked like a slightly misshapen cube with a bite taken out of its side. It was a little wider at the top than at the bottom, with a slanted edge causing the difference between them. Those same precise, right-angle lines had been molded into its side, which seemed a bit odd, because Gavin had not noticed them inside the hole when he had been peering into it.

He checked again, even felt the surface of the hole with his finger. No lines anywhere, yet somehow the clay had still been imprinted with them. Curious, Gavin took the clay and pushed it back into the hole. This time he would let it sit for longer, so he set his watch for five minutes and drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk.

“Seriously, why are you still playing with that stuff?” Curtis asked as he changed out of his pajamas.

Gavin shrugged. He hadn’t been going to any special lengths to hide his discoveries, but he also didn’t feel like sharing them either.

“It’s just something fun to do. Why? Does it bother you?”

“Only when it has you waking me up early on a weekend,” Curtis rolled his eyes, then made to leave the room. “Hey, don’t stay cooped up for too long, it’s a beautiful day out there.”

“Sure Curtis, I’ll come play soon.”

Curtis nodded and walked through the door. As soon as he was gone Gavin grabbed the tube. He turned it over in his hands while waiting for his watch timer to run out. He pressed his palm against it and paid close attention to the way it made his skin ripple. Could those ripples be what made the lines in the clay? But the ripples moved across his skin and the ones on the clay had seemed stationary. Still, the distance between each ripple seemed about the right size. Or maybe–

Gavin froze. He had been turning the tube over, and while doing so had glimpsed the inside. And in that brief moment he had seen those strange, black fibers from the previous experiment moving, crawling up the sides of the tube. He looked closer, and sure enough they really were moving. Not in the strange, sudden hairpin way that the bugs had done, but in a constant line, converging towards one common destination: the hole he had stuffed with the clay.

Gavin looked closer at the individual fibers that made up the dark splotch. They hand deepened their bowing motion, allowing them to touch their upper ends all the way to the surface of the tube and then slide their bases forward so that they step-by-step marched towards the foreign object. Once they reached the clay they began to prod themselves into its soft form, poking through it like thousands of little hairs on a white scalp.

Gavin’s timer went off, startling him. He dismissed it, and watched patiently until every last fiber had reached the clay and burrowed itself deep into it. Then he tried to remove the clay, which proved a great deal more difficult than before. It was far less pliable now, and as he pulled the top and bottom halves apart there was a strained cracking noise from its center.

At last he got it out and placed it on his desk, where he could see that the clay had been being transformed. It looked marbled, divided between two materials. About three-fifths still just ordinary clay: soft to the touch, gray in color, covered in fingerprints. The rest of it was white, glossy, just like the material that the discs and rods were made of. It even had those same strange properties of heating and rippling his skin when he touched it.

“So…these are changers,” he said slowly. “It eats stuff, and turns it into those black splotches, and then it uses those to build new parts…” he smiled broadly. “I’m not missing any pieces after all! I can make as many as I need. As many as I want.”

He still didn’t know why that was significant. None of these discoveries were actually useful to him in any practical way, yet it felt like it mattered even so.

Holding the tube under one arm he dashed down the stairs and out of the house. Once there he found the nearest patch of dirt and began shoveling it into the opening of the tube.

“It doesn’t seem too picky about what it eats, so I’ll just give it what I can get the easiest: dirt and water. And maybe play with the ratios. A bit more dirt and a bit less water. See if it makes more of the black stuff that way.”

He finished with the dirt and ran over to the spigot sticking out of the side of their building. He turned the water on and began transferring it by the handful into the tube.

“Hey, are you finally ready to play?” Curtis asked, tossing a football up in the air and catching it. Gavin hadn’t noticed him here in the yard.

“Yeah…almost…I’ve just got to run this upstairs and I’ll be right down.”

Curtis was looking at him with a bemused expression. Gavin was sure his manner of filling this tube up looked pretty strange, but he still wasn’t going to address it right now. He would probably have to explain things to his brother sooner or later though.

Gavin tipped in one more handful of water and the tube overflowed. He dashed back inside the building and up to his room. He grabbed another chunk of the clay and began to fashion a rod from it. He was trying to imitate the general dimensions of all the other rods he had, then he stuffed its end into the hole he had been experimenting with before.

Now there was nothing left for it but to wait…and this would probably take a while. So he might as well go and play with Curtis in the meantime, even though his mind wouldn’t really be on it. This afternoon he’d come back and see how far things had progressed, feed it more dirt and water if it needed it. Probably he would be feeding the tube for a few days before it could transform the entire rod, and he would have to think about buying more clay, too.

*

It did take a while for the rod to fully form, though not as long as Curtis had feared. He had been correct to increase the amount of solid material, and after a few more “feedings” he found the ideal ratio to be 80% solid and 20% liquid. With that the rod was completed in three days.

While it was growing Gavin set up a series of experiments to conduct with his other islands, so that he could test the limits of their abilities. From his first trial he established that the tube could not grow a rod in just any shape. He had filled the hole flush with clay, and then put another misshapen lump on its end that didn’t resemble any of the actual rods. The part in the hole transformed as expected, but the lump remained entirely clay. Bit-by-bit he prodded the lump closer to the shape of the rods, at each step pausing to look at the black splotches inside to the tube, waiting to see when they would begin moving towards it.

In the end the splotches activated before the clay was shaped perfectly. Apparently it just had to be close enough. Not only that, but the “close enough” clay ended up being altered during the transformation into the exact form it was supposed to be. That was how all the little lines ended up being etched into its sides.

So evidently there was a way that the rod was generally “supposed” to be…but now Gavin wanted to see whether there was any leeway allowed in that. He started by making a proper, straight rod, and it grew in just fine. Next he tried to do the same thing, but smoothly curved it to one side as it extended. The new rod grew in, and did so without straightening the piece out. He tried it again, bending it back the other way, and it also worked. So long as he didn’t try to have it zigzag back-and-forth, or make too sharp of a turn, he could fashion a wide array of possible rods.

Next Gavin experimented with the endpoint. After a few experiments he found that he could cap off a new rod with any of the already-existing slot-shapes and it would be accepted. Not only that, but he could also fashion it into entirely new shapes, so long as they were “similar” to the already-existing ones. Though if he tried to mold anything dramatically different, like a sphere shape at the end of the rod, it would be rejected.

Gavin tried growing a rod that was short and then capped off, and then he grew another that went for three times the length before being capped off. Both worked.

Gavin grew two incomplete rods that weren’t capped off at all. Then he put their incomplete ends together with a little clay in between, and inserted the whole contraption into one of his “growing islands.” The clay turned into the same rod-material, and it fused the two parts into one perfect piece without so much as a seam.

So I have to follow the fundamental shapes of the already-existing pieces, Gavin wrote in his notebook, but then I could really steer these into any setup that I want.

He paused to bite at the end of his eraser. What exactly did he want? He could join all of the tubes into one larger piece to see if there were any new properties there. He could try building a disc now instead of more rods. If he could accomplish that then he could make a dozen copies of the same tube, but each with slight variations to see if that influenced their behavior at all. Or maybe–

“So when are you going to tell me what you’re doing with all this stuff?”

Gavin jumped in surprise. He had been so lost in thought that he hadn’t noticed Curtis standing behind him.

“Curtis! You scared me. I–uh–I’m just still playing around with it. I still don’t know what it was meant to be. There’s not much to say, really.”

“Uh-huh,” Curtis raised an eyebrow. “Why are you lying?”

“What?”

“Look, little bro. I included in you that stuff from day one, didn’t I?”

“Well yeah, but…”

When Gavin didn’t continue his excuse Curtis sighed in exasperation.

“You know what, if you don’t want to share, then fine.” He turned to go out the bedroom door.

“No wait,” Gavin said suddenly. “I’ll show you, come here. I just–I guess I just liked having my own little thing for a while. But you’re right, you shared with me first.”

Curtis smiled and sat back down, then patiently waited for Gavin to talk him through it all.

“So…it’s pretty weird actually,” Gavin said. “But if you don’t believe me about any of it I’ll show you and you can see for yourself.” He flipped his notebook back to the first pages and began from the last progress Curtis had seen.

He told him everything. How he figured out how to put the pieces together into islands, about how things floated in the middle of them, about reducing material down to the black splotches, about putting clay into the holes, about making new pieces, and even about all of the questions he had for where to go next with it.

***

 

I mentioned on Monday that with this entry I wanted to bring Gavin’s brother back into the picture. This would allow Gavin to start speaking and expressing his emotions, and cause him to become a character that the reader can settle into the perspective of. We can see the beginnings of that here, although thus far still we aren’t yet in Gavin’s head any more than we’re in Curtis’s.

The fact is this story has resisted getting into a specific perspective, and part of the reason why is because I don’t know where it is going. It is hard to commit to a specific point-of-view, when I don’t know what to point that view at.

Sometimes with my short pieces I start with a clear roadmap from start to finish, but sometimes I like to just explore an idea and see where it takes me. Instructions Not Included followed that latter approach. I knew I wanted to have boys exploring these strange devices, but I didn’t know what it was all leading up to. Sometimes this approach has led to some very fruitful discoveries, sometimes it meanders around and resists proper closure.

This next Monday I’d like to talk about this more exploratory style of writing, its inherent strengths and weaknesses, and how to find a proper ending to it. After that I’ll post the last section of Instructions Not Included, hopefully with that proper ending all figured out!

Giving Out Information

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On Thursday I posted the second part of Instructions Not Included, at the end of which I noted that some readers will see more significance in the discoveries being made by the main protagonist, Gavin, then he will. Gavin is a bright child, but he still has a lot of education and life experience ahead of him, which prevents him from seeing how his inventions fit into the bigger picture. I don’t believe readers will hold his ignorance against him, though, that ignorance is simply the story being true to his character.

If, however, Gavin had been written as a grad student at a University working on a PhD in molecular biology, things would be different. If he had had that background and still wasn’t seeing the deeper significance behind his discoveries, we would feel frustrated at him for not knowing the things that he should already know.  And this, in fact, is the first guiding principle for how how much knowledge a story’s protagonist should have of their own world.

 

Characters Should Know What They Should Know)

Though it sounds obvious, there are many stories that fail to write characters whose knowledge or intelligence is consistent with their background. Consider the common complaint of horror films that the behavior of their victims is stupid beyond plausibility. The average viewer will say “I would know not to split up when a serial killer is on the loose, so why don’t you know not to do that?!”

Now, to be fair, the author of the horror film probably isn’t ignorant of their subjects’ ignorance, they know perfectly well that their behavior is unbelievably stupid. The thing is that the horror story has a unique requirement. Its purpose is to make you, the audience member, face situations that you wouldn’t subject yourself to in real life. It is necessary for you to be dragged into a situation that is uncomfortable so that you will become jumpy.

And one of the easiest ways to accomplish this is just to halve the IQ of every main character. Now you are tethered to a moron that will make choices you would never make, and put you in situations you would never want to be in. It works…but it also leaves the viewer in a frustrating relationship with the film.

Of course characters shouldn’t be too intelligent either. A child can be precocious, but once their wisdom stretches the limits of plausibility they start to be annoying. I admit this is one area I am worried about with Gavin in my story. I believe it is plausible for him to be curious and experimental, but I am anxious as to whether his scientific testing goes a bit too far. In the end I’ve just had to make a judgment call, and it will be up to the individual reader whether I rendered him in an acceptable way or not.

 

Choose an Appropriate Perspective Character)

The obvious takeaway from the previous section should be that you need to choose your story’s perspective with care. And to be clear, your “perspective character” is not necessarily the same as your “main character.”

For example, in To Kill a Mockingbird the main character is “Scout” Finch as a young girl. The perspective character, though, is Scout many years later as a mature woman. You see the story is being told to us as something that happened quite some time ago. This construct skillfully avoids the pitfall of an overly-precocious child, because the social commentary comes from the mature version of Scout, not the childhood one. This is a wise choice, because the story deals with heavy themes, including racism and abuse, which young Scout simply doesn’t comprehend. The end result is we get a voice of wisdom on these matters, but without having our illusion of younger-girl Scout compromised.

Another example of careful selection in the perspective character can be found in Moby Dick. In this tale Captain Ahab is the protagonist, but the story is told through the lens of Ishmael. This setup is well-chosen, because it allows for us to witness Ahab’s insanity from the grounded perspective of a rational observer. In fact this approach adds an element of mystery because the exact depths of that insanity are only made known to us as they become apparent to Ishmael.

Once a perspective character has been chosen, then the author needs to be respect the union that has been made between that character and the audience. The audience expects to be this person in this world, and they won’t take kindly if that relationship is cheated.

 

Don’t Show Things to the Perspective Character and Not the Audience)

So what do I mean by cheating the relationship between the perspective character and audience? Once the reader has identified which character facilitates their view into the story they expect to be privy to everything that that character is. Furthermore, they expect to be kept ignorant of everything that that character is, too.

Let’s look at an example of this in the Sherlock Holmes. In these Doyle has chosen as his perspective character John Watson. Sherlock Holmes, of course, is the star, but Watson is the one telling us things as he sees them. And Watson is extremely serviceable in this function. He is an intelligent man, but he is not the demigod of intuition than Holmes is. Watson observes only as much as the average audience members would observe if we were in these situations, and that allows us to be delightfully outsmarted by Holmes.

Take for example the often-repeated sequence where the great detective will reveal astounding things about a complete stranger, all deduced from the vaguest of clues. The audience is never frustrated with Watson for having overlooked those same clues, because they wouldn’t have noticed them either.

Sadly, though, this careful selection of the perspective character has somehow been lost on most film and television adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. In these the perspective has always been changed to be Holmes’s. In these shows and movies we hear Holmes thoughts, we zoom in on the object that he’s looking at, we see his problem-solving process firsthand. We don’t ever have these same insights for Watson, he is now just an unnecessary side-character.

This could still work out, but then the show/movie reach a climax with an ultimate revelation, one where Holmes pins the big badguy down by an amazing show of insightful perspective… And most often he does it by pointing to evidence that we never saw. Suddenly we feel cheated. Holmes revealing that he secured a clue while the camera was turned the other way is not impressive, it is insulting.

When we share the detective’s perspective, then we expect to be able to solve the case ourselves if we are intelligent enough to manage it. If they solve it and we do not, it needs to be because they were smarter than us, not because they had secret information. Again, it’s fine for them to have secret information if our perspective character was Watson, but not if it was Holmes.

 

Don’t Have a Character Perspective)

Of course another solution that some stories can employ is to just not give us a perspective character. Instead of seeing the tale unfold through one of its actor’s eyes we instead have the events recited to us by some omniscient narrator/author. In this setup the reader’s perspective is their very own selves. And here an interesting little development occurs.

From this setup it doesn’t matter so much what knowledge you do or don’t give to the reader, they will accept it. You can tell the story with the wisdom of a sage, or the petulance of a child. You can selectively withhold information, you can even tell the audience member that you are withholding information. You  can tell them one thing, and later tell them that you lied and really it was something else.

And all of this is okay.

Consider the film The Usual Suspects. This film is shown to us entirely in flashback, the events explained by a convict taken in for questioning. He is our narrator, and what he tells to us and the police is a complete lie. At the very end his deceit is revealed, but the audience feels satisfied rather than cheated. Why? Because we weren’t actually there when these supposed events were happening, we only ever heard about them secondhand. The film has not broken the relationship it established with us from the beginning.

There is clearly a lot of power possible in a story that has no character perspective, though the trade-off is that it can be harder for the audience to immerse themselves in the tale. An author will have to weigh these different strengths, and choose what is best for their own situation.

 

On Thursday I will be posting the third section of Instructions Not Included. The perspective in that tale has been a little mixed, the voice telling the story seems to be a dispassionate narrator, but the events are limited to only what Gavin sees. The audience is absorbing the same facts that he is and there is a small bit of Gavin’s mental process on display, but virtually nothing of his emotional state.

I have been alright with this so far, because this whole segment has been meant as the introductory chapter to a theoretical larger work. If this were ever part of a bigger story this would just be the introduction where the ground rules are established, and then the real character-driven plot would follow immediately afterward.

I’m going to start signaling that transition by reintroducing Gavin’s brother with this next section. His presence will require us to settle more firmly into Gavin’s perspective, just in time for the dramatic shift at the end of this sequence.

Instructions Not Included: Part Two

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Part One

Gavin had a hard time paying attention in school the next day. He had wanted to check his fly trap first thing in the morning, but knew it would have been miserable to start his experiments and then leave them unfinished.

He only half listened to the teachers in class. In his notebook he kept scrawling different ideas of things to try with a fly, complete with a flowchart of what test should follow which results. At the very top he had “Put fly in tube, see if it just dies right away.” If it did that was the end of the flowchart, so he hoped to at least get further than that. Next was to observe if it tried to fly, and if so whether its wings were able to beat. If so, were they able to move it. Even a little bit? If he wedged a stick inside of the tube and the floating fly came near would it grab the stick and move along it? What if he blew a fan through the tube? Would it be able to push the things? Or what if–

“Gavin, are you paying attention?”

“Yes.” Very close attention…just to other things.

That afternoon Gavin dashed through his front door, the mason jar already clutched in his hand. He bounded up the steps to his room, turning sideways to avoid knocking over his mother. “Hi! Back from school. It was fine, nothing to say about it. I’ll be in my room, okay?”

He bolted into his room and took his seat at the desk. Taking a few calming breaths he carefully removed the saran wrap from the jar and placed one of the strange tubes over its opening. There were three flies buzzing above the sugar-water at the bottom of the jar, and Gavin watched breathlessly as one of them buzzed closer and closer to the tube. It decided to stop to rest right at the lip of the jar. Gavin frowned and tapped twice on the glass. The fly darted into the tube…and froze.

Gavin put the saran wrap back over the jar and picked up the tube, peering through its center. As soon as the fly had crossed the threshold into its domain it had gone completely lifeless, not so much as beating a wing as it floated through empty space. Curiously, though, it had not curled its legs to its body. It really was frozen as if in a singular moment of time, its legs still extended and wings still raised. Was it dead then? Or just frozen?

Gavin reached in, curled his fingers around the fly, then drew his hand back out. Immediately he felt the creature buzzing against his palm. He extended his hand back in, the buzzing still continued, but once he opened his fingers the fly snapped back to its frozen state and floated listlessly.

“Well that’s interesting,” he muttered, pulling over his notebook and jotting down the results of the test.

So the fly couldn’t move. Could it think? Was it aware that it was motionless and confused about that? Or was it unconscious while in the void? He couldn’t think of a good way to test that.

So instead Gavin went through a few more experiments. It turned out that wedging a stick between the walls of the tube did not give the fly a way to escape floating. In fact, it couldn’t because the fly never touched it. The path it floated along would always push away from the stick whenever it got too close, just like how it did when avoiding the walls. Apparently the stick, being in direct contact with the wall, was now an extension of the wall. Gavin hadn’t expected that, given it was comprised of an entirely different material.

That suggested another experiment to Gavin. He reached in, cupped his hand around the fly, drew it out and listened for its buzzing, then put his hand back in the tube and opened it. But this time, as he did so, he pressed the fly against the wall of the tube, rather than dropping it into open space. This time the fly did not freeze. It crawled across the surface, moving at a constant high speed, and making sudden direction changes as if drawing out a pattern. It looked nothing like how Gavin had ever seen a fly move. Also it never flew. It never did anything to risk losing constant contact with the surface, even when Gavin poked at it with the end of his pencil.

Gavin introduced the other flies one at a time to the tube, all with the same results. If released into the air they became immobile and floated, if pressed against the tube wall they danced out strange patterns on its surface.

Next came water. Gavin angled the tube downwards and slowly tipped the mason jar  until the water ran out of it. When only the first part of the water stream entered the tube it continued to fall as normal, but once the last drop was contained within the tube it lost its connection to the outside world and suddenly froze. It behaved like videos Gavin had seen of astronauts playing with liquids in a Zero-G environment. The water stream didn’t break apart, it just shimmered as one, long, snaking body in the middle of the tube. As with everything else, it began zigzagging from wall to wall, never touching them, never slowing in its ordered dance. As expected it never touched the stick or the flies as well. It did not act entirely as a single body, though. For example when it neared the stick it would sometimes split into two streams that would go around it. Sometimes those streams would rejoin, other times they would break off into their own entities. Once the two streams were completely separated they would never join again, they would each follow different patterns that seemed forever destined to to never intersect again.

“But how long could you really go without touching?” Gavin wondered aloud. He picked up the tube and walked with it to the bathroom. What if he tried to put more water into the tube than it could keep separated?

He turned the sink on and filled up a cup with water, then poured it into the tube. The stream floated around inside, continuing to split when it approached the stick head-on, continuing to avoid any contact other water streams. He filled up the cup and poured it in again. And again.

He couldn’t want to hold the tube directly under the faucet, because then it would be an unbroken stream of water that extended out of the tube’s confines. It was a very strange feeling, pouring cup after cup into the tube and not a single drop spilling out from the bottom. A faint inkling occurred to him that the physical properties of this tube went against everything he’d learned in school, and would therefore be of significance to other people…but at least for now he wanted to keep it only to himself.

As Gavin continued entering cupfuls of water the threads of water begin to divide and shrink to such a degree that they looked like tendrils of glass, each as thin as a spider’s thread. They criss-crossed and filled the space so completely that they almost appeared to be one volume. Yet still he could see the tiny glints that betrayed their separate edges, and knew that the threads still refused to touch.

Finally he reached the moment he’d waited for. As he poured in one more cup the water began to spill over and flow down the edges of the tube. The tube could not accept anymore volume without merging its streams of water, and so it rejected any further material.

Well, that was that then. Now Gavin wanted to get the water out and verify that not even a drop of it all had touched the flies or stick either. As he couldn’t pour the water out he would just have to scoop it the same way he had put it in. He grabbed the cup and began the long process. A vague thought occurred to him that the flies had probably died even if the water hadn’t touched them. He doubted the gaps between the water streams would have been able to hold enough oxygen to sustain them.

The thought then occurred to him that the flies had probably had just as little control on the edges of the tube as they had floating in the air. Their movement had been extremely similar to the floating movement, just projected onto the surface. It was the same pattern! He supposed that meant if he covered the walls with flies they would dance around and never touch? If he put a spider in with them would it just ignore all of the free food? He could–

Gavin had reduced the amount of water so that he had a clear view inside of the tube again. He had been waiting to see the flies, but now he realized they weren’t in there anymore! Neither was the stick. There were instead four black marks smeared across the inside of the tube in their place. Had they been crushed by all the water? But why?

Gavin turned the tube over in his hands, angling it so that the bathroom light shone more clearly on one of those dark smudges. No…it wasn’t just squashed fly guts there. It was something pure and shiny black, like tar. Although as he looked closer he saw it actually wasn’t a single goo, it was a thousand tiny strings, like millimeter-long strands of hair. And they were mobile, doing a sort of a waving gesture where they folded at their midpoint and then stood erect again.

Three flies, a stick, and a liter of water had gone in…these things were what came back out. The tube must have broken everything else down to create this. But what exactly were they? Tiny little strings of…organic sludge?

Gavin walked back to his bedroom and put the tube back on his desk. Then he strode back out with a purpose. The rest of the afternoon Gavin collected anything small and interesting he could find around the house and the alley outside, then he brought them back to his room. A few ice cubes, some small rocks, a piece of brick, ants and beetles, apple juice, a jug of water, rubbing alcohol, small pieces of glass, plastic, an old rag, a cigarette butt, a ping pong ball, bread, a strip of wood, some small weeds, a few metal screws, and a handful of dirt. He lined all the items up on his desk, right in front of his “islands.”

He pulled out his notebook and wrote down Tube #1. This was the one he had already been experimenting with. He wanted to continue to work with this one, following the same sort of structure it had already been on. Water and living tissue. He placed the beetles against the inner surface of the tube and released them to perform their erratic dances. The ants he dropped in the middle to float around. He added the weeds to this one as well, and finally filled it up with water. Done.

Tube #2. For this one he wanted to experiment with the natural materials. He put the ice in it, the small rocks, the strip of wood, and the dirt. Finally he added in the apple juice to fill up the rest of the space.

Tube #3. Here he would try the more synthetic things. The brick piece, the glass, a corner of the rag, the cigarette butt, the ping pong ball, the bread, and the metal screws. Then he poured in the alcohol. He had selected this particular tube because it was smaller, small enough that he didn’t need a whole liter of the alcohol to fill it up.

Of course some of the things had been too dense for the tubes to handle. The metal screws, the piece of brick, the rocks, and the glass. They had each just fallen to the bottom and stayed there. When he shook the tubes those pieces slid around and even fell out of the tube if tipped too far. Curiously, they were completely absent any residue of alcohol or water or anything else when they emerged. Still, the stick wedged into the tube yesterday had been similarly dense and it had decomposed, so perhaps that didn’t matter.

In any case, now there was nothing to do but call it a night and wait for tomorrow. It would be hard to be patient, but at least tomorrow was the weekend.

 

Monday I wrote about how I chose in this story to emulate some of the patterns in Shane Carruth’s stories. Most specifically I made use of a person applying scientific methodology to understanding something fantastic. Gavin is obviously an intelligent boy, but his lack of experience prevents him from fully realizing just how significant some of his simple discoveries are, such as the tube’s ability to completely untether its contents from gravity.

Sometimes when reading a story it can be aggravating for the audience to be stuck with a main character that understands less than the reader. Other times the main character will know more than the audience, and that can be frustrating as well. Other times, though, differences in understanding between characters and readers can be immensely satisfying. On Thursday I’d like to delve deeper into how an author disperses knowledge in unequal measures, and how it can be done either poorly or well. I’ll see you then!