Owen's Writing Week 7

Well, I’ve exhausted my list of ‘unpublishable fiction pieces’ and, as I move forward, I find that I want to further clarify what I mean by ‘unpublishable’. I mentioned last week, with Flat Planet, that some of my decision is based on how much time I’m willing to spend on a given piece. If I find my time would better be spent on a different piece, then that story gets put aside. Usually that means any future edit will substantially change aspects of the story (for instance, The Six and Polyester Tears) to the extent that I would be better off starting over, other times it means that I either don’t have the ability or life experiences required to fully realize the story’s potential (Flat Planet, Special Education), the ‘message’ that I originally wanted to convey is no longer something I want to write about (A Regression of Thought), or I’ve found an easier and/or more appropriate way to pursue the subject (Claustrophobic Spelunker).

In the end it’s all fluid. While I have reasons for calling something ‘unpublishable’ I don’t really have any reason to call something ‘publishable’ besides stating: “this is something I am willing to spend time on right now or in the near future.” What this basically means is that I could be writing and editing a story that is weaker than any or all of the ones already posted, but that I am currently enjoying it and so I feel it is worth my time.

So the next logical step is to post an example of something that I consider publishable, but first the ubiquitous legalize:

All works in this blog are property of me, Owen Newberry. Some rights reserved. These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Don't steal it or sell it. If you want to publish it let me know.

With that out of the way I can now move onto introducing this week’s piece. Totally Useless Guy started at a decently stressful point in my day-to-day college life at Knox. Written at around the same time as Flat Planet it was intended just to be funny. I didn’t really care if others understood its humor as it was mainly written for me (I really needed a laugh…and a second story for the Workshop).

I started off with two different points in my real life: an audio story I had overheard a friend listening to and an improvisation game I participated in while I was a Boy Scout. In both cases super heroes, ineptitude, and humor were involved. The name “Totally Useless Guy” came from the improve game specifically. We were doing the Unlikely Superheroes scenario commonly used on Whose Line is it Anyway? and that’s the title I was given. To demonstrate my uselessness I ran around yelling ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?!’ as loud as I could, eventually tackling the ‘main’ participant and slamming him into the ground repeatedly much to the amusement of the audience.

In the end the story totaled five pages, its humor was likened to Woody Allen’s movies (which was a pleasant surprise), and everyone was in agreement that it felt rushed (which it was). So I began my edits; the humor died off a bit, the story expanded, and I paved my way towards the first piece I would consider publishable (a year after I started writing ‘officially’).

I don’t plan on posting the entirety of any of my publishable pieces as it would defeat the purpose a little, but I think the first section of Totally Useless Guy will begin to demonstrate the basics of the piece.