Some Thoughts On Where A Story Came From
When I sat down to write the story the first time, it was pure Borscht Belt. Tip your waiters, the 9 o'clock show is completely different form the 5:30 show, and oy, the moaning and the geshrying and the random Yiddische profanity. There was a lot less buckling of swashes and a lot more pilpul, and maybe a dybbuk who wouldn't let the fact that he was dead keep him from being a pain in the ass. There was, in short, shtick, and the entire thing sounded like it had been written by Jackie Mason's old anteater character from the Pink Panther cartoons.
It was, in a word, terrible, a one-joke bit that borrowed its central conceit from Joseph Heller's God Knows . And I threw it out, as any right-thinking author would, and spent a few days panicking about the upcoming deadline and the promised "Magical Pirate Rabbi" story, and my inability to deliver same.
I ended up figuring it out in a coffee shop, of all places. This is possibly noteworthy because A)I hate coffee B)I hate writing in coffee shops because there are too many other people there, there's music I don't like, and the tables are never the right height for my particular flavor of hunched-over compositional frenzy and C)I hate coffee. But there I was, at the Caribou in Brier Creek (largely so I could pillage their free wifi and assuage my guilt for doing same with an oddly composited hot chocolate), and I just sat down and started writing.
Correction: I sat down and started tapping my finger against the tabletop as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do. And I realized, after a couple of what must have been intensely annoying minutes for anyone seated near me, that I wasn't really tapping, I was drumming out a rhythm, and that the rhythm felt like the sort of thing you got in movies where a drummer was coaxing rowers to work in unison, and that the language of the story really ought to be driven by that same rhythm, and...
...and I wrote the first line.
Still hate coffee, mind you. But I like that coffee shop a lot better now.
It was, in a word, terrible, a one-joke bit that borrowed its central conceit from Joseph Heller's God Knows . And I threw it out, as any right-thinking author would, and spent a few days panicking about the upcoming deadline and the promised "Magical Pirate Rabbi" story, and my inability to deliver same.
I ended up figuring it out in a coffee shop, of all places. This is possibly noteworthy because A)I hate coffee B)I hate writing in coffee shops because there are too many other people there, there's music I don't like, and the tables are never the right height for my particular flavor of hunched-over compositional frenzy and C)I hate coffee. But there I was, at the Caribou in Brier Creek (largely so I could pillage their free wifi and assuage my guilt for doing same with an oddly composited hot chocolate), and I just sat down and started writing.
Correction: I sat down and started tapping my finger against the tabletop as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do. And I realized, after a couple of what must have been intensely annoying minutes for anyone seated near me, that I wasn't really tapping, I was drumming out a rhythm, and that the rhythm felt like the sort of thing you got in movies where a drummer was coaxing rowers to work in unison, and that the language of the story really ought to be driven by that same rhythm, and...
...and I wrote the first line.
Still hate coffee, mind you. But I like that coffee shop a lot better now.
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