#14 The Author Train Chugs On!

Today’s show presents a mix of new story ideas based on Exquisite Corpses, suggested by listeners; storytelling from an evolutionary psychology perspective; a new release announcement; more Exquisite Corpse game play; and a Halloween Challenge for you!

Halloween Challenge: Can you write a 400-2K word story based on one of these, or on an adjective-noun combo in any one of them (e.g. “humungous vampire”)?:

1. The disgruntled ghost hunter eloped with the anthropomorphic mushroom.
2. The brutal woodchuck picked a poisonous plant for the watery burgomaster (European mayor).
3. The deceased griffin dug deep into the sackcloth pockets of the great vicar.
4. The aggressive centaur peered through binoculars at the gullible acrobat.
5. The humungous vampire angrily washed the engorged cheese.

Let the challenge begin! 

​SHOW TRANSCRIPTION (does not include Exquisite Corpse game play at the end):

Right, I’m going to jump straight in to some interpretations of this Exquisite Corpse which came up on episode 12:

"The clownish train trudged up the mountain pass with the false author".

Shaq Alexander, who I met on Twitter, suggested:

“An author goes on a train that travels through different dimensions and environments to find inspiration and while searching (for) the origins of the train builds a sense of worth.”

Such a fascinating idea! There’s so much you could do with this. The more I think about it, the more this feels like the perfect metaphor for my journey through Brainstoryum; or, in fact, anyone’s journey as a storyteller. Writing is like a weird train you get onto. You don’t really know where it’s going, or you might have an inkling, but you haven’t seen it yet. And this train, as Shaq suggests, travels through a whole range of different dimensions and environments, which are really, like the places you’ll find in your imagination when you tap into it. You might find yourself in the forests of high fantasy, the mountains of the unknown, rivers of ideas passing through. Who knows what characters you might meet along the way – and on the train as well. Is the train full of other authors, or just people travelling into their imagination? Could be other types of artists, I suppose.

Writing is an exploration of places that don’t exist and yet become real in your mind as you step into them. Exactly like a journey – many journeys. And searching for the origins of the train? This bit feels especially like Brainstoryum, for me. I’m trying to get closer to the enigma of inspiration through this podcast, sometimes looking to my own experiences as a writer, other times dipping into surrealism and breaking down the psychology of storytelling  to try and find some answers, as well as asking other writers how they are inspired. It is a journey! Perhaps even a ticket on a “clownish train” chugging up the mountain pass.

There’s a goblin a Twitter. A Poet Goblin regularly offers to write poems off the cuff for anyone who’ll ask, about pretty much anything you like! So, naturally, I had to ask, could they try and write a poem based on this same Exquisite Corpse. Actually, I think I offered two different Exquisite Corpses so they had a choice, and offered some more suggestions in case it was going to be too much of an ask - because it’s one thing brainstorming a story idea from one of these sentence, but writing a poem? That’s like a whole other level. Anyway, they also went for "The clownish train trudged up the mountain pass with the false author". They homed in on the false author part, and here it is:

Garish the colors of the engine,
Foolish people can't imagine.
I am not who I say I am
Not the silent little lamb
Who writes silly little tales
Atop these steep iron rails
I shall rob these blinded fools
With my wit and charm as tools.
 
(Copyright @ThePoetGoblin)

Love it! And The Poet Goblin has really developed that idea of a “false” author – someone who’s up to no good, but using their writing skills to trick people, rob people, with their “wit and charm as tools”. Oh, I think I’ve missed my vocation. Could I use my imagination and writing skills to trick people and steal from them? Maybe not, but that would be a great story to write, wouldn’t it? Evil authors on a train….
 
I also had a very different interpretation of what I thought was one of the hardest Exquisite Corpses I’ve ever come across:
 
“The loving horizon passed through the TSA checkpoint with the galloping pickle.”
 
This one also came up in episode 12 and for those who are unfamiliar with TSA (cos I had to look it up), it means transportation security administration – just the checkpoint in an airport. So we are talking about a loving horizon going through an airport checkpoint with a galloping pickle. (Of course we are.) I think on the show I managed to come up with something about the light shining through the glass – the last light of the day – as someone, inexplicably dressed as a pickle, was running away from a scary situation to get onto a plane, and get away. And leading up to that point, when they finally reach the airport, I imagined it was like one of those films when someone’s being chased in the city, and they come across a parade where they can hide. This just happened to be a vegetable parade! A harvest celebration. And they duck in one side, hiding behind a float in the shape of a giant potato and come out the other side dressed as a pickle! The perfect disguise. There’s now a naked person in the parade, wondering what happened! And of course, when our protagonist gets to the airport, dressed as a pickle, the security guards working in the TSA checkpoint wouldn’t be suspicious at all of this!
 
But: get this. Frasier Armitage, my author friend, found another way to interpret the Exquisite Corpse, in fact he made it look easy!
 
He said (and I quote):
“This one was hilarious. After you explained it, I got to thinking, and I wondered whether the “loving horizon” and the “galloping pickle” could be names of paintings? Perhaps someone at an auction house or gallery has been smuggling one painting underneath another as they ship them to buyers? The story could be that the person is getting fired, and this is their last opportunity to pull off this type of heist, and so they go for broke, and try to smuggle “the loving horizon” which is a super famous painting by hiding it under the galloping pickle — a painting that people consider worthless. The person could be fleeing the country, and the whole story could hinge on whether they make it to freedom with this fortune. The crucial moment would be when the paintings pass through the checkpoint.”
 
Oh my goodness, Frasier, you have found the key! And I realise – as I keep realising, it seems – that I have this habit of assuming that at least one of the nouns in any Exquisite Corpse must be personified. Turned into a character, a sentient being. That if you come across a “loving horizon”, okay, that’s got to be something else, but then I automatically think, right, let’s try and make a character out of the second noun, which is… oh dear… a galloping pickle! But of course, you can decide that both nouns are just “things”, objects, and that the characters have not been accounted for; that they exist outside of the sentence. And paintings – that’s genius! I asked Frasier how he came up with this idea and he said:
 
“I got to thinking about why the action of going through customs security at an airport might cause conflict, and that’s when I got the smuggling idea — and the rest just slotted into place. But that’s often how these things go. When I hear you interpreting the results, it’s often one idea that unlocks the whole thing. Isn’t it strange how the brain just needs one particular detail and then all the links just mesh.”
 
Very true! I think there’s a lot to be said about the connections our brains seem to "want" to make, and that certainly works in our favour when it comes to making up or developing stories; once we have a little bit of knowledge and guidance as to what makes a story work. As you said, Frasier: conflict. Look for the conflict and the rest may follow.

There’s a little piece of speculative psychology in this. I think, at base, humans are puzzle-solvers. We want to understand the world; probably even need to understand a certain amount about the world to feel safe in it, with the level of consciousness that we have compared to other animals. All evolution comes from striving, and limitations against that striving, that cause us to have to adapt. Every creature on Earth is really just trying to survive and thrive.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve become almost too intelligent for plain old survival; we’ve become a sort of self-made paradox. We’ve gone beyond adaptation by creating our own environments to suit our needs, rather than adapting to what’s already there in nature. (Maybe that’s why it can be difficult to maintain that awareness, that we are a part of nature, because we seem to control so much of our physical lives, like our homes, our streets and so on.) But this control is an illusion, at least in part. In fact, the one thing we’re most frightened of as a species is the unknown. You might even say that our development of complex languages is the ultimate attempt to defend ourselves against the unknown: if we label everything, give everything names, definitions, explanations through science, then we are better at understanding the things that might otherwise frighten us if their workings were still mysterious. We feel more in control; but we don’t control the world, any more than we can catch a lightning bolt. We’ve just come to understand the lightning bolt so it doesn’t scare us silly when it strikes, and built homes and offices that protect us the weather.

Where am I going with this? Well, I think it works in our favour, as writers, and imaginists, that we’re hard-wired to solve problems and to try and understand things, without even necessarily intending to, consciously. We look for patterns and meaning. We want patterns and meaning in everything. The idea that everything is chaotic is frightening and just not right, to us. So, on a much smaller and less frightening scale, when presented with a seemingly impossible puzzle like an Exquisite Corpse – which hasn’t even been designed as puzzle, it doesn’t have a right answer like a crossword that’s been deliberately put together – no, there is no golden answer, it’s all random. And yet our minds, so set on finding connections between things, on imposing meaning upon things and finding patterns – we find a way to make sense of the nonsense.

A deeper question would be: are we imposing artificial meanings – or are we finding them? Is all of life imbued with meaning, inherently, or are we just making it all up?

There you go. Is that deep enough for you? Storytelling from an evolutionary psychology perspective!

Do we have an inbuilt natural ability to create stories? To some extent, you could argue that, but in my opinion, the best approach to being a storyteller is to embrace learning. I am always learning, and re-learning, it seems, refreshing what I’ve previously learned, because it’s all about practice, and putting things into practice, these little nuggets of information about process and techniques; practice is what helps you take these things on board so they begin to become intuitive to you as you write. So intuitive, that you might go and forget them consciously as you try brainstorming a story. So, yes, we all know already that a story hinges on conflict, yet it’s still so fresh to hear Frasier’s technique of actually trying to look for the cause of conflict first, or above all else, when we tackle an Exquisite Corpse – it’s a great idea. Conflict is ultimately what we need to get to when we’re writing a story, so why not make this the very first thing we look for?
 
Now, before we move on to word games and new story ideas, I wanted to tell you a bit about the next Brainstoryum show, due on 2nd October 2022 and… I have a new release coming up! Not yet another book in The Book of Exquisite Corpse, but an e-book anthology of winter-themed stories, that I was honoured to be invited to contribute to. It’s called Midwinter Magic and Mayhem edited by Frances Evelyn, and it’s a collection of short stories by a range of different fantasy authors. It is in fact the first book-length anthology where I’ve had an Exquisite Corpse story published, rather than a normal story (well, it would never be “normal” as such, but dreampunk, or just other fantasy). The e-book is due for general release on 15th October 2022, but subscribers to my Deeply Weird newsletter will get a FREE copy pre-publication on 8th October 2022! (Please note this offer is now closed, but the book is available to buy at this link.)

So if you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletters, which are free by the way, hurry on over to annatizard.com and click one of the subscribe buttons. After that, a “confirm” button will be emailed to you, and usually have to go into your spam email to find this – but once you’ve hit “confirm”, you’ll automatically be sent to a secret page when you can download the usual freebies I give away to subscribers, which are The Empty Danger (vol 1 in the book of Exquisite Corpse) and Barely Composed which is an exclusive short story about a classical composer who meets the demon of death metal. And being subscribed means you will also be in line to receive an email on 8th October with a private link to your free e-book of this new anthology, Midwinter Magic and Mayhem. So make sure you subscribe and confirm in time for this, and don’t miss out!

In the next Brainstoryum show, a week before that private subscriber-only release, I’ll be talking about the stories that are in the anthology, what to expect, and also sharing what the other authors have said about inspiration, where they get it from, and any other tricks and quirks of their writing processes – as well as some anecdotal oddities of my own. A juicy show to come on the 2nd of October – but make sure you subscribe in the meantime!

Now: for today, I think you’ll agree it is time to reach for the Socks of Destiny. 

Exquisite Corpse game play is not transposable... Please listen the last section of the show to enter a realm of deep silliness and inspiration!