Thursday, October 12, 2006

Stories - Dolton

Brian Dolton

The Box Of Beautiful Things:

1 - The Title

Titles come from all kinds of places. There's a Scottish singer-songwriter called Jackie Leven who has some really great song titles (and some really great songs, though the two don't always match up). On one of his albums is a song called "Burning The Box Of Beautiful Things", which I just thought was a great image. So I decided to write a story about the box. I just didn't quite know what the story was...

2 - The Story

On-line, I hang at a writing group called Liberty Hall, run by the wonderful Mike Munsil. There are weekly writing challenges; you get ninety minutes to write a story, kicked off by a trigger, which may be a word, a quote, a song lyric, a picture... anything. It's a great way to get butt in chair and actually produce stories. Back last year, the trigger was a picture of a doll, with a porcelain mask and a vivid purple robe. I looked at the trigger and, as I usually do, I just started writing; and what I started writing began "There was only beauty in the great box.." Under 90 minutes later, I had the story, and I sat back, and for once (and this is a very rare thing for me) I said to myself "I've just written something bloody good". Critiques by other members of the site helped me hone it down a little, but it really didn't get changed much. Mostly, it's there, just the way it was in that 90-minute period of intense inspiration.

3 - The Character

Heh. That's another story. Indeed, that's a lot of other stories. I'm really hopeful that everyone's going to be seeing a lot more of Yi Qin.

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There you go.

Brian

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That Liberty Hall - it does pop up in the most unexpected places. It's great to hear, though, how LH has enabled writers to produce good stories. I've got one from an LH flash challenge, as well, I'm trying to polish (in what little time I have free right now). You give me hope, Brian, and for that I say thankya.

Anonymous said...

Jim - yeah, that's me, provider of hope to the world. If I can get published, anyone can *lol*

Aliette - thanks for the plug. And it's up now.