the sky’s the limit

[Adapted from Christopher Noel’s exercise in What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said:

At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. On night a friend of mine lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. … When I read the first line, I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.

We all have unconscious rules in our head of what “good writing” should be. When we see an author break those rules and create an electrifying narrative from that rule-breaking, it can be so inspiring!

To expand your own writing, try embracing a greater range of possibilities in your stories. Acknowledge that even the most apparently silly ideas can turn out to be, in execution, a work of genius.

Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, about a man who turns into a cockroach, has now become a classic, as has Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”

What strange or outlandish idea do you have that could become an amazing story?

Writing exercise:

• Write a first sentence to a story that contains a disruptor: something strange or surprising that raises a lot of questions for the reader about what will come next.

  • For example:

    • “I was lying on the floor watching TV and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster’s jaw collapsed.”

      • from F. Paul Wilson’s “Soft”

    • “It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered.”

      • from Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic”

    • “‘Don’t look now,’ John said to his wife, ‘but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.’”

      • from Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now”

Now, continue writing your story, allowing it to go in strange and unanticipated directions, not worrying whether it fits into the model of a traditional story.