No One In Our Sample Of 668,000 Wordles Faced This Scenario
Flexible thinking: is it better than going with the crowd for creativity - and also the Devil is always around
I just wrote 1,500 words detailing my creative process and comparing it to how I solve Wordles.
Bruce poked his head in to let me know that there is a giant desalinization plant being built to provide water to Arizona.
I looked up, my pinky clicked —
Looky looky, a link that you copied.
And it is all gone.
So here is what I wrote — again. Different this time.
I don’t face the same scenarios as everyone else (granted, maybe every single player sees this message) because I don’t do Wordle the same way twice.
Every day is different. This morning (I’m delaying this by one day because it does show the Wordle answer) I didn’t have much of a feeling about what the word would be. Other days, I do. I’ve guessed the Wordle on the first try ten times out of 200 tries.
Some people say that there’s no editorial slant to Wordle. I disagree: it’s the New York Times and several times the word has connected to a holiday, time of year, or major world event. Coincidence? Perhaps.
So how does the Wordle guessing game connect to writing fiction?
Playing Wordle and playing fiction the way I do, the instinct process is similar.
Spark of an Idea: Concept and Title
Much like the times when I have a real instinct or spark about the Wordle word, stories come from sudden inspiration —
Yesterday Bruce and I were talking about the cheerful topic of Hell and damnation. “It seems like Hell must be bursting at the seams,” I said.
“What if there’s no more room?” Bruce said.
“Then there’ll be homeless in Hell,” I replied.
Homeless in Hell — that’s a great title!
The irony made us both laugh — here in the human world, innocent people who’ve done nothing wrong are homeless.
The Homeless Hell Motel is the setting for this story: a roach-infested “No Tell Motel” like the one that real-world homeless families are forced to live in.
Who is sent there? I immediately sensed that the residents will be inspired by real-world villains, each of whom would have various tactics to try on a long-suffering motel manager. I also had an insight into their motivations. Whereas in “Shakespeare in Hell,” I wrote about famous writers, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and a famous “yes man,” Bob Haldeman, who all wanted to escape damnation for paradise, this story is going to focus on people who most of us agree: deserve to be in Hell.
And their motivation isn’t to get to Heaven. It’s to get out of the Homeless Hell Motel and into the real Hell where they already have all the skills and qualifications to advance through demonic ranks. Maybe even, in some of their minds, they believe they can unseat Satan himself. Or at the least, Beelzebub.
I sort of think that the manager will be an ordinary person who has made one bad mistake to earn his or her placement at the facility and awful job.
But I don’t have that character yet.
Without the Main Character: No Story
The viewpoint character is like a key letter for solving Wordle. Without this character, there is no story.
Sometimes characters come by instinct. Now that I base most characters on people I know in real life, it makes it a bit easier.
I do know a few people who might qualify to be good or at least interesting Homeless Hell Motel managers.
The events of a story are what happens to the viewpoint character or characters because of who they are and their circumstances (context — time and place).
There was a lot of humor in “Shakespeare in Hell,” a novella I previously published which dealt with the redemptive power of dreams and a child’s innocent heart — even after a lifetime of sin. The “B” plot was Emilia, who wanted badly to be a famous writer like her lover Will. She ended up with Beelzebub, who was and remains a real bastard.
But in any story involving immortal souls, there’s a serious side.
Even Fantastic Fiction Is About the Real World
One of the greatest shames about the publishing environment is the lack of diversity of viewpoint. We read x-number of stories that reflect various worldviews, but so many of them are narrow.
This a.m. I saw the NYT books recommended for the summer and look at what’s coming up — I can’t wait!
I don’t know how far I want to go with the seriousness of this story, but in terms of Hell Hierarchy, as I noted before, I’d written about creative people and ordinary people being trapped in Hell. No characters in “Shakespeare in Hell” were worse than the demon Beelzebub.
Here? This motel is going to be filled with Pharma kingpins, junk food purveyors, a politician or two, and various other billionaires. Maybe even a vegan hedge fund manager.
And maybe the antagonist is going to be a TV preacher or reality star.
I don’t know for sure but these degrees of badness will impact the challenges that the relatively normal “I made just one mistake” main character will face.
Not coincidentally, last night I watched the concluding episodes of the Amazon Prime documentary, Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.
The type of people featured in this show are those that Dante assigned to the 8th Circle of Hell. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar — the world-famous parents of 19 children — are “false prophets.” So false that the oldest Duggar son, Josh, is currently serving a 12-year sentence for child pornography, following years of molesting others, including his own sisters, with no prior penalty of any kind.
As the show neared its conclusion, I said to Bruce, “Cathy [my best friend] would always say that Satan was real as in a physical presence.” It was hard to imagine any more Satanic presence than the former leader of the Duggars’ fundamentalist religious organization, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a man named Bill Gothard.
Gothard, a serial pedophile focused on girls, invented a concept called the “Umbrella Principle.”
This principle has led the hundreds of thousands of women and children in IBLP families to submit to beatings, sexual abuse, and financial and personal exploitation … because the umbrella indicates that anything the pastor or father says is the “Word of God.”
“This has to be the coldest evil I’ve ever seen,” I said to Bruce. These evil men are literally telling little children that their word is the same as God’s and their desires are what God wants and that if the innocent child speaks up or tries to rebel in any way …
they’re the ones who are damned.
So, the least I can do for the survivors of the Duggar and IBLP abuse is: put those false prophets in their proper circle of Hell.
That is motivation: the final ingredient for creating a satisfactory story. At least for me.