Making Sense With What You Got
Last Tuesday I asked readers to suggest 10 ideas to incorporate into a single story for Tuesday, which happens to be Story Day on a friend's website. I'm always ready to steal a good idea when I see one (credit due, of course), and I thought it would be an interesting design challenge.
Here's what 9 individuals contributed as elements to be incorporated into the story (read the original comments for the full treatments):
- A bee facing management challenges.
- Bee dancing and finding new pollen sources in the face of two suns, which makes the dancing pretty difficult (there's BEE SCIENCE behind this one!)
- Einstein & Relativity.
- An overachieving college student with height issues.
- A Hamster seeking Lettuce and Bee Companionship.
- Gojira on the loose.
- Some kind of “meta-pun”
- A flower in a field of flower. The coastline of an ocean. Both or either.
- The French.
At first glance the list seems pretty daunting...how the hell am I going to integrate all these elements into a single cohesive story? On the other hand, this is exactly what I love about design: the challenge of finding the underlying themes that make the ideas cohere together. It's not unlike dealing with regular clients; if it's challenge you want, lead a client meeting with the heads of engineering, sales, and marketing at the same table. The contradictions in need of resolution are awe-inspiring in their scope. You'll need to go through the same process of identifying underlying common themes and principles, so that the overall strategy makes sense to everyone; I can see the relationship between creating a story from semi-disparate elements and what I wrote about story-based design.
Sometime late Tuesday I'll post the story, written quickly in first-draft form. No promises whether it will be good. I've been reading some children's books lately for fun, so doubtless whatever I come up with will have a similar vibe. We'll see what happens... I'm a little bit nervous, but also excited by the challenge.
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Part I of the story is posted!
In one of my writing classes, we were given the exercise of coming up with ten great first lines.
None of mine were memorable, but a classmate got the best (IMHO) with “For as long as I can remember, we kept Aunt Maud in the basement.” The next exercise was picking your favorite first line - even if it was someone else’s and writing a story around that.
It was a wonderful exercise. Sort of a cool structured writing jam.
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