Last week I had an absolute blast writing (and posting here) one of the weirdest stories I’ve written. It’s a very short heart-warming tale about becoming a father (with only a little cannibalism). This post is about the writing process behind it.
Obviously, there are spoilers ahead, so go check it out before proceeding:
Today, I’ll dig into:
Concept and inspiration
Tone and genre
Embracing your themes.
Let’s go!
Concept and inspiration
Like with my previous short story Come Along, Grandpa (and discussed in its post-mortem ) I sat down to write without much of an idea of where to go, and again I used the ‘what if’ method.
I know that nature has some odd parenting styles, so I did a quick search for a list to see if anything inspired me. I found this page with a description of the activity of the male assassin bug:
Female assassin bugs lay their eggs and allow the male to guard them closely. While doing so, the male will resort to eating some of the eggs, usually the ones on the outer edge of the brood, allowing only a few to survive.
Okay, so we’ve got a behaviour which seems very inhuman which would be fun to smash into human expectations, but I still didn’t have a hook into the story.
I did a search of stock images, and found the silhouette of a person tossing a child into the air. A fun family moment? Or a parent releasing their child into the sky?
The anonymous silhouette combined with the insect story to create a ‘what if’ question:
What if a person pretending to be a human (or from some odd human-sub-species) told the story of how he breeds, unaware of how strange it sounds to others?
I decided to leave it ambiguous whether the father is a peculiar form of humanity or something more alien. Clarity there wasn’t necessary for the story to work, all that was needed was setting the right tone and diving head first into the weirdest place I could go.
Tone and genre
I set the tone with a slightly off-key but earnest and disarmingly friendly narrator, who uses familiar words in an unfamiliar way. Let’s dissect the first paragraph:
I am a good human father. When my willing mate suggested I access her eggs, I knew it would be a big leap for us, but it was one I was willing to take with her. Birthing is hard.
“I am a good human father.”
‘I’m a good father’ has an element of defensiveness about it, but adding ‘human’ shifts the tone from being defensive about whether he’s genuinely ‘good’ to being defensive about being ‘human’.
This sets us up for a story where a person will be asserting their status as a human. The awkwardness of a person speaking in English but needing to assert they’re a human (when there are no other creatures we know of that speak English) immediately suggests he’s not going to convince us. This might be sad, but it’ll probably be comedic.
We’ve also got this oddness contrasting with the seriousness of the topic: fatherhood.
In an earlier post-mortem, I wrote about how low stakes taken very seriously can be a great recipe for comedy-horror. There’s also a writing exercise linked to this idea, if it tickles your fancy. In ‘A Good Human Father’, I’ve inverted this idea: we’ve got a very serious topic (fatherhood) taken very lightly. The result is a similarly fun tension between tone and content.
“When my willing mate suggested I access her eggs, I knew it would be a big leap for us, but it was one I was willing to take with her.”
If the first short sentence wasn’t enough of a clue, this confirms there’s something odd going on here. I mean, yes, technically conceiving a child involves accessing eggs, but this isn’t how you humans speak. I mean… how us humans speak… how we speak.
Sidebar: pronouns.
I started writing this using neopronouns for the mother figure. Specifically, I was using xe/xey/xeir. It read well, and I thought it was easy to follow, but I changed to more standard she/her forms for two reasons:
Given that the characters are possibly non-human, I didn’t want to imply that non-binary people are anything other than human and a normal part of society. As a gender-wobbly person, I wouldn’t like my gender vagueness to be thought of as making me less- or non-human. If anything, I feel it makes me more human. I actually really like neopronouns, but the potential for misinterpretation here wasn’t something I was comfortable with.
The mother character didn’t need them. It added a layer to the story without complimenting the narrative. You’re welcome to feel otherwise, but it didn’t feel like it fit enough to justify the risk of point 1.
Anyway…
The second sentence of the story confirms the oddness, but also establishes this is both consenting and feels daunting to the parents-to-be. This is, hopefully, very relatable and it balances out the non-humanness of the narrator.
In essence, we’ve got an oddball narrator who’s scared of becoming a parent. He might be a bit peculiar, but he’s relatable and so we’re probably going to be rooting for him.
“Birthing is hard.”
Again, that peculiar and slightly-off phrasing, and it’s also setting up the key narrative path: we’re going to read about the trials of pregnancy… or something resembling pregnancy.
-
In the first paragraph we’ve built the tone, and given hints at genre. It’s likely to be comedy, and the use of ‘human’ suggests we’re stepping into the borders of science-fiction. The subject of fatherhood, combined with this peculiar terminology, also raises the possibility of well-intentioned awfulness that leads to horror.
Embracing your themes
It’s become pretty clear to me, after over 20 years of writing things, that I’ve got a theme of ‘the rich aren’t like everyone else’. This turns up in many ways, such as corporate satire in the Mr Snaffleburger animations, billionaires gifting themselves ultimate power while keeping the working class subservient in Superfuse, or… er… billionaires gifting themselves ultimate power while keeping the working class subservient in Aliens versus Predator 3, or… You get the idea.
I keep on writing about the same thing. Rather than fighting this, I’m choosing to embrace it.
I’m enjoying always finding new ways to talk about the inhumanity of the political and economic ruling classes. I think this is probably a coping mechanism for the trauma of living in this late-capitalist socio-hellscape, but if it helps me cope then that’s A Good Thing™.
It probably helps that it seems like the target of my ire keeps on being ridiculously evil, which just reloads my headcannons. If you find a renewable source of inspiration, cherish it!
One of the things I find interesting about this running theme is that it doesn’t always come out as satire or loathing, sometimes it just pops up in the background. In ‘A Good Human Father’, I could have set the couple up living on a council estate or on holiday in an RV. Instead, I chose to give them a mansion and a private beach. The subtext here is ‘perhaps all the superrich are incredibly different from us’.
While writing ‘A Good Human Father’, the narrator’s voice slipped into the privileged mode of discourse where the wealthy talk about how incredibly challenging it is to find a good butler these days, as if this was a normal and relatable task that everyone faces rather than wondering if we can afford to buy onions anymore. I wanted to exploit that disconnect, where the upper-class obliviously present their lives as absolutely normal. This time it came out as somewhat tender… But…
They eat their unborn young. Foetal cannibalism is still foetal cannibalism. Alongside all the wholesomeness, there are still a very dark and inhuman things happening behind the doors of mansions.
In the end, the child-spawn fly away to feed on the fumes above our polluted cities. This was a final dig at the wealthy, living away from the messes their wealth causes, and yet still benefiting from it.
Was any of this obvious in the story? I don’t think so, but it helped me write it.
By finding the themes that speak to us and letting them guide our choices, we make our writing process easier and more fun.
That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll probably have a writing tip. Hope you enjoyed this. Drop me a comment or a ‘like’ to show me you’re out there and having fun.
BTW, I usually paywall half of these critiques, but decided to not do that this time. If you liked reading this, please consider sharing it.
Cheerio!
Mata xxx