Post-mortem: writing Come Along, Grandpa
Smashing together a stock photo, Logan's Run, Soylent Green, and a barely remembered sci-fi novel.
Today’s newsletter is a post-mortem of last week’s short story. It’s only 700-ish words, and the rest of this post is spoiler-tastic, so pop back to read the story before continuing:
All caught up? Then let’s dive in. Today we’re going to look at:
finding inspiration
setting period and tone
leaving questions unresolved.
Finding inspiration
As I said last week, Come Along, Grandpa was written on the spur of the moment, inspired by the stock photograph at the top of the story.
For inspiration, I often use ‘what if’ moments that interrogate slight moments of strangeness. In The Longing Trees, my story was inspired by the strangeness of small clumps of trees that are often seen in English farmland. What if there were local legends around these trees? What if they were left untouched by farmers because something powerful lives in them?
The ‘what if’ method is very common in fiction: what if a great white shark developed a vendetta against a town? (Jaws) What if a bullied teenage girl with an appalling mother developed psychic powers? (Carrie)
So, with this lens, I browsed stock images until something struck me as a little strange. In the photo that inspired this story, there were three pairs of people walking along, all heading in the same direction. This led to questions: Where are they going? Do they want to go there? Do they understand the journey?
There could be countless answers to these questions, but mine swirled quickly into a blend inspired by stories I’ve read or seen in the past. There’s a dash of Logan’s Run (where people aged 30 willingly die to preserve equilibrium in society), a hint of Soylent Green (where people’s bodies are converted into food), and a splash of a sci-fi novel I read about 25 years ago—which unfortunately I can’t remember the name of.
It’s okay to find inspiration in the works of others: what you do with a concept will always be personal to you.
It’s a common saying that there are no new stories. Every writer is different: give two people the same concept, let them loose, and you’ll get wildly divergent outcomes. Most writing competitions have a common theme or prompt that is shared by the stories, yet every submission is unique.
Writing short fiction, even with ideas skimmed from others, can be a way to explore who you are as a writer. Do it enough times and you will feel your way into your own aesthetic.
Finding readers who gel with that aesthetic is the next challenge, but you’ve got to find your voice first before they will hear you speak.
So, I had some answers to my questions:
Where are they going? To a clinic that will end their life, but will skim away layers of their brain during the process, somehow preserving the memories or knowledge in there. Their bodies are then be processed into food.
Do they want to go there? Some might, some don’t, but most will be too old to resist.
Do they understand the journey? Probably, but it’s also a normalised process in this society.
With these pieces in mind, I had two main choices for the PoV (Point of View) character: the girl or the old man. The girl’s perspective would be interesting, but less exposed to the final stages of the process, so I decided to go for the first-person perspective of the old man, Grandpa.
Setting period and tone
With an idea in mind, I knew this was going to be pretty glum. I wanted the bureaucratic nature of the horror to be established very quickly.
Nothing says ‘we’re going to politely kill you’ like a formal letter and a personal escort to the place of your death. Latin mottos are out of fashion for almost every organisation, but the language still holds a feeling of authority and magic—what better way to make this seem unopposable than to give the organisation a Latin motto?
Alongside that, the Latin gave a route to establish the time-period. Let’s look at the clues to the time-period:
The man is called ‘grandpa’ by a girl who’s old enough to walk around on her own, so he’s probably at least in his 60s, but more likely in his 70s or 80s.
He was taught Latin at school, which isn’t common in modern curriculums (outside of private schools), suggesting his education was pre-1990s.
He uses light bulbs in a metaphor, so we’re after 1880s. We’re getting a vibe of near-present day.
There are moving companies, laboratories, and concrete and glass buildings. We’re definitely in a modern setting, either the present, recent past, or…
In the final section, brains are ‘scanned’ by being peeled away in some unknown surgical process. We’re probably in the near-future.
One way of establishing a sinister tone is to make something horrific appear normal and accepted by the story's society. Bureaucratic killings, ignoring or justifying suffering for a ‘greater good’ are a common trope in some forms of horror.
For examples, see The Purge for a societal-level horror, or The Hunt, The Most Dangerous Game, Hard Target, or The Hunger Games for more spins on this concept. As mentioned above, give the same idea to a dozen writers and you’ll get wildly different stories back!
In an earlier post, I wrote about how the contrast of ‘making cute things dangerous’ is one route to comedy, and this approach of ‘making mass-slaughter seem normal’ is another way of using contrast to create an impactful trigger for a story.
Interestingly, if written from a different PoV, this same idea could easily become a horror-comedy. Imagine a glossy brochure for the laboratory, boasting about the efficiency and cleanliness of the facilities, how they have a 100% death rate, and zero customer complaints. By picking the PoV as the victim of the horror, rather than making the PoV a bystander, the tone was locked into the grimness of dubiously-consensual euthanasia.
But, as was established at the beginning of the story, Grandpa had already lost a lot of memories, so perhaps this wasn’t too bad… Right?
To heighten the sadness of the story, I showed our protagonist having lost memories returning to him as his brain was skimmed away. That brief excitement of recalling something long forgotten shimmers through him—something in the scanning process fired up old pathways, returning what he’d lost—and, of course, due to the nature of the procedure, this is then be whisked away again moments later. This increases the pathos and horror of what’s happening to him.
So, we have a forgotten family member escorting an old man away from his home, we have bureaucratic processes visibly taking away his rights, there is an ugly modern building, cherished resurfaced memories are ripped away, and possibly there’s a cannibalistic kitchen awaiting his corpse. The dark tone is complete.
Leaving questions unresolved
The reader doesn’t need all the answers for a story to be effective. This is because stories aren’t about the logic of a world, they’re about the emotional journey of a person being challenged and shaped by difficult circumstances. So long as the reader gets sufficient information to understand that journey, all other parts are optional.
In most genres of stories, we don’t need to answer everything. With the notable exception of…
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