You can thank my other half for this one. Whenever I’m stumped for something to write for you guys, I ask him and he comes up with something good. Sometimes I wonder if he should be writing these.

In his, uh, copious spare time.

Yeah, I think I see the problem there.

But we were talking about weird stories and how to make a story ‘work’ under unusual circumstances, and he said something interesting, to the effect that having weird constraints in a story can be a pro or a con. ‘Fixed points,’ he called them. In a science experiment, they’d be independent variables, I think. Those odd little rules that the author- or sometimes the editor- builds into the story to give it structure. Everything else hangs off those little anchors.

And they can be truly weird. Maybe the anthology wants to say something about flighty people, so you must use the word ‘flibbertigibbet’ in your submission. Or you wrote yourself into a corner by giving your alien species pseudopods but no eyes. Or your darling spouse challenges you to a duel of stories. Or the creative side of your brain simply refuses to engage with a project that doesn’t include buried treasure and a map with ‘X marks the spot’.

Some number of fixed points are necessary in writing. They can be more or less weird, but if you don’t have something to anchor the story, you don’t really have a story and it certainly won’t get the readers’ attention. They provide structure and sometimes a goal for the story. Without something to hang the story off of, you have to make it up out of whole cloth, which is overwhelming when it’s not tedious.

Another bonus is, those fixed points can give you an opportunity to write about something you wouldn’t ordinarily put in a story. Stretch your wings a little; expand your skill set. And if you’re like me, writing something different increases productivity; I usually write most when I rotate between three or four projects, because I can procrastinate on one and be productive on another.

The major downside of weird fixed points is, it’s easy to sound stupid if you don’t know the genre conventions pretty well. Or in this day and age, you’ll get people saying your story was written by ChatGPT and you didn’t even bother to edit the output.

Let me illustrate with an example. One of my online friends was irked at an AI generated regency romance that insisted the heroine had to travel to town with only the family steward as escort. That would be an unusual situation, to say the least. Women could travel in regency England, but they usually went with their male relatives, or sometimes an older female companion. Having a woman travel with only the steward makes the author (or bot, in this case) sound like they don’t know the genre conventions, and throws the reader out of the story.

So I started thinking about the circumstances in which a young and presumably pretty heroine might go jauntering around the country in the company of a family servant. By the end of this thought exercise, her father is an invalid, and her brother is dealing with a crisis in his own family. They simply don’t can’t take her to town. The steward is, not precisely a family servant, but the family lawyer, or ‘man of business,’ and is the son of the local clergyman. He and the heroine grew up together, and since her parents still think of him as a grubby schoolboy, he’s considered ‘safe.’ Perfectly respectable, and while it would still be unusual for them to travel together, it’s no longer ridiculous.

And suddenly I have another WIP. Go figure.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever hung a story off of?