What's the deal with your story ideas?

1
What's the deal with your story ideas?

Kurt Vonnegut often wrote story snippets that were incomplete but compelling, and unsatisfying in that they seem to hold enormous potential, like an ungerminated seed.

When I first encountered one of these, I was intrigued and wanted to read more, assuming they were strategic clues to fuller stories elsewhere; but upon discovering another and then another, I realized that's all there was.

But, of course, the rest of those story ideas are in his other works, if you approach them as occasional glimpses into his psyche. They're sort of detached glints, or vibrations, or reflections, and sometimes points and sharp edges.

And his got published.

I'll bet you someday somebody will discover Brother Tappit and say "My goodness, there is something quite interesting underneath this."[1]

[2012-08-15]

 

2
Where nobody knows your name.

I have a friend now living in Manhattan who spends a lot of her free time at a public library near her mid-town apartment.

If I were her and had any length of time alone in a big city, I'd spend lots of it there myself. I did as a kid. I rode my bike for miles to go to the downtown Erie Library.

That was when it was at 27 South Park Row, Erie, PA. That was about 6 miles from my home. (I think. Addresses have changed. The old library is on the corner of South Park Row and French and is now home to the US District Court Clerk.)

It looked like this:


I was 14 or 15, no driver's license, and you'd think my folks would have been scared to death, but that was a different age. As plentiful as drugs and hippies were, there was not a lot of of violence in Erie in those days.

Ten years after I left Erie for the last time, the Erie library moved to a beautiful new facility on the bayfront and is now at 160 East Front St. Erie, PA 16507 .

It looks like this:

I haven't been to this new location. My heart is still with the old. It is very pretty, however, especially when seen from Dobbins Landing, which I still call "the dock."

This is a picture I took from the top of Dobbins Landing a few years ago; this looks up Sate Street away from the bayfront. The library is just out of view, to the left.

[2012-08-08]

[1]
As I may or may not have mentioned at one point, I started but could not finish Palm Sunday, which has a number of these story snippets, IIRC. Palm Sunday is a brilliant collection, but I happened to be reading it at a time in my life when I was battling severe anxiety, and as can happen with those types of things, the anxiety quite by accident became associated with this wonderful book. I've not been able to return to it since, for fear the anxiety would return.