Taking the 59th street exit on the FDR in Manhattan, you usually get caught in red-light eddy between two tall buildings for what may seem like minutes, but is probably just 20-30 seconds (this is Manhattan, after all).
One access point to and from the apartment building on the left is across a footbridge over the eddy (lovely at dawn, looking out at the rosey-peaked dawn while inhaling exhaust fumes) that seems to lead to a long, glass-enclosed corridor decorated, at intervals, by art prints. Occasionally, very occasionally, you see someone in the hall. Once, I saw two or three, very widely spaced, walking all in one direction.
As is often my habit, I look at places like this and imagine them as a particular corner of hell.
SO hell is an endless corridor.
Carpeted? What’s the lighting like? Is there music? Or musak?
Is one wall windowed, overlooking an industrial wasteland (a go-to favorite of mine, alas) or a Bosch landscape of tortures to come should you ever reach the end of the corridor? Or is it rock? Lava? A spongy mass that will consume you if you lean against it? A blank wall. Or another wall decorated by prints. Or art.
Do the people in the corridor do the art? Or someone – or something – else?
Who are these people in the corridor, by the way? Are they all walking in the same direction, up and down? If the same, are they spaced apart as they were in my vision? How far – meters, miles? Can they hear each other scream? Or do they just run into each other’s trash?
Let’s get to the mechanics. Do the people in this particular corner of hell need to go to the bathroom? Do they get hungry? Sleepy? Do they want sex? Drugs and alcohol? In other words, is part of their torture the needs and appetites of their former lives?
It’s good to have needs. Needs propel stories. So if not this, then some other need…something chasing from behind, or a carrot dancing just around the next bend of the corridor. An urgent mission they were assigned to fulfill by reaching the end of an endless corridor when they arrived at hell’s gate.
How those needs are met, and frustrated, are sure to torture in hell, as they sometimes are in life.
Is there a culture in this corridor world of hell? What protocols structure encounters, whether regular (as in the world of cross current walkers) or irregular (spaced walkers, perhaps lingering by a bathroom or food store they exhausted waiting for to share the company of the one who follows them – and what happens then, is hell really other people?).
Culture also propels needs, as well as structures them. Culture complicates the fulfillment of needs with rules. Culture is good for story.
Does all this hell stuff mean something – is it a metaphor, or a satire, or a surreal excursion, a virtual simulation or game or test, or the dreams of a catatonic character?
And we haven’t even gotten to the characters, yet.
The point of this exercise, of course, is to approach storytelling from yet another angle – developing an idea, a premise – hell is an endless corridor – and making it real by asking questions and finding answers for them. Could be science fiction, where the rules are the ones that rule the external world, or fantasy, in which the action serves as a metaphor for the rules governing the inner landscapes of people.
In other words, some kind of logic needs to be applied to stories at some point in their making. Usually. By most folks. (Have I hit all the qualifiers, yet? Because everybody’s different, yes, I know.)
Because logic will be applied by editors, publishers and readers. So you’d best to get know the concept.
Internal logic, logic consistent with the rules set up by the world in which the characters live – that’s all that’s asked for, most times, by readers from casual and professional.
When that logic gets worked out is up to you, of course. Some let the undertow of emotional and intellectual currents carry them off through some stuff that happens to these folks they throw in, and when an ending is reached, logic is applied and the stuff that happens is tightened up a bit or a lot, and the folks, well, they get that stuff happened to them.
Others work all that logic out in their heads, know the arcs and the twists of their tale ahead of time, and set about the clean and crisp construction of a story with a certain amount of precision and confidence.
Wherever you fit in the spectrum, from master architect to pulling it out of the hole with your eyes shut, it’s good to remember what can propel a character and a story is usually something that can follow a form of logic others can understand. Vampires, living dead, werewolves – all logical in their context.
Now, if I were John Skipp, I’d tell you all to work out a little 100 word ditty based on “the corridor is hell” premise and see how many different views of hell you can get (and how brief they can be), and then send it to me, and I’d post the best ones next time.
But, of course, I’m not John Skipp and I don’t have a legion of fans and I’m not even sure who’s reading this (I do have a fan, Mr. Legion, from Des Moines, who mostly buys my stuff used but is very sincere, but his old 486 desktop has been acting out lately and I’m not even sure his screen is working anymore and last I heard the mice had eaten through a power cord and the roaches were dancing on his hard drive disk).
So if you feel spunky, see what you can do and send it to me and I’ll be back next month with something from you guys.
But, most likely, I’ll be back with something else acting like this never happened.
Just like if I was in hell….