In my last post, I described this amazing retreat that I attend every year. It’s probably 75% gaming, 25% whiskey, and 100% fun.

I promised to share the short backstories I’d written as part of the swag I was giving everyone. But before I get to that, let me describe the writing challenge I gave myself.

I had limited time to prepare, once I’d decided on my plan. I needed to print at least a dozen miniatures, then clip, clean, cure, and prime them all. I did the same with another dozen bases or so (I had some failed prints, I mean, some were battle damaged! Waaagh!) I also printed labels for each story card and for the bottom of each base so you’d remember the name of your character and the event where you got it.

And then I needed a dozen backstories of about 200 words each, which after printing, I’d affix a label and laminate. Buuuuut, because I’m a writer who needs to challenge himself, I ended up with sixteen. It wasn’t that much of a hardship because I had more than twenty ideas that I thought would be fun. So let me get to the challenge.

1. One sentence to describe the gist.
2. 15 minutes to write each ~200-word story.
3. Write like hell! Waaagh!

It was surprisingly easy, and I think the key was #1 because it forced me to focus on a single facet of a character. Therefore, this: “a curse is causing a village to forget language, and the chronicler is trying to decide what he wants his last word to be” becomes the following.

Hirley Moraccin had lived happily amongst his people for many years until one of the foragers had returned with the curse that people would name the “Black Mind”.

Hirley, the town chronicler, wrote that one day, the forager, a woman known as Fernd, forgot her children’s names. The next day, her own. In a week, she could not greet her neighbors nor could she ask for supplies at the market. “It was as though words were slipping from her mind, running upon that black ooze that leeched from her ears,” Hirley wrote.

The affliction passed from Fernd to her family, then their neighbors. Each person suffered the same degenerative fate, though they seemed unconcerned by the loss of words that passed from their minds like water through fingers.

Today, Hirley has opened his chronicle of the last 6 months, unable to comprehend most of the words he had written. His people have learned to adapt, but to him, a lover of language, he knows there is some emotion he should feel at this loss. Instead, he tries to take stock of the remnants of his vocabulary so he can consider the last word he wants to retain before it too fades into black.

And this, “cannot hear whilst talking; cannot talk whilst listening” becomes this:

The healers couldn’t explain it. And Edie Anatok had spoken to plenty. A gorfrickin lot. They explained that her body had completely healed after she’d fallen from the cliff into the churning seas below. Some even suggested she must have briefly died, she’d been underwater so long.

And yet, her condition persisted and without any real diagnosis. It was infuriating.

Edie’s senses seemed to cancel each other out to ensure they maximized their sensitivity. So while she was listening, she couldn’t talk. If she was reading something intently, she couldn’t hear. While she was eating, he completely lost her sense of touch.

If these outages, as she came to call them, were predictable, she might have been able to adapt. But they were random, as she found one day when she went blind while listening to birds on a walk. Edie became a shut-in, believing she had no future and no contributions for her society. That is, until two days ago, when her village burned and she fled into the wilderness.

Simple as that. In addition to the above three bullet points, I had one other goal, which was to write about things I’d never read before or to have a fresh take on something. I think I mostly succeeded.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m sharing these little vignettes in the hopes they inspire other writers to use their skills in different ways. Some days, we just can’t look at that darned manuscript another second.

Good luck with your writing!

Mike

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© Michael Wallevand, February 2024