I started taking my kids to the mall, not because of some commercial need like a new pair of shoes, a winter coat, some useless toy or shiny trinket, but for the experience: to stroll around, to ride the escalator at JC Penny, to sit on benches and simply observe the strange but beautiful mingling of people and commerce.
     It's ironic to think about the contrast, how I visited Northpark Mall more when I was a kid living 40 miles away versus now as an adult where I can see the building from my backyard (ok, only when I'm practicing my swan dives off the roof and onto the trampoline). But isn't that how we are? How we take things for granted when we have easy, endless access?

     But Northpark is hurting, and has been for some time. Two of the flagship stores - SEARS and Younkers - are long gone, and maybe a third of the smaller store fronts with them. One day the closings will reach a critical mass, and I'll stroll up to the entrance only to discover it draped in yellow caution tape and bolted shut. I will be standing there alone with nothing but my decades worth of memories grinding to a halt, and a sad little corporate farewell plastered on the door.

     And that will be that. 

     Maybe I'm a sucker for nostalgia. Maybe I have a hard time letting good things go. And it's not that I'm resistant to change, but I feel like a small part of me dies every time a new season of life turns over - strolling past phantom memories of the same stores when I was my childrens' age, noting how much has changed, and how much I have changed.

     Is that a flaw? For it's difficult to move forward if your eyes are locked on what's been. But perhaps examining ones life across the span of time has a function. Perhaps there's a utility in discovering purpose in the small, unlikely comparisons, and finding meaning in what we once thought was our weakness.
      After all, what is strength but the flexing of muscles already mapped?

     

     It's that time of year again, where we open up our general magazine submission period. We've made some changes (including a bump in pay), so check out the details below (and don't forget, paying Members get access to additional perks, a few of which are highlighted in green):

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     Take it from our Head Writing Coach, The Gunslinger himself; hit The Writer's Gym and get whipped into shape! The competition is fierce, and only the best will come out on top… 

Author's note:

     There's a lot of connective tissue in this story. One of those tangibles is music. When you write memoir, flavoring the narrative with photos lends it dimension. See, look here, it really happened! In this case, it's video, of which I could just set on repeat and bask in for hours. There's something strange about music. Or maybe there's something strange about me. Either way, I wanted to include a snapshot of what I experienced (though it falls well short of being there in the moment), and felt it pertinent to mention this unusual alignment.

     Would a reader prefer to watch this as a teaser before heading in? Or would the desire only come after, if at all? I don't know. So I'll leave the link at the end of the story, but I'm telling you now in case you're one who likes to skip ahead.

By Danny Hankner

 

     You’re standing in the backyard, bare feet sinking into the lawn, holding a rotting apple and watching the fireflies strobe against the cornfield. The smell of freshly cut grass and spent fireworks lingers in the still air. Your dad towers above you, a cigar burning in the corner of his mouth as he works against the setting sun. He levels a nozzle at the apple tree, baptizing sacks of silk in chemical cocktail.

     “What are those?” you ask.

     “Bagworms.”

     "What's a bagworm?"

     “An invasive species.”

     “What’s an invasive species?”

     “Something that shouldn’t be here.”

     You glance over to the garden, at your sister pulling weeds with your mom, where you’re supposed to be helping. Molly spies you looking at her and makes a face.

     You turn back to your dad. “I think Molly’s an invasive species.”

     “I heard that,” she shouts, and then adds, “These weeds won’t pull themselves.”

     “It’s too hard,” you say, lamely.

     Molly rolls her eyes and wastes no more time with you. Behind her, your mom, breathless and sweating, examines the seedling map, a decorative handkerchief wrapped around her head like some hippy Rambo.

     “I’m not strong enough,” you mumble, as if your excuses require elaboration. You look up at your dad for a reaction, but he doesn’t hear, for words go unheeded when men are lost in work.

 #

 

     There is a chasm measured by the decades, an ethereal bridge spanning from my childhood until now. Its road is meandering - though not without purpose - its supports are memories, all mashed together and made strong, its terminus still unseen in the foggy distance. These are the thoughts that permeate as an adult. Working. Living. Stepping down the cobbled streets of historic Dublin with my wife. Moving as if the world is known, and destinies fixed. But then something happens - a note is plucked, and we follow the sound like a scent; around a corner, through an ancient door, peering over a packed crowd, and behold:

     The music is the most natural thing in the world, and they take to it without paper, program, or direction. One strikes a chord and the rest fall seamlessly in line; the guitar, the banjo, the Irish accordion and the uillean pipes. It is a striking symphony, the kind that pulls current from the air, ripples down your skin and explodes like a depth charge. It is raw power, the strength of a people united, swirled, and converted to decibel form. The musicians – crammed into the corner of this noisy little pub – smile peaceably and play on, like they've been doing it for ten lifetimes and will keep on doing it until Christ calls them home. There's no stage, no mic, no bus ready to peel away to the next venue, just ordinary folk who play simply for a pint of Guinness and the love of the game.

     And me, the American, pressed against the wall, sucking it all in like the last drops of decency left on planet Earth, never having been to a place so distant and feeling like I’d come home. These beautiful people and this beautiful culture that gives hope, make it seem like what they're doing is the most important thing you can humanly do, that perhaps they’re offering a glimpse of something bigger than ourselves as we stagger in and behold such majesty, like the parched after a sojourn through the desert; that maybe, just maybe we’re not simply enjoying a night on the town in Dublin, Ireland, but stumbling towards the kingdom of God.

 

#

 

     You’re standing on the fairway, calculating the distance to the green and gauging the wind against the idle chatter and rogue farts of your teammates. The sun burns bright in the late afternoon sky. The grass is soft and perfectly manicured.

     “Going to the musical tonight?” asks Thorson, which is a strange thing for him to ask. The last remnants of your senior year are peeling away and you’ve never been to a school play in your life, and have no plans to alter course.

     You sketch your words in sarcasm. “Yeah, right, the musical.”

     Carinder wrestles an eight-iron out of his bag. “C’mon Hankner – give it a try.” He swings. You watch the ball sail and land dead on the green, fifteen feet from the pin.

      “It’s a good time,” insists Thorson as you hike up the fairway, irons rattling.

     You’ve known these cats since you were kids. Thorson doesn’t have a nose for trouble, but Carinder embodies the restless intellect. He’s as sharp as the blades that manicure these greens, strong – could probably drive the ball a mile if he got his swing dialed in – and has no patience for inactivity; when there’s nothing to captivate him, he manifests the entertainment himself.

     In other words, their collaboration rings false.

     Sensing a trap, you narrow your eyes and poke for weakness. “All right then - Siskel and Ebert - who’s your favorite actor in our class?”

     “Chris Scott!” they chime together, surprising you with their synchronicity. There’s no way they would’ve whipped Chris’s name out - and in chorus - without meaning it.

     “He brings the comedy,” Thorson elaborates, setting his bag on the fringe and nabbing a putter. It was true. Chris wielded a welcome sense of humor, not in a class-clown or smart-ass sort of way (of which you’ll plead the fifth and claim you know absolutely nothing about), but as an all-around good guy who everyone appreciates, like a young Morgan Freeman, or Jared from Subway pre-pedophilia. Suddenly you begin to doubt – are musicals now cool? All this time? And if so, what else have you been missing out on?

     “So, uh…what is it?” you ask.

     “Brigadoon,” says Carinder, hunched over his ball. Here, on the green, all that power he wields is caged, for a new type of strength is required. He takes a solitary practice swing, then strikes the ball with hushed reverence. You watch it roll over the green, a perfect little sphere traveling to its inevitable destination, rolling into the cup with the gumball echo of finality.

     “Birdie!” he cries with a fist pump. “That’s my first bird, baby!”

     There’s a first time for everything.

     Tomorrow, you will squeeze into the bleachers in your high school gym and discover for yourself: all the time and hard work you witnessed your classmates pouring into the scenery as you scratched lines of pencil and Conte in your corner of art class over the last four years, watching Mr. Pinion float between the tables, amongst the props. Nodding. Muttering. Lost in the ether of his old hippie music.

     The high school gymnasium – where the music of Brigadoon will echo amongst the laughter and applause – will swell with your fellow students, their parents, and the good folk of your small community. A week or two later, you’ll all be sitting together on the front lawn of the high school, red robes shimmering like a lake of sunlit fire. Each will step on the makeshift stage and accept their fate – diplomas like maps for the world – and afterward, snapping photos amidst the flurry of bodies and congratulations and tears, you will feel the weight of this beautiful thing called adolescence slipping through the fingers and think, hollowly, now what?

     Thorson, ever genial, will head off to university, Carinder, born with an iron spirit and thirst for adventure, will cut his teeth as a career SEAL, and you’ll plunge headfirst into the back-breaking, character-grinding killing fields of construction. It’s not the last you’ll ever see of each other, but it is its own goodbye, of young men who’ve known each other since infancy playing one last round of golf before sailing off into the unknown with nothing but their dreams and fragmented maps of what they think is the world.

#

 

     The Bog-men, as they call them, are just remnants, leathered husks of what were once Irishmen. An arm here, a torso there, a head cratered like a rotting pumpkin. All of them came to an unlikely demise, slaves or noblemen or kings tossed into the swamps and unearthed by unsuspecting farmers millennia later. The peat-bogs have preserved them so well as to reveal the food they ate, their bizarre hairstyles, and their horrific deaths: holes chunked into their arms to tether and restrain them while they were stabbed or tortured, disemboweled or sawed in half. Are these the results of ritual sacrifice, a homicide well-hidden, or just good old-fashioned war?

     The Irish also have gold, hammered like tinfoil and shaped into earrings and jewelry. Is this what they fought over? Is this why their enemies came?

     Atop the stairs hangs a replica of an old Viking vessel. Light and fast, the longship is the O.G. of getaway cars for plunderers. In a few days, I will stand upon a stone cliff on the other side of Ireland where the ancients built their city, a defensible fortress against any seafaring barbarians. Between the old fortress and modern Dublin spans a lush, green land where crumbling castles litter the countryside like old barns back home. The history of the Irish unfurls like a blood-stained battle map; kings and dukes and lords, raising castles for protection, burning them down and rebuilding as the centuries grind on. The Queen of England claiming her land, and the Catholics responding, flooding the country with gentle serfs titled monks. Kinetic and Culture, this was war.

     And it never changes.

     Years, decades, centuries of this; crushing famine, endless hardship, and to come out on the other end, chatty and smiling – is this the bottled magic of a miracle? What kept them going? What lifeline enabled the Irish to persevere? Through it all, did the music play on? Was this their strong tower – their strength – in a vicious cycle of hard life? And now, seated in a dimly lit pub, I can feel the history like a paperweight on my palm, a moment captured and set on ice, and no matter what comes it can never be untold, so long as the music plays on. It is the breath of life, the soul of culture passed on through the generations; little red-haired girls dancing in the meadow and the elderly whispering into their flutes, where there is nothing but the taste of melody and the fresh kiss of perennial spring, where time stands still and for one glorious moment we catch a glimpse, a taste of paradise.

     We stroll through the surprisingly clean streets of Dublin as trolleys and double-decker buses rumble past, this historic city where the Irish themselves have become just another minority, pale faces sipping dark beer, lost in a foreign crowd. And as an American, we welcome the stranger because it’s ingrained into our DNA and pounded into our skulls. There's something intrinsically decent about the mechanical symphony of stop-and-go modernity, still playing despite the variation of hands pulling the levers and keeping the lights on. And yet another part is deeply saddened, for when new cultures emerge, old ones disappear. And to watch, from a distance, the slow erosion of perhaps the most decent culture ever to breathe, there is no proper response outside of a deep sadness that settles about the heart and works its way into the bones - a leash cinching tighter around the soft parts of our souls. And I wonder, what can man do to halt the inevitable, to stop the impenetrable wheels of fate that have been churning on like a great machine, gobbling up and spitting out everything that crosses its path since the creation of time itself?

     But maybe the Irish have it right, maybe they'll be fine, perhaps everything that is good and decent about these splendid people will survive in the bars and pubs, on the street corners, and around every fireplace, as the music plays on.

 

#

 

     You’re standing in the driveway, round shovel biting into a pile of paver base, when a small child wanders over. You don’t recognize him – not that you have active stats on the neighborhood kids, but aside from the next-door teens, there aren’t really any kids around. When you were young, you ran the streets on knobby tires, conquered the cornfield behind your house, and slunk through everyone's backyards during nightly hide-n-seek. When you moved down here, one of the first things you noticed was the complete absence of this juvenile dance. Were these the fruits of an aging neighborhood? Or have the young simply gone dormant, fused to screen and controller, transhuman locusts eternally waiting?

     The boy standing before you is small, black. He has wide, innocent eyes, and an insatiable list of questions.

     "What's that?" he asks.

     "It's a shovel.”

     "What's it for?"

     "The patio I'm building."

     "What's a patio?"

     "A place where you hang out with your roommates and make fun of the neighbors."

     "Can I try?"

     "It's not hard," you say. "They pretty much ask for it."

     He scrunches up his face, and you realize he’s referring to the shovel. You’re 21 and single – what do you know of pesky children, and what do you care? Especially when there’s work to be done and you’re wrestling with overtime and remodeling your house with a never-ending makeover on the weekends. And honestly, the kid is about the size of your leg, so handing over the shovel is going to be a grand waste of time, which you’re already short on. You scan your brain for a nice segue out of this, for how do you let a child understand the burdens of responsibility without simply barking for obedience? You glance down the road, at the silence where there should be delighted screams and indignant shouts, at the drought of children kicking up neighborhood dust, and back at the wide-eyed one standing on your driveway.

     You sigh.

     "Sure," you relent, and hand him the shovel. He grips it reverently as you imagine all children of the past would their first broadsword, bow, or rifle. Surprisingly, the nose bites a few inches into the sand, returning with a small load. Then his little arms quiver and fail, the shovel knocks against the rusty wheelbarrow, and the legs teeter.

     "Oh!" he gasps, dropping the tool, the steel clanging against cement. The wheelbarrow rocks like a newborn calf on fresh legs, threatening to spill out and baptize him in sand…

     ...and halts under the force of your quick, rough hands. A waft of sand spills over the lip, dusting his sneakers. He looks up at you with huge eyes, and to this day you’re not sure if it was out of wonder, or fright.

     You heave the wheelbarrow back to level ground. "Maybe you should give me that," you suggest.

     He looks at you for a second, as if in a daze, his dark little eyes calculating God knows what. Is that the same look you had at his age? Is curiosity a universal that transcends culture and time? A brief moment passes, like the clockwork inside of him finally clicked into place, which didn’t result in a smile, but something deeper, like the instant an artist beholds a painting and knows it’s finished.

     "You're strong," he concludes.

     Years later, you’ll stand in another worksite, shovel in hand, perspiring under the Guatemalan sun, smiling and joking with another people who have suffered immensely, when a child – same age, same size, lighter skin – curious and watching, finally opens his mouth and says, of all things, the exact same thing.

     “Eres fuerte.” You’re strong.

     And all you can do is laugh. What is strength, but the flexing of muscles already mapped?

But now, in the hour ahead, this little American, whom you’ve never met before and will never see again, will follow you to and from the backyard, peppering you with questions as you work and sweat, until some point when he wanders – or is called – home.

#

              

     Another city, another pub, another group of classic Irish musicians. We press against the wall, human traffic so thick you can barely sneeze. A lovely young French girl squeezes in next to me, pulls out a leather-bound notebook from a pocket and sketches the band. Her hands work in a blur of motion, all ignition, a frenzy of lead and paper. In a breath, she finishes the guitarist, rips open a new page and drafts the drummer. I watch, mesmerized by her unexpected talent. She captures them perfectly: the folds and shadows of their everyday attire, the way the drummer nods to the beat, the bliss that eclipses the old-timer picking away at the banjo.

     Over the chorus and chatter, I ask this young lady about her art and origins; we speak of pencils and shards of charcoal, of long flights and ferries, and the hemorrhaging panic when driving on the opposite side of the road. Before long, a few seats open up and I’m whisked away before I can delve any further into her craft. And it's such an insipid thing, but it's an opportunity missed, burning questions left to fizzle in the rain. How many people possess such a talent? Who else can storm a portrait in seconds, raining down beauty like leaden fire? What power – what strength! And I desperately want to know: when did she start doing this, and why? Does she draw everything she sees in this lovely Ireland, filling volumes and stashing the final product in the crevices of her basement? Is this how she sifts order from the chaos?

     Is this how she maps the world?

     And I ask, or would have asked, because maybe I do the same thing, only my lines morph into phrases – the ritual prayers of a silent cartographer. And if I’m being honest, I suppose all that is simply the indirect Sunday drive around the heart of it, the real question at hand, the one we all stumble through life asking not with words, but like blind men fumbling through the dark, still trying to cipher the simplest revelations like how strange and foreign we all are, and yet we wonder, hopeful and waiting, with these words lost on our lips:

 

#

 

     You’re standing on pavement, watching traffic climb the overpass and popping almonds into your mouth. It’s mid-winter, when the sun slinks halfway up the sky before losing steam, scattering shadows in deceptive angles as it retracts towards the horizon. You’re taking a late lunch break in the afternoon, but it feels like watching the sunset. The man next to you is an Iraqi refugee, maybe a decade your senior, with an engineering degree sadly useless under your employ. He speaks fluent English and works hard, but none of his skills transfer. You’re installing can lights and wiring outlets – doing the work, not just mapping it. You’re new to being the boss – green to running your own business – and haven’t yet learned the patience required for training the untrained.

     The cloud of confusion that is the war is halfway through its confounding, incontinent journey; vacuuming up tax dollars and spitting out broken bodies in return. You ask this foreigner what he misses most – what else do you say to a man who fled his homeland, to be reduced to low-income housing and blue-collar labor? You expect something like the food, or, the way the trees blossom in spring, but instead, he levels you with the truth.

     “My friends,” he says. “My family.”

     You squirm under the weight. And maybe it’s the tension, maybe you don’t really hear – after all, words go unheeded when men are lost in work – but you prattle on, asking your questions and giving voice to your still-youthful curiosity. There was so much bad over there, under the oppressive weight of a cruel dictator, but what of war? Is it like a fire, consuming all the dead wood so that many years from now, a new forest may grow? And as you speak, you see them before you, the years both behind and ahead, turning and flying away like kites let loose in the wind.

     Today will be the first and last day you will ever see this man. Like the curious child standing on your patio. Like Carinder’s birdie rolling into the cup. Are these enigmas? One-offs without meaning or purpose? Are you just flesh and blood stars scattered across a dirt galaxy, or are you connected by a living power you cannot see or comprehend?

     Later, you will wonder; do we map the world through pen and paper, or with our collective regrets?

#

 

     The music is the most natural thing in the world, and they take to it without paper, program, or direction. One plucks a note and the rest fall seamlessly in line. The musicians – crammed into the corner of this noisy little pub - smile peaceably and play on. There's no stage, no mic, no bus ready to peel away to the next venue, just ordinary folk who play simply for a pint of Guinness and the love of the game.

     We’ve returned to O’Donoghue’s pub, our last night in Ireland – same packed crowd, same dark beer, different cast of musicians. Between sets, they ask where the patrons are from, and a roar proceeds every answer:

     I think of everything I’ve beheld this past week: crumbling castles and a Blarney stone, convents parked against misty mountains and the greenest pastures I’ve ever seen, Arryn Islands, and the lost languages spoken like the guttural, hollowed-out drawl of every small-town grandpa seated upon a tractor, inside a diner, or leaning against a rusty old Chevy.

     A retiree is parked next to me, tapping silently to the rhythm, nodding and smiling, radiant between the wrinkles. I ask, and he tells of his childhood uprooted and replanted in Washington, ushering children into this world who in turn produced their own. There is a warmth to him, the serenity of a man who has run his race well and now basks in accomplishment.

     I tell him where I’m from, and he smiles.

     Would you like to know?

     For I could pretend and likely fool you with my gray-green eyes and quintessential red beard, and skin that pales come winter; I would make for the perfect avatar, smiling and chatty, a story holstered and waiting. Am I like them? Could I be them, pressed against the wall and sucking it all in like the last drops of decency left on planet Earth? These beautiful people and this beautiful culture that gives us hope, they make it seem like what they're doing is the most important thing you can humanly do, that perhaps they’re offering us a glimpse of something bigger than ourselves as we stagger in and behold such majesty.

     But what would I know? After all, I’m not Irish.

     I'm just another fractured American, a stranger dwelling in distant lands, a Midwesterner whose German blood is slowly diluting, one generation at a time; for we have no ancestral tree, no fairytales to guide our paths, no ancient hymns to pluck from the air like static mementos of whence we came, just our prosaic questions and desires, our music, and – weathered and incomplete, yet stained with fresh ink like blood siphoned from the vein – our maps for the world.

 

#

 

     You’re standing in the backyard, bare feet sinking into the lawn, holding a rotting apple and watching the fireflies strobe against the cornfield. The smell of freshly cut grass and spent fireworks lingers in the still air. Your dad towers above you, a cigar burning in the corner of his mouth as he works against the setting sun. He levels a nozzle at the apple tree, baptizing sacks of silk in chemical cocktail.

     In the garden, your mom and sister pull weeds with gloved hands. The whole endeavor is an unusual affair. Never before and never again will this be replicated – at least to this extent – outside of stubborn, mutant perennials that spring forth of their own will. But now, you turn back to your dad, lost in his work. You don’t yet understand the weight he carries, the burdens he bears. The ashes that were business – his livelihood – are still cooling. How long has it been now, a few months? A few years? You can't recall the timeline, only the effects, gasping for air in the quagmire of joblessness and depression, borderline poverty, and so much more.

     But your thoughts are merely the simple wheels of a child’s, circling on the task at hand. The trees. The bagworms. The sprayer.

     "Can I try?"

     Your dad stops, blows a line of smoke, and turns. He pumps the handle to build pressure. And you can feel the weight of his eyes. Calculating. Estimating. Breaking with so much secret pain. What thoughts reel behind the surface? What seismic shifts continue to rupture? Especially when there’s work to be done, when his life lies in ruin, when the route he so carefully charted has been torn to ribbons, leaving him stranded on islands unmarked. And what does he say to his son? For how does one let a child understand the burdens of responsibility without simply barking for obedience? Better men have yelled for less. But your dad never yells. Never screams. Never conjures a single, hurtful word. Instead, he sighs and sets the tank in the grass.

     And hands you the nozzle.

     You grip it reverently, like all children of the past would their first broadsword, bow, or rifle. There is a power to this plastic wand – you can feel the goosebumps rippling down your skin and exploding like a depth charge. But the tank – sloshing with liquid – is a different beast. You tug, uselessly, arms quivering under the weight. You readjust your grip, heave and struggle, but it is simply too much.

     And you are too weak.

     “I can’t carry it,” you confess. And with the words spoken, they appear, ready for the next command, lining up like liquid soldiers ready to slide down the battlefield that is your face. Furiously, you blink them back before your dad can see.

     But if he sees, he says not a word. Instead, he drops to one knee and scoops it all up: the tank cradled in one arm, you in the other. The grass escapes from your feet. But you’re not looking at the ground, or the trees, or the apples rotting on the branch. You’re staring at your dad with wide, innocent eyes, and what springs to mind is not an original thought, but the anthem of every young boy, from little Americans dropping shovels to impoverished Guatemalans squinting against the sun, to what your own son will repeat – decades from now – without prejudice every time you swing a hammer, fell a tree, or haul lumber from the back of your pickup. Is it a mantra or manifestation? An observation or transformation? Or just laying down another line on the maps that we will navigate this wild and unsteady world?

     Your dad lifts you a mile into the air, and as you press the trigger, an understanding takes root, and you look upon him – even though he’s fragile – with these words lost on your lips:

~~~

About the author:

     Danny Hankner began penning stories about himself and his idiot friends as a teenager. Now, masquerading as an adult, he lives in Davenport, Iowa with his wife and kids, working as a master electrician for his own company. In his spare time, Dan rides and builds mountain bike trails, scrapes infinitely spawning cat hurl off the basement floor, and runs Story Unlikely, an award-winning literary magazine where he floats around self-important titles like 'editor-in-chief'. His written material—be it short stories, scripts, or song lyrics—has been consumed by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

 

By Wulf Moon

 

I can't afford a DeLorean and a flux capacitor, not even in 2025, but I have found a way to take you back in time through this low-budget article. You see, you pay by the year, and fortunately we're not traveling all the way back to 1955 when cars were made of steel instead of plastic. We're pulling the lever back and heading to 1979 when the country was a beautiful jive talkin' boogie wonderland. Hold on!

 

Wow! 1979. We're here! And it's just like I remembered! American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, cassette tapes that often became brown spaghetti in car stereos, jogging shorts and hotpants, wild polyester disco shirts, and there's my 1967 Mustang! My beautiful three-speed Mustang orange coupe with the black hardtop!

 

Oh no! I pushed Full Stop too soon! This is late '79 when my brother rolled my Mustang on an icy corner, turning my high school souped-up dream car … into a gray Bondo bucket for the rest of my senior year and beyond. The shame! I barely had money for gas, let alone a body shop to restore it. And the pretty girls? They quit asking if they could go for a ride.

 

Why did we come here? Moon, isn't this supposed to be an article on writing? Why are we bumming around in '79 in your beat-up Mustang, and why can we see the pavement whizzing by through the rusted-out floor deck in the back?

 

Yeah, forgot about that. Don't worry--I used heavy gauge wire to hold up the floor underneath where it rusted through there. You should be safe as long as we don't go across any speed bumps.

 

Here's my point. First, look how fast traveling through time can be in written stories. I just snapped my fingers and bam!, here we are! (And may I say your frizzy 70s perm looks spectacular!) Second, there was an experimental short film produced this very year called The Wizard of Speed and Time. This film was virtually a one-man production by special effects creator Mike Jittlov. No CGI here!

 

Every special effect was created through stop-motion animation, rotoscoping, and pixelation. That one man could create what normally required entire teams of animators to make certainly made him a wizard of animation. Years later, Jittlov got the funding to create a full-length motion picture called by the same name, loosely based on how he made the short.

 

In the short-film, Jittlov used his special effects wizardry to make the wizard in his film travel the world at high-speed, granting wishes in a lightning blitz of scenes. In the feature-length film, he revealed his secrets that made his wizard speed through space and time. It was exhausting work because every second of a movie requires multiple frames per second. Can you imagine setting up those shots one by one as he made tiny progressive movements?

 

How does this relate to writing? When you understand your medium and how to manipulate it, you can move readers through time and space with the snap of your fingers. You can slow poignant scenes down or speed dramatic scenes up. You can even move your protagonist instantly through space and time through scene cuts or flashbacks. In writing, you truly can be The Wizard of Speed and Time!

Would you like to see how writers do these tricks, perhaps even become a wizard yourself? Great, let's see what this 'Stang can do when I put the pedal to the metal! Eighty-eight miles per hour to make the flux capacitor engage? Pshaw. I've buried the speedometer on this car, way past 120 mph (kids, don't try this at home. I'm a trained professional!). Oh, you in the back seats. Hold your feet up. We're heading back to the future and we're about to go over a speed bump.

 

# ← speed bump

 

Moon teaches the award-winning Super Secrets of Writing Workshops and is the author of The Illustrated Super Secrets of Writing and the runaway bestseller, How To Write a Howling Good Story. He invites you to join his free Wulf Pack Club at www.TheSuperSecrets.com

 

     If you're not familiar with Bruce Bethke, you probably should be. Aside from being the guy who wrote (and coined the word) Cyberpunk, he also runs a magazine and has a pretty storied history in and out of the writing world. And when he writes about those storied histories, we like to pay attention. So read the first installment of Bruce (reminiscing, recounting, lamenting?) The Saga of Cyberpunk by CLICKING HERE.

Listen on:

Dear Story Unlikely,

     In my current incarnation, I have been mildly day drunk for 23 years straight. I live in a house that is filled with a variable number of cats. I'm handsome in a secret way, and charming in an alarming way. From certain angles I'm invisible, which makes using that superpower kind of awkward as I have to kind of crab-walk everywhere. I write a lot, have published widely, and look forward to another source of fiction in my veins, which are clogged with similes and metaphors that threaten my life.

Sincerely,

Jeff Somers

~

Dear Story Unlikely,

     I found Story Unlikely through a friend who came across your page on a website about open writing contests and sent me the link. I clicked it, read it, and stared static at my screen for about a minute, in absolute awe for making through all that without the usual urge to reach for ice cream spoons as makeshift eye gouges, as you do when hundreds of words worth of rules are across from you. I thought, If they can make bureaucracy a fun read, they’ve got some serious skill - seriously, that's a superpower, and whether you like my story or not, it matters.

 

Sincerely,

Recovering Bureaucracy Survivor, Isabele

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