Alright, time to revisit my old story notebooks and run through some of the ideas there. This one starts in fall of 2009, my last semester at BYU, and ends shortly after my hasty exodus from a miserable internship in Washington DC.
And now, without further ado, here goes:
A super-celibate society that holds that sex is evil and reproduces entirely by artificial insemination.
In other words, what if the Shakers had had our modern reproductive technology? Weird, but not beyond the realm of plausibility.
I suppose that in such a society, the nuclear family would not exist, and children would instead be raised by the community as a whole–kind of like Plato’s Republic. Question is, would this be a happy utopia, or a miserable dystopia? I know how I’d write it…
Shattered glass sparkling in the roadside desert
Okay, that’s less of an idea and more of an experiment with prose. I suppose I saw broken glass on some dusty asphalt and wanted to capture it with words.
The next passage is from an assignment for the wilderness writing class at BYU. We went camping in Moab and hiked up to Delicate Arch, perhaps the most iconic natural landform in all of Utah. Shortly after taking this picture, here is more or less what I wrote:
They say that the arches in this national park are formed by wind erosion. The funny thing is, so is the slickrock. The same wind that carved the gravity defying structure of the arches also wore the rock all around them almost perfectly smooth, so smooth that you feel as if you’re about to slip and fall even as you sit on the edge of a relatively flat ledge.
It makes you wonder: what was here before the wind blew it away? What did the land look like before the wind took out the loose material, leaving behind only the strongest, most resilient bedrock? How many other arches lie underneath our feet, waiting only for time and the wind to unearth the landscape that hides them?
Awesome class; if you ever get a chance, take it. Professor Bennion is great.
A boy born without a name.
Not sure where that came from, but it kind of makes me think of this girl in an abusive household, who grew up to age 14 before learning how to speak. It seriously crippled her intellectual development, so much that she never became fully independent.
Think about it: how would not having a name stunt a person’s growth?
Below them lay the alluvial plains–miles of silt and dirt vomited from the mountains over the passing of countless centuries.
I think I intended this to be a line in the first chapter of Worlds Away from Home…and unless I’m mistaken, something very similar to this passage made it into the book.
The detritus of life from which we extract the fossil record of our memories
Another passage meant to evoke something in the reader. I think I wrote it when I was cleaning out my apartment shortly before leaving for DC. It certainly makes me think of a dirty, junk-filled room.
And that’s enough for now. This basically takes us up to January 2010, when I left for the BYU Washington Seminar program. All the other ideas in this notebook have a decidedly civic/political bent to them, so stay tuned!
This past week was pretty crazy. Tests, papers, homework…BLEARGH. Less than satisfying. What’s more, I was starting to get cabin fever from being in Provo so long. Every day, doing the same old thing, going the same old places, seeing the same old sights…
What an awesome weekend! Ben had brought a couple of dutch ovens and tons and TONS of good food! Dinner was much better than the stereotypical hot dogs and smores (though we did have smores in the morning). We had cobler, sweet and sour chicken, and fried rice for dinner–awesome! Plus, it was fun just to hang out around the campfire and talk. Good times.
Got up early, restarted the campfire, and we had a good breakfast–biscuits and gravy, and then smores a little while later. Good times. We took off a little later and went up to Arches National Park to do some hiking.
This was my first time at Arches, and despite some problems with the parking, it was a lot of fun. The desert around Arches reminds me a lot of Petra–lots of sandy red rocks in weird formations, making for relatively easy climbing. In fact, the whole trip reminded me a lot of Jordan and Petra.