Today, we do writing science.
Let’s start with a short, simple story and crank up the absurdity bit by bit until it reaches DANGEROUS levels, to see how far we can push the limits of understandability!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over how far we can push the levels of absurdity in a story.
Watch what we did here, or scroll down for highlights.
How Absurd Can a Story Be?
- We watch shows quite often that are pretty absurd, like Adventure Time (with a shapeshifting dog) or Ren and Stimpy (where most episodes have different settings/rules)
- But what about when you’re WRITING a story? And what if you want it to be SERIOUS and not a kid’s comedy?
- The question: how absurd can you make a story before it becomes too hard for a reader to follow?
- It’s an interesting question, and to answer it let’s do some writing science: we’ll take a short story, then slowly make it more and more absurd, until we reach a limit
- In order to make it progressively more absurd, we have to deduce what elements we can crank up the absurdity on, and by how much
- So let’s go over four story elements, and the levels of absurdity within each of them
#1. The Characters (LV0 = Normal humans)
- LV1: Animal Farm by George Orwell
- POV of nonhumans with human thoughts/emotions: pig, spider, other farm animals
- LV2: Nutshell by Ian McEwan
- POV of something alive but doesn’t think like a human: a fetus
- LV3: The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer
- POV of a nonliving thing: a 5,000-year-old Sumerian bowl
#2. The Setting (LV0 = Normal Earth)
- LV1: In the Tall Grass by Stephen King/Joe Hill
- Normal setting with a twist: a regular field that cannot be escaped from
- LV2: The Giver by Lois Lowry
- Familiar but strange setting: our world but without color/sun
- LV3: The Integral Trees by Larry Niven
- Completely alien setting: civilization that exists in free fall around a neutron star
#3. The Rules of the World (LV0 = Our world’s rules)
- LV1: Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
- Similar to our world’s rules but with plausible twist: brain-encoding
- LV2: A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge
- Comparable to our world’s rules with big differences: “cheese tunnels” and buying emotions
- LV3: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
- Completely alien to our world’s rules: a massive grizzly bear hovers over the planet and rules everything, and a sea-anemone named Borne grows larger as he learns new things
#4. The Plot (LV0 = Normal, logical plot)
- LV1: No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
- Normal but with small logical bump: people in Hell can leave any time, but they don’t
- LV2: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Understandable but many logical bumps: two people endlessly sit and wait for “Godot”
- LV3: Perdido Street Station by China Mievelle
- Completely alien plot: a scientist with a half-insect girlfriend takes on a bird client and creates a caterpillar that feeds on drugs which turns into a giant hallucination-inducing moth and he needs to enlist the help of a multidimensional spider to defeat it
THE ABSURDITY LEVEL GUIDE
(Totaling together all levels)
- LV 0 — A normal story
- LV 1-2 — Typical fantasy/sci-fi
- LV 3-4 — A little weird or absurd (Inside Out, Monsters Inc.)
- LV 5-6 — Weird but still mostly makes sense (Bee Movie, Hitchhiker’s Guide)
- LV 7-9 — Only palatable to a niche audience (Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive)
- LV 9-12 — ???
After going over the different elements and levels of absurdity, we then took a simple short story, and slowly made it more and more absurd in rewrites, to see how far we could push it.
Here’s the original LV0 story:
The only thing getting me through my shift was the promise of apple crisp. For seven and half hours I slaved away at Barnes and Noble, reshelving books, cashing out Karens, and helping old people find “that book with the blue cover.” No single task was exceptionally painful by itself, but death by a thousand paper cuts is far more tortuous than a clean lop through the neck.
One thought kept my legs moving and my lips smiling: apple crisp. Tom and I had gone out for our one-year anniversary dinner to the Golden Corral last night, and I’d had apple crisp for dessert. But I was so full of mac and cheese, cornbread, and chicken dumplings that I couldn’t even finish a single spoonful. It was a good problem to have though, since the greatest spice is time itself. Particularly time spent in the coolness of the fridge.
That’s where it had been marinating all day, inside the styrofoam container, waiting for me to come home to it. I’d almost been tempted to gobble it down for breakfast, but the pre-work jitters always make it hard to keep down anything heavier than toast. The last thing I wanted was to be vomiting in the ladies’ room during a morning Dr. Seuss read-along in the juvenile section next door.
But no matter, because finally it was time to go home. The last wayward book shelved, I moaned a goodbye to the manager as she locked up, and slumped through the dark parking lot into my car. As I drove, I could hear the hum of the store’s halogen lights still reverberating in my head. Hunched over, I gripped the torn-up steering wheel, pretending the static from the broken radio didn’t bother me. For the first time, it wasn’t hard. A warm shield of promised apple crisp surrounded and protected me.
I pulled into our complex’s parking lot and trekked through the thick night to our building’s door. For the first time in what felt like forever, a little whistle came out my lips as I unlocked the entrance and strode to our apartment door. That extra marinating time was going to pay off soon.
“Hey babe,” Tom said as I opened the door. “How was work?”
He was standing on the border of the living room and kitchen, scraping an empty styrofoam box clean with his fork and licking it clean.
“I had no idea we had leftovers from last night,” he said. “Nothing better than second-day apple crisp!”
First, we cranked up the CHARACTERS to LV3, by making it from the point of view of a fork.
Here’s what we wrote:
The only thing getting me through my shift was the promise of apple crisp. Penetrating my prongs through its crispy crust, forking my way into its moist, gooey center, the sweetly scented crumbles flaking off like drops of blood as my female human brought me up to her mouth and licked the crisp right off me. Just the thought of carrying the warm, microwaved apple goodness into her sweaty, salivating mouth filled me sharp, gluttonous tines.
For seven hours I slaved away at the Barnes and Noble cafe, piercing cakes and picking up muffin crumbs. It’s not that they were bad, but merely unworthy. No cold bread nor pastry could compare to the warm apple crisp that awaited my metallic body tonight.
I knew it was coming because my female human and her husband celebrated their one-year anniversary at Cracker Barrel last night. Tom the Spoon had done a good job with his head scooping up mac and cheese, while I put on a good face as I was stabbed into cornbread and chicken dumplings. When the hot apple crisp arrived at the end, I wasn’t sweating — it was just the condensation from the hot steam that seeped from the delicacy. I hoped there wouldn’t be any… misunderstandings. But the humans boxed it up and took it home.
At first I was devastated, but then I realized it was a good problem to have, though, because now I can savor the moment to come. Time is the greatest spice, especially time spent in the coolness of the fridge. That’s where it had been marinating all day, inside the styrofoam container, waiting for my female human to bring me home from her cafe shift so I could fork it into her mouth.
Finally it was time to go home. Early, for once! My female human asked if she could head out early for her anniversary, and with that, we were gone. She slipped me in her pocket and darkness surrounded me as we drove back to the apartment. Usually I’m scared of the dark, but tonight, the promise of apple crisp surrounded and protected me.
The car stopped, and there was the familiar bounce as we went up the apartment stairs, then the jangle of keys and the opening creak of the door.
Followed by something very unfamiliar. A scream. Then a jump, launching me out of the pocket and clanging on the kitchen floor. Looking up, I gasped when I saw it too.
My male human was sitting with an unfamiliar female human at the table, feeding her the apple crisp. Only the skeleton of its once glorious deliciousness remained, and it was being carried from the cleaned-out styrofoam container by Tom the spoon!
“Oh,” my male human said. “You’re home early.”
Betrayal. This household would only use chopsticks from this day forward.
That wasn’t too bad, but then we cranked the SETTING up to LV3 too, for a total of LV6 absurdity. We changed it from Barnes and Noble to The Garden of Eatin’, a pit stop between Heaven and Hell.
Here’s what we wrote:
The only thing getting me through my shift was the promise of apple crisp. Penetrating my prongs through its crispy crust, forking my way into its moist, gooey center, the sweetly scented crumbles flaking off like drops of blood as Eve brought me up to her mouth and licked the crisp right off me. Just the thought of carrying the warm, forbidden apple goodness into her sweaty, salivating mouth filled me sharp, gluttonous tines.
For seven hours I slaved away at the Garden of Eatin’, an all-you-can-eat buffet at the truck stop off the road to Purgatory between Heaven and Hell, being stabbed into stale lasagna and figs. Piercing each cold food item just made me anticipate the warm apple crisp that awaited my metallic body tonight.
I knew it was coming because Adam and Eve had been talking last night about finally ordering from Devilishly Good, the local competition with Uber Eats. They wanted to try the one dish that had been forbidden for them to eat: the apple crisp of knowledge.
Devilishly Good was the only place in the Garden that was willing to take the risk of serving the apple crisp. Something about its owner Stan being Gad’s disowned son, but he couldn’t find another job anywhere else, so he hired him on in the truck stop. Stan was a hell of a salesman, devilishly clever, with a tongue so fast you’d think he had two of them.
Details aside, I couldn’t wait to shovel that warm apple crisp into Eve’s mouth. I’d never bathed in anything like it before, and I was looking forward to the new experience. Tom the Spoon, my boyfriend, just laughed and said it probably wouldn’t be that different than blueberry crisp.
But I wouldn’t have to wonder for long, because finally it was time to go home. Early, for once! Eve asked if she could head out early, keeping her intentions hidden with giggles, and with that, we were gone. She slipped me in her pocket and darkness surrounded me as we walked back to the tree house, the songs of singing flowers and bright rays of neverending sunshine sparkling all around us.
We stopped at the bottom of the tree, where it smelled of rosemary and lavender and cherry blossom and cinnamon and all good things, then came the familiar jangle of climbing up the tree house ladder.
Followed by something very unfamiliar. A scream. Then a jump, launching me out of the pocket and clanging on the tree house floor. Looking up, I gasped when I saw it too.
Adam was sitting with a different female human, Lilith, feeding her the apple crisp. Its styrofoam box was stamped with the smiling, thumbs-up demon logo of Devilishly Good; they’d ordered it without us. Only the skeleton of its once glorious deliciousness remained, and it was being carried from the cleaned-out styrofoam container by Tom the spoon!
“Oh,” Adam said. “You’re home early, Eve.”
Betrayal. Anger thundered through me as Gad’s voice thundered above us in the sky.
“Oh geez,” he boomed across eternity. “Look what you’ve done and gone. Now I’ve got to, like, banish you forever?”
As the whip cream angels came down to tear us away from the Garden and to our new mortal home, I hated Adam and Lilith for what they’d done. But even more than them, I hated Tom the Spoon. At least he was being banished having felt the warm baptism of crisp brush along his body. Me, I was cold as sin.
We then cranked up the RULES of the story to LV3, making this a world where silverware used other silverware, for a total absurdity of LV9.
Here’s what we wrote:
The only thing getting me through my shift was the promise of apple crisp. Penetrating my prongs through its crispy crust, forking my way into its moist, gooey center, the sweetly scented crumbles flaking off like drops of blood as Eve the Goldfork scooped me up on top her prongs, and was subsequently brought up to the next level of eating utensil ascendence. Just the thought of being part of the chain that carried the warm, forbidden apple goodness filled me sharp, gluttonous tines.
For seven hours I slaved away at the Garden of Eatin’, an all-you-can-eat buffet at the truck stop off the road to Purgatory between Heaven and Hell. My job was to be Eve’s fork as she shoveled food up the silverware hierarchy. She was a goldware, and I was a silverware, and the bronzeware fork brought food up to me. I’d heard that tinware brought food to him, and zincware brought food to her, but down further than that things got murky. Utensil philosophers had long debated where the wares began, but so far nothing beyond the woodwares had been concretely proven.
Either way, somehow the food eventually made it to me, and I passed it on to Eve, who passed it on to the diamondware, who then passed it onto utensils above those whose makeups I could not even comprehend. It was a neverending chain of utensils singing together in a universal harmony.
Piercing each cold food during my shift item just made me anticipate the warm apple crisp that awaited my metallic body tonight. I knew it was coming because Eve and Adam had been talking last night about finally ordering from Devilishly Good, the local competition with Uber Eats. They wanted to try the one dish that had been forbidden for them to take a stab at: the apple crisp of knowledge.
Devilishly Good was the only place in the Garden that was willing to take the risk of serving the apple crisp. Something about its owner Stan the Bento Box being Gad’s disowned son, but he couldn’t find another job anywhere else, so he hired him on in the truck stop. Apparently Stan was a hell of a salesman, devilishly clever, with a tongue so fast you’d think he had two of them.
Details aside, I couldn’t wait to shovel that warm apple crisp up to Eve. I’d never bathed in anything like it before, and I was looking forward to the new experience. Tom the Spoon, my boyfriend, just laughed and said it probably wouldn’t be that different than blueberry crisp.
But I wouldn’t have to wonder for long, because finally it was time to go home. Early, for once! Eve asked her diamondware boss if she could head out early, keeping her intentions hidden with giggles, and with that we were gone. She slipped me through her prongs and bounced back to the cup-car to drive home to the tree-bowl. All the way back, colorful plastic spork flowers and bright rays of microwave sunshine sparkled all around us.
We stopped the cup-car at the bottom of the tree-bowl, where it smelled of spicy cheese and nacho chips and guacamole and salsa and all the good things that come in a Superbowl chip dip bowl. Then came the familiar jangle of Eve hopping up the tree house ladder.
Followed by something very unfamiliar. A scream. Then a jump, launching me out of Eve’s prongs and clanging on the tree-bowl’s ceramic floor. Looking up, I gasped when I saw it too.
Adam was sitting with a different goldenware, Lilith the Goldenknife, both of them scooping up apple crisp to their diamondware superiors with their own silverware. Its styrofoam box was stamped with the smiling, thumbs-up demon logo of Devilishly Good; they’d ordered it without us. Only the skeleton of its once glorious deliciousness remained, and it was being carried from the cleaned-out styrofoam container by Tom the spoon!
“Oh,” Adam said. “You’re home early, Eve.”
Betrayal. Anger thundered through me as Gad’s voice thundered above us in the sky.
“Oh geez,” he boomed across eternity. His Transcendentware body glowed so bright above us, we had to look away. “Look what you’ve done and gone. Now I’ve got to, like, banish you forever?”
As the pearlware angels came down to tear us away from the Garden of Eatin’ and to our new mortal home, I hated Adam and Lilith for what they’d done. But even more than them, I hated Tom the Spoon. At least he was being banished having felt the warm baptism of apple crisp brush along his body. Me, I was cold as sin.
Finally, it was time to go where no writing scientists had gone before. We blasted the PLOT to LV3 as well, for a total absurdity of LV12, the maximum.
Read it for yourself:
The only thing getting me through my shift was the promise of apple crisp. Apple crisp hadn’t existed in the Garden of Eatin’ since before Stan died, attempting to create it. It had long since faded into lore and myth among the warepeople, especially popular among the silverware and goldware, while the diamondware laughed at the peasant talk and the bronzeware were too busy trying to eke out a living to worry about children’s tales.
But today, I was going to change that. All I needed to do was go back in time to when Stan created the forbidden apple crisp, and take a bite, forking it up the utensil hierarchy until it reached the unknown very top, bringing down the entire tower.
It was impossible to time travel by going up the utensil hierarchy, but there were no rules against going down it. So when my superior, Eve the Goldenfork, set me down during her own forking session, I took the chance and dived down a level to my own subordinate: Jimothy the bronzefork.
I’d never seen the bronze realm myself, I merely scooped Jimothy the same way that Eve scooped me. Now that I was here though, I wished I’d never had to come. The bronzewares moped about, most of them suffering from prongile dysfunction, their droopy tines as flaccid as fish tubes.
At first they accosted me, accusing me of trespassing where I did not belong. But when I told them my goal, and how the apple crisp of knowledge would solve their insolvency, I was given one of their own subordinates to continue my journey: Simon the zincfork.
I leaped into him and my senses knew no familiarity. There was nothing in this place except the three swaying zincfork towers and foggy expanse. The poor low-metal souls who I had barely known in my earlier life, and who I had pitied, now stood before me as towering monuments to insanity.
Trying to speak with them was futile. The zincfolk knew no language, only work, and I was disturbing that for them. They trembled with primitive anger, and one of them started to fall before me. It crashed to the ashen earth, bursting into a flock of blackbirds that dissipated to steam, leaving behind only its own utensil, the humble woodware Stephen.
As the two remaining zincforks cried to the beyond for their loss, I leaped into Stephen, hoping that I was close to the end. What terrors awaited, I was unprepared for.
The next level was nothing. A void of whiteness and whispers. Only a single bento box lay bleeding in the emptiness, cold and dead for centuries. I touched it and I knew it was Stan himself, the bearer of the apple crisp. With him no longer in his bento realm, no matter how far I traveled, I could never bring him back. The apple crisp had died here, with him, at the subatomic utensil level.
A voice from behind me. I turned to see Tom the Silverspoon, my boyfriend, standing there. He was all of America, and smelled of spicy cheese and chips and Coca Cola and tanks.
“Sometimes,” he spoke to me, “what you’re supposed to be doing isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing.”
He stabbed me with his spoon-head, drawing blood across my chest. With what little I had left, I ran to nowhere. The void crept on for eternity, Tom and Stan growing to small dots behind me before disappearing. I was out of breath and running out of life.
Until I tripped and fell over the edge of forever. I thought I was going to clang to my death, but something soft and warm saved me. It was crunchy and crusty beneath me, with just the right amount of gooey goodness.
I’d landed in an endless field of apple crisp. My journey had only started, I needed to return, but I lay there for a moment and closed my eyes, letting myself be baptized in the sweet, sticky chunks.
If this was the beginning of my journey, then why did I feel cold as sin?
Honestly, I was surprised to see that the story still retained some semblance of readability. In fact, all of the stories were pretty understandable. A big part of that was probably being upfront from the very start about what kind of disbelief the reader would have to suspend, and keeping it similar throughout.
Our conclusion of this experiment: it doesn’t matter how absurd your story is, so long as you’re honest about it and uniform with it. Like most things in writing, it doesn’t matter how weird it is, it just matters how good it is.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso