Special Coverage... True Story©: The Process

True Story©, The process…

                I have been asked – well, once – just where in the hell I come up with my story-a-week presentation.

It is REALLY quite funny, actually.

Well first thing's first, it was never actually supposed to become a "thing," so much as me being silly in a FB post back in September, which grew to "Phlip, you should do this every week!" which grew to "Phlip you need a blog," which became "wait, I have a blog!"  and voila, I was out of retirement.

Now that we have established how this became a thing, back to business...

I generally go about my every day just looking at the world as only I can see it and wait for SOMETHING that happens that I can wrap a story around.  Then it becomes a multi-part process.

1 – Wait for something interesting, funny, bombastic or otherwise outstanding to happen.  It doesn’t even have to happen to ME, it just has to happen for me to see or hear.  This is where being a people watcher comes in handy.  I don't need to know someone's story, I don't even really care since I am about to make some shit up for my own amusement.

2 – Relate said item to something I HAVE done, seen, said or experienced.  This is the important part, since it is a requirement to lend plausibility to the story, the best stories are the ones where it is pretty hard to tell where I stop talking about what happened and start bullshitting.

3 (this should probably be 2a) – Remembering the item that actually did take place and thinking “damn, what would I have done or said if I knew then what I know now to make that funny?”

4 – ^^^ ADD THAT ELEMENT!!!  This is where I am allowed to live vicariously through my imagination.  I can have sex with who I want, I can commit whatever crime I want, I have only the passive agreement to be bound by what I am able to think at the time I sit down at the keyboard.

…  now this is where it gets interesting.  Everything above took place before I am seated at a computer.  If anything to this point, I MIGHT have pulled my phone and drafted an email with a blurb to remind me to work on it when I am sitting down, but not a word has been typed yet.

5 – I will spend a period of time of 2 to 6 hours directly daydreaming the story and how I will set up, develop and resolve it within 1500 words.  This time frame is the time between my morning shower and my lunch break.  The most intense development is on lunch, normally in the last 20 minutes of such.  If I spend more than an hour typing then I have probably overcooked the stew and scrap it.

6 – I hate, hate, HATE to not be able to go from start to finish on a story in one sitting.  At/near the end of my lunch break (sometimes on the day before a post is to be up), I sit down and rain man the post.  No notes, no plans, no blueprint.  I just start typing.  I introduce the story with a concept and then dig right into the telling of the story.  Not a one to this point have I approached with a fully developed plan, not even the two that were actually (mostly) all the way true.

7 – I post a paragraph or two of the post to my FB wall, enough to get my friends interested enough to click the link and come to the blog and read the rest of the story.  Then they hate me for feeling a little dirty for laughing at my immature humor and share with their friends to not be alone in that feeling.  Then we do it all again the following Thursday morning between 7:30 and 8:12am.

With all that said, know that anything you say, do, post or even think could find its way into one of my humorous stories.