Fiction Factory

Well today's been a good day. Usually I have many more seizures during school days, but as of the time of this writing I've only had 8. I'll probably have more later, but I think there won't be many. I just ordered an art book for my birthday. Art can give me so many ideas and inspiration. When you look closely at art sometimes you can pull out some wonderful emotions and ideas. MC Escher is my favorite artist, his work is really awesome. “The Bent Studio” is a story I based on art I looked at. Its something I based on the artwork of a good friend of mine and I gave it to him for Christmas. Now none of the paintings of the artist match my friends and the story isn't taken from his art. But the mood and tone for the story is from them. Here would be his deviant art page: http://kirigakurenohaku.deviantart.com/gallery/

(He's a bit weird by the way)

What I mean about tone is that I looked at his art, and tried to pull out the mood inside it. Have you heard the expression that writers have a “voice” in the way they write. I tried to change my voice to be similar to the ideas and feeling I got from some of his art. I tried to take his style of art, and make it the style of the story, but the plot isn't taken from his art. It's a bit hard to explain.

Now today's story has nothing to do with his art, but is still pretty good and I think you'll enjoy it.

Fiction Factory

        A massive machine churned shining metal bowls onto a conveyor belt in a steady rhythm. An old man looked at the conveyor belt with both happiness and sadness. This man's name was Alex and this was his last day at the factory before retirement. Despite how much the work there bored him he knew he would miss its familiarity during retirement. He wondered how many stories he helped complete during his employment at the factory.

        Each bowl was a story. At the start of the line one of his coworkers ran a machine that poured a bubbling, blue liquid into the bowls. The liquid was the setting of the story, prepped by the factory to be consistent and clean.

        The next machine placed the plot in the bowls. The plots were thin, plastic looking walls that controlled the flow of everything in the story. The factory had a bit of fame for not having any holes in their plot walls. The walls also had great pacing between each other.

        Alex worked close to the end of the belt. He took the characters, large, golden balls of varying textures and sizes, and threw them into the bowls. The characters flowed through the setting between the walls of the plot until they reached their destinations. He was supposed to throw them in a random, but Alex sometimes picked the ones he wanted first. His most important job was to wrap his hands tightly around the characters and make sure they were nice and round. He threw out any characters that were too flat. The factory had very strict quality control protocols.

        After he put in the characters another machine put a metal top on the bowl and welded it shut. The last worker used a machine to wrap the story up and put it in a cardboard shipping container. For hours this would repeat without fail.

        But that day the shipment of creativity, the oil that made the machines run, was late. When the workers realized this they panicked. It had been years since a shipment was late. Within minutes they were running out of supplies. They had to pull out their backups.

        Clichés started to be put in the stories. The quality of the stories rapidly fell, but they had to fill the order. Alex's boss looked out his office window at his employees. The boss frowned, but didn't feel angry his employees. He feared for the complaints from customers that would be coming to his office for weeks to come.

       Then a terrible, horrible cliché was accidentally dropped into one of the machines. The machine started rumbling and screeching as the cliché fell through its cracks. Alex knew it could break at any moment and its engine would most likely explode. But he didn't run from the machine. Instead he went to the machine. Despite it being his last day at it he still had an instinctual devotion to his factory and more importantly, his coworkers that would be hurt in the blast.

        Instead of running away he went to the machine and risked his fingers by plunging his right arm into the machine. Over the years he learned everything about every part of the machines. He managed to wrap his hand around the cliché and pluck it from the machine.

        All the workers in the factory cheered. They shut off all the machines, mechanics checked for further problems and once the next shipment of creativity came in they continued to work. And at exactly five o' clock that night Alex said goodbye to all his coworkers and left for home, his retirement fund now completely open to him.