Constraints

I like to write stories. Sometimes, just to take my mind off my troubles, I weave the stories in my head as I try to fall asleep. (Yes, I can hear you now, ‘They must be really boring stories!” Oh shut up! But I digress.)The fun thing about them is that none of the characters, though lightly patterned after bits of people that I know, really exist. This way, I can have anyone do anything. Go on adventures, fall in love, make love, kill an enemy; it doesn’t matter.Until now.A while ago, I reconnected with a dear friend on one of the social networking sites. We had lost touch thirty years ago, due to a falling out I had with a mutual friend.Being the silly person that I am, I wrote a fictionalized account of how we first met and posted it on her account. (based solely on what I remembered about her 30 years ago and our mutual liking of Star Trek). To my surprise, she added several paragraphs to the story. Over the last few months, each of us has added bits to the story, based solely on what the other person wrote. It’s turning out to be very fun, since neither of us knows where the story is going.And yet, there are constraints, for I know where the story is not going.Like I said, when I write a story, it is about fictional characters. This time the characters are us, but in a fictional setting. So I cannot let my character do things in the story that I would not do in real life. And that’s the rub. For if anyone else were to read the story, they would soon wonder, ‘When are these two gonna admit their feelings for each other and spend the night together, locked in passion?’ Ah, but that can’t happen, the story has constraints .I have the story in my head and avoid the obvious traps. The elephant in the room. If these two people are stuck aboard a crippled starship for almost a year, they will either end up falling in love, or one shoves the other out the airlock! And I have to dance between those two extremes and still make the story plausible. At least I have a fun story to think about as I drift off to sleep at night.