An Expungable Offense: Behind the Story

It’s my belief that good authors steal from everyone and everything around them. For example, here’s the closing lines from one of my favorite movies:

TV News Anchor:

“In a surprise announcement, the Republican National Committee has revealed it is bankrupt! A spokesman for the party said they had plenty of money in their accounts last week, but today they just don’t know where the money has gone. But not everybody’s going begging. Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the United Negro College Fund announced record earnings this week, due mostly to large anonymous donations.”

You might not recognize the source of the quote and at 32 years old, that’s definitely fair. Still, it’s close to the top on my list of most underrated movies of all time, Sneakers , released in 1992 with an overall incredible cast, but top billing goes to Robert Redford.

If you know the movie, you can recognize the germ of the idea: the little guy manages to swindle the big, corrupt corporations.

At the time of the original writing, I had also read Scott Walker’s little book, Daily Story Seeds. The book is essentially a collection of story-starters, many inspired by newsfeeds and turned into narrative launch pads for the readers’ imaginations. It reminded me of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris van Allsburg which did something similar with art and a single line of text. I thought both were very cool and made my imagination feel like a fireworks show.

But then I learned (call it two years of writing experience) that most readers really want complete stories: something with a beginning and an end, and weren’t necessarily interested in creating the “what happens next” narrative for themselves. They didn’t want to be left hanging.

So I shelved Tom Randall, but never forgot him. And recently, casting about for the best story to send out this month, I came back to him. I wondered if there was a way to work the photo itself into the narrative, and not have it be simply a picture of the narrative? And I realized what had to happen next. Tom wasn’t going to survive.

In a way, “An Expungable Offense” reminds my of my first story, "Windows to the Soul," where technology defines us so completely, that without it, we cease to exist in a very practical sense. So here I am, near the end of two years of producing short stories, and have come full circle. It’s taken me two years to come back to where I started, but the beauty in that, is thinking of all that I have learned in that time and all the stories that have filled the time between these bookends.

As always, thanks for reading.
—Phillip