Story scenario, free to good home
I have an idea for a short story, but if I wrote it, it would probably turn out as a really lame ripoff of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Plus I can’t think of a plot. So I’m hereby offering it up to anyone who wants to have a go at it, if anyone reading this is interested.
Background: I travel from and to SEPTA’s Suburban Station on workdays. Like a lot of underground rail stations, it’s confusing as all get-out, because you never know which direction you’re facing. I can orient myself by the locations of tracks, but one side of the main concourse looks more or less like the other side, and the signage is less than helpful.* My inability to distinguish right from left doesn’t help, either. For this reason, there’s one exit that I first discovered at random, realized was exactly the right one for my usual bus stop, and then couldn’t find again for a month. I finally undertook a determined search and memorized where it is.
So here’s the story idea: a subway commuter keeps getting lost in the station, and keeps looking for the right exit but getting not quite the right one instead. Perhaps the station is unusually disorienting, and the commuter is new to the city. And one day, after returning from work — maybe after his or her usual train gets rerouted to a different track — s/he finds a staircase, a little out of the way, that s/he has never noticed before, but it looks like it might lead to the right exit. Instead, it goes to another place, maybe another dimension, entirely … and here’s where my deficiencies as a would-be fantasy author appear, because I have no idea what happens next.
So there you have it. Anyone want to adopt it?
* For the love of God, SEPTA, would it kill you to be consistent in
labeling which exits lead to which intersections? Why does one sign
read "18th & Market" while other signs say only "Arch Street"
or "17th Street"? 17th and what?
hmm. something is tickling in my preconscious. H.G. Wells? A green door in a stone wall, glimpsed from a bus? But it’s like that stop of yours; it won’t come clear.
Oh no, now that (possibly) H. G. Wells story is going to bug me until I track it down. Time for a little research.
I think O. Henry also wrote a green-door story (entitled, as I recall, “The Green Door”), but it was much less fantastic.
Hmm … I leave from Suburban Station every day as well. I’ve always wanted to do a story about the people who worked at Passero’s coffee (now closed) and spent their entire days in this subterranean nether world.
The Wells story is ‘The Door in the Wall’; it’s online at several places, for instance here.
In your story outline you say you’re not sure what happens next. What happens next is the key, of course; Wells’s door is an escape to a better place and the narrator rues the fact that he can no longer locate it. I’ve always assumed Neverwhere is about anxieties of urban living, really, and is, for all its colour, a pretty horrible place. Which way would you be tempted to go, I wonder? Utopia or Dys?
(Great blog, by the way; I got here via a recommendation of Amardeep Singh on his blog.)
I think the fun would be in the repetition: first to start with the irritating quotidian confusion, then with finding the exit that’s *exactly the right one* only the world isn’t quite exactly the right one: our protagonist — Alice, say — happily goes home, only her husband is suddenly and inexplicably no longer a vegetarian. The world just feels oddly different, and so the next day Alice feels superstitious about taking that *exactly the right* exit again, and takes another one. And the husband’s a vegetarian again but the cats are outdoor cats instead of indoor cats, wearing collars when they never did before. Repeat with variations and feeling of disorientation until Alice can’t not take the train and try to find her way back to the place when everything was the way it originally was. If she could remember how it all originally was.
The day before yesterday I drove through Philadelphia and longed to live there once again. Now your words take me to those subterranean systems where I cut my big city teeth. (Do they still have that skating rink down there?)
My haunt was 18th and Arch, but now the building where I lived no longer exists. They paved that paradise and put up a parking lot.
At any rate, I envy you and your daily opportunity to get lost in the bowels of Philadelphia.
Adam: thanks! I don’t know if I’d necessarily go for utopian or dys-; I’m more interested in just “other”. (I like Mike’s suggestion. The repetition factor was one I hadn’t thought of.)
Chris, did you see they just opened a new coffee place? Except it’s differently named and doesn’t seem to be up and running. I kind of wonder about what it’s like for those sushi guys, myself.
Betsy, glad you liked! I’ve never encountered the subterranean skating rink, but I may just not have been looking in the right places.
I wouldn’t have a clue where to take this story (but I like Mike’s suggestion) although I think I could write the opening after having been ‘lost’ in a Paris subway/train station last summer, unable to get back to where I had checked my luggage for the day, suddenly not remembering a word of a language I am conversant in. Or so it seemed, since every directional sign brought me back to where I started.
Drifted in to your blog via links to the Poetry Meme. Will return again.
So you’re the originator of the poetry meme! Nice to meet you.
Yes, I did see that — Juan Valdez is the name. I think it’s a chain out of NY.