What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Douglas Adams

At the same time my husband and I were in between books in a fantasy trilogy, waiting for the next one to arrive at our library, we were going on vacation. We needed a book, so I chose "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," one he hadn't read yet and one I felt it was culturally imperative that he did. That, and it's a fun book to read.

He was hesitant because he had not enjoyed the latest movie, which I also thought came across as lame. I promised him, and I promise you, that the books are much better.

We finished The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (by Douglas Adams, by the way) in half a week. For the record, we only read the first book, not its sequels.

The thing that makes this book a classic in science fiction is the narration, I'm sure of it. I mean, read this beginning:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has--or rather had--a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

It could be rewritten to be something like this:

There is a small, yellow sun in the western spiral arm of the galaxy, and a little, blue-green planet populated with humans orbited it at ninety-eight million miles. The planet had a problem: Most of the people living on it were unhappy. Many solutions were suggested, but most of them involved money and didn't work. Thus, many of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable.

Which says the same thing, right? It's also shorter, which is supposed to be a good thing, conventionally speaking.

But it's not nearly as interesting or fun to read. Now, each author has their own voice, and that voice can gain an accent, if you will, depending on the genre or the voice of the character, if written in first or third person limited. This is Adams's voice.

I used to have a digital sticky note on my laptop that said "Write like me, and genre will come." My writing should be better if I just sound like me, basically, and I will find stories to tell. Well, I was reading this book and realized that my sass and absurdity may work in my favor if I just let it out like Adams did.

While trying to go to sleep, I gave it some thought. What sort of story would suit a sassy, weird narrator? I wanted the main character to be a regular person, so they could look on the world with the necessary sass and so the absurd things would be even more funny (prime example, Arthur Dent, the book's main character). So in my mind, I invented a 20-something woman who works as an executive assistant (my current day job, easy to use) an a metropolitan area. The next step is to give the character desire. What do they need? Arthur Dent wants normality and for his house not to be bulldozed. Eventually, he just wants to stay alive. My character, I decided, was single and LDS and thus wanted to get married eventually (it's a cultural thing); get a different, better job; and ... here is where I stagnated.

Because those are boring things that would give me a boring, cliche story. What was it that gave The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy its original spark? The Earth gets blown up.

I couldn't think of a story that would suit a sassy narrator well that didn't involve an inciting incident (event that sparks the plot) that was so devastating it was absurd. Try to think of one and let me know if you can. I couldn't.

Without Earth blowing up, this book would just be characters getting drunk and hating on bureaucracy. Not nearly as fun.

So now we have an executive assistant who is LDS, wants to get married eventually, hates her job, and just had her city bombed during an invasion, with her and her office aquarium fish as the sole survivors. Or she just watched her boss turn into a zombie. Or she's been kidnapped by Tibetan monks and has to fight her way out to safety before the monks or cold get to her.

Then a sassy narrator could really shine.

As for the absurd part, I realized while grocery shopping that stories with absurd events in them have a wild card built into them. Examples: The Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The board game in Jumanji. Book magic in Inkheart. Foo in Levan Thumps. The rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. The wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The wild card is a prop or gateway thrown in there that allows the author's imagination to run wild. Anything is now possible, thanks to that one item/place/person/thing. The Heart of Gold turns two missiles into a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale. The Jumanji board game sends wild animals through the house and eats Robin Williams. Book magic in Inkheart allows characters to come to life, whichever ones happen to arrive. Thanks to Foo, a living tree is turned into a living toothpick, who then splits farther into the good and evil sides of himself. And we all know about Alice in Wonderland  and Narnia (I like the lamppost in the middle of the forest. That was a nice touch).

I haven't finished thinking about this story, but in case you also think this is a good idea, have at it. You'll need an attitude, some humor, a bizarre inciting incident and a wild card to let your imagination go wherever it pleases.

Best of luck.