Casting Seeds on Barren Soil
Larry Niven tells a story – a true story, he says – of a burglary in his mother’s house. The thief was fresh out of prison, and obviously unready to deal with the pressures of free life. Not only did he return immediately to a life of crime, but he came unprepared. He stole a pillowcase to carry his loot, and made a half-hearted swipe at the jewelry box, drank some liquor, and generally farted around before leaving. The jewelry he threw away, reasoning that anything that easily accessible must be fake. Police found the (quite real and valuable – Niven’s grandfather made a fortune in oil) jewelry, and the thief shortly afterwards. Niven says it makes a hell of a story, and admits to being unable to mine it for original fiction, despite several attempts. Gracious in his frustration, he offers the tale to any writer who feels he can make a story of it.
I’m experiencing the very same trouble with a song dubbed “the Hungarian suicide song,” for its connection to a string of suicides – lyrics quoted in suicide notes, primarily, and the eventual suicide of the composer. The song was good enough to inspire several translations, appearing in America as “Gloomy Sunday.” It was a popular lament for a lost lover, just the thing for a smoky jazz lounge and Billie Holiday.
There’s more, but of dubious authenticity. Several governments, including Hungary and Great Britain, are supposed to have banned the song, for fear it would inspire further suicides. (I guess the charges of heavy metal leading to Satanism are just part of a long tradition.) Descriptions of the composer’s suicide have a strong scent of urban legend. The more credulous you’re willing to be, the better the story gets. And, since inspiration need not bow to historical fact, a song that drives people to suicide is a terrific seed for a story, or, in my case, a role-playing adventure.
Unfortunately, that’s as far as I can get: a song that drives people to suicide. With a hook like that, an adventure ought to craft itself. Maybe the original recording, far deadlier than commercial versions, is about to go into mass production, and our heroes have to stop the printing and erase back copies. Or maybe the players have to look into a string of spectacular suicides with no more in common than scraps of paper with lyrics on them, and have to recognize and find an antidote for a song that kills. Maybe the protagonists hope to use the song as an untraceable weapon, and need to find a way to get their well-protected enemy humming it to himself. See? Loads of possibilities. And I just can’t get the idea off the ground.
So off it goes to a text file I keep full of ideas to build adventures upon. There’s about two dozen in there; some are useful ideas that only wait their turn at the next convention, but most are just stubborn, like the green tomatoes that took weeks to ripen in the brown paper bags in the sun last November. If only writers had artificial accelerants to ripen ideas.