Something/Anything?

Here are a few approaches to consider while composing narratives:

- Compression/compressed narrative: Summarize a novel's worth of events in 2000 words. A 250 word story....

- Inversion: Make good guys into bad guys, invert moral or social codes, etc. If you are a Democrat, write a story about a jolly hunting trip with Sarah Palin. If you are a Republican, write a story that passionately advocates socialized medicine.... Satirical or not, it will be amusing.... Alternative history or current events....

- Substitution: Substitute fire trucks for tidally-winks, circuit chips for Bibles, what have you.

- Lists: Longs lists of funny words to produce satirical effects, or to wind the reader through landscapes of sense data stimulus. Could a grocery list serve as a plot outline? Why not?

- Telephone directories: See lists

- Catalogs: Write stories about pictures, consumer themes; if those pictures could talk, what would they say?

- Criticism: Novel as critical commentary, a la Pale Fire. Using the voice of a critic to tell a story....

- Pedantic voice, pedantic forms: see above.

- Instruction manual or handbook: Could a pilot's checklist be adapted as a plot line?

- Advertisements: TV, newspapers, radio....

- Pulp action/adventure/sci-fi: "elevate" a traditional generic form to "literary" status through over-burdened cleverness, big words, and satirical intentions. Not necessarily parody, but parody is OK too of course.

- Hypochondria/obsessive-compulsion: a sort of craven fixation upon plot elements, imagery, or the representation of emotional states: example, a lurid description of a soldier cleaning his rifle, or an oral surgeon hammering away at impacted wisdom teeth....

- Hysteria: hyperbolic description, emotions run amok, purple prose, etc.

- Mock Epic: See Alexander Pope "Rape of the Lock."

- Cut-Up and Fold-In Technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique