Storytellersunplugged

By George Guthridge

No, this isn’t a Ludlum pastiche, despite the title. It’s the story of Sponge Bob. Well, sort of.

Backstory: Three years ago my wife and I went to visit my grandkids in San Diego. Before returning to Alaska we went across the border, into Tijuana, for a day of frenzied shopping.

Among our other items, we brought back two large piggy banks. One, for our son – who was ten and was in Thailand – was Sponge Bob. The other, for my six-year-old nephew, was Superman. I also purchased an onyx chess set for myself.

Superman did not prove invincible, and Sponge Bob is the epitome of vulnerability. We carted our purchases through the very long line at the border – it was Thanksgiving weekend – and then lovingly brought the items onto the plane as luggage. However, we found we could not get the piggy bank onto the last flight, a commuter service from Anchorage to our home in Dillingham, a fishing town that, in Southwest Alaska, is accessible only by air. Needless to say, the airline managed to break both banks. Literally, this time.

To add insult to injury, when I unpacked the chess set, not a single piece was damaged. I lifted up a black bishop – it slipped through my hands and, despite my desperate attempt to break its fall with my foot, broke in half when it hit the floor.

This year we returned to the scene of the shopping. We bought a smaller Sponge Bob piggy bank. When we exited Mexico, the American customs agent asked if we had purchased anything. I proudly held up the bank and announced, “One Sponge Bob!”

We got the bank home without incident and, at least as of this writing, it sits on a dresser in our bedroom – the heck with giving the kid such a valuable commodity! – and collects coins.

What, I was wondering the other day as I was putting clothes away, would a story about a Sponge Bob bank be like?

I began thinking about protocols.

In my field – rhetorical analysis – protocol has a precise definition. In the early ‘70s, a high-school English teacher, Janet Emig, published a book about a series of interviews with a group of high-school seniors. The interviews were about the writing process, and took place as soon as possible – often while – after the students had engaged in writing. Emig became the first non-professor in the second half of the century to publish a landmark book about composition theory. She demonstrated that students do not at all think about writing the way that theorists assumed they did. Her book became one of the first to insist that we need to design writing theory to fit students’ cognition, rather than designing a pedagogy and shoehorning students’ creativity into it.

Her work was followed up by that of Linda S. Flower and John R. Hayes, who interviewed several dozen people engaged in a variety of writing tasks. The comparison of cognitive processes occurring during the creative act is what Flower and Hayes called protocols. SOP now calls for developing teaching methodologies to fit protocols.

So: for me, I will begin with a germ. Let’s say I decide to write a story about a boy who has a Sponge Bob piggy bank. His dad, who is rather an ogre to start with – an alcoholic, perhaps? (and who becomes increasingly so as the story progresses) gets caught up in feeding the bank, which grows out of all proportion. And swallows the dad, or the kid, or both, or whatever.

That is the gist, as I have seen, of myriad stories I have read either as a writing instructor or as a panelist critiquing stories at a convention. The writers do not engage in what is often called meta-story, the conscious thinking about the story, its structure, and its meaning. (Not to be confused, incidentally, with metafiction, which is fiction about fiction – though of course there is overlap.) In other words, the beginning writers have not stepped back to analyze their protocol, thereby not allowing the story to become stronger and mesh with an intuitive sense of what the story should do.

All of this probably sounds simplistic, and it should. It is simplistic. But that is because of the great strides that occurred in writing theory in the twentieth century. Because of the influence of the Romantics in Germany and England, during the nineteenth century it generally was assumed that writing is a purely imaginative act, one carried out in solitary by the writer’s genius. Most rhetoricians now agree that writing is a social act that involves a lot of decision-making, much of which is more conscious than not.

So back to Sponge Bob. Rather than starting to write, I consciously rework the piece before typing so much as a the. Given the structure that is likely to result from such a story, the characterization will be cardboard. The horror of a Sponge Bob that becomes increasingly gluttonous is cartoonish, and it’s a cartoon that will stand between the father and son. No matter how well I might characterize the human principals, Sponge Bob will devour their humanity.

I try another tack: tell the story from the father’s viewpoint. He is not a lout but rather is caring. He loves his son and wants the best for him. To that end, he dutifully puts his day’s change – perhaps he works at a job in which he constantly has change – in the bank every evening. He has heard that a man once paid for his child’s college education that way. The goal, and not the bank, outgrows the child. The dad neglects the boy, first in little ways and then in increasingly bigger ones, in favor of turning, literally, another dime.

It’s a horror story now – one of hearth and heart instead of something that looks like a prose rendition of a B-grade movie. Next I will step back and, since I have a fairly good understanding of my protocols, see how I can keep that sense of quiet horror and still make it genre enough (I don’t mean that in any demeaning way) to be saleable. I don’t write for literary journals, after all.

Then I will step back again and consciously begin to cast about for a larger thematic possibility. The matter becomes more head than heart. I like to examine ideas, and to a certain extent fiction writing for me is just a lovely excuse to entertain myself with speculations. (Not having to write anymore to put bread on the table gives me a certain latitude that did not exist for me when I was writing full-time.) The best example I can think of regarding this last protocol is a Damon Knight story about a machine that enables people to see everything going on in the world at the same time. Most people who use the machine go insane – some from exhilaration; most from sadness.

Once I consciously marry the basic story to something that to me seems at least somewhat profound (whether it is to others is debatable, of course), then I begin the physical act of writing.

—George Guthridge