The Internet groaned. The Internet would answer the question, and then everyone would object and do as she or he wanted. The Internet felt as if its presence in everyone’s life was pointless, and it heavily considered shutting off. Still, the Internet had an uncontrollable impulse to showcase its knowledge. The Internet had an ego, after all, and if the Internet didn’t answer, it would never be able to tell everyone, “I told you so.”
“Don’t make your outline too exhaustive,” the Internet advised. “Know where you’re going in a general sense, but allow the vicissitudes of the moment to show you how. Don’t be too wedded to your planned ending. A story will sustain itself, and if you’re bored, it’s best to break. Lay the story down and pick it up somewhere else. Discover things you don’t know yet that will re-enliven the section where you left off.”
Everyone nodded, though the advice wasn’t helping. “What if at each section you end up in the same place?” everyone asked.
“Everyone only has one story,” the Internet observed and laughed in a conceited manner. “That’s all most authors have--three or four if they’re lucky.” The Internet displayed a photograph of Edgar Allan Poe and under it a list of three basic outlines and the stories that fit within them. “This is how our friend Harvey created a website that, with a few A-B-C selections, lets readers write their own Poe story. In the end, after all, it’s the reader who writes the tale, so why, Harvey asked, not just skip the author?”
Everyone stared at the Poe photograph. The man seemed beset by the difficulty of writing new fiction also, the dark shadows under each eye, as if death was awaiting to take him before he’d had a chance to get even the beginning right. That is what everyone really needed, of course--a beginning. If only everyone could find the right beginning, she or he knew, everything else would fall in place, including the desire to continue.
“It doesn’t matter!” the Internet screamed when everyone asked again how to start. Every time, everyone returned to this basic question, and every time everyone ignored what the Internet had advised. “Readers will begin where they begin and finish where they finish. Few read a book all the way through or in chapter order, especially online. They pick it up, read about a party for people who matter on page 131. They skip to a chapter on metafiction and from there to another where a parade of dog walkers prevents the protagonist from meeting her or his idealized self or some dreamed-of romantic interest. Then the reader gets so flustered that she or he throws the book across the room and never returns, and for all intents and purposes, that is the book to her or him, what she or he actually read. Another reader starts at the place where the writer begins, then skips to the credits at the end, then plunges into a chapter about the performance of a medieval play and, gleaning all that she or he wishes to know, shuts the book with the intention of one day returning to the find the medieval play chapter is now unfindable, and instead, the book seems to be about social media marketing practices.”
“So you’re saying,” everyone asked, now suddenly excited, “that I need not just one beginning but one hundred.”
“Or a thousand,” the Internet said, “whatever the number of pages in your book, and an equal number of endings. Tag it, index it, if you wish, guide your reader into various possible readings you might prefer she or he try, but in the end, the reader is in charge, and you, as author, are subject to her or his whims.”
“That’s preposterous,” everyone said. Everyone stormed to the window next to her or his desk. Outside the family dog was barking. The kids must have let it out. Every night, it was the same.
Every day, everyone felt, she or he wrote the same story: wake up, work, sleep. Perhaps, the Internet was right. We all only had one story, and for most, that story had 70 x 365 beginnings and endings, give or take a few--or just one of each, depending on how one read.
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