Following on From ‘Oh Sock’

February 6, 2010 at 5:33 am (Planning, Thoughts on Writing) (blogs, discussion, novel, planning, plot, questions, tension, writers, writing)

Elspeth Antonelli recently had a post titled “Oh sock, where art thou” in which she asked why socks go missing and where do they go? She provides a number of possible theories and it got me thinking about all the things around us that we can’t explain that we could use for a story.

Now obviously I’m not about to launch a new project entitled the Slimy Socks of Saturn Strike Again. Mostly because I don’t like that much alliteration in a title and secondly, because missing socks would probably get old quickly and can you imagine trying to edit something like that. But…

Other things go missing. Not just socks. Rings, remotes, the last chocolate bar in the fridge, keys, documents, emails. These things just disappear. You can stand behind someone and watch them type in your email address (correctly), press send and it confirms that it has been sent and that email will still never appear in anyone’s inbox. It is gone. Lost in – well, who knows.

Socks by themselves may not make a story however the mystery of things disappearing has made many stories. Trolls, gremlins, brownies, and all manner of other mystical nuisance has been blamed for theft of objects and pranks on people. So have sink holes in time and space and all sorts of other things.

What if someone is making these things happen? Now we have a bad guy.

I love questions where I can’t be expected to know the real answer. It leave my mind open to come up with the most absurd. The absurd is always more fun than the logical and as neither answer can be proven or disproven, you might as well have fun.

Thanks Elspeth for such a thought provoking post and now I have to go and try to find the missing partner to my favourite pair of socks.

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