TOP 30 STORIES, DAY 17 // THE MICE WILL PLAY
(Sharing my creative process via 30 stories as the http://shorteststory.com/engine campaign runs!)
This story is my love letter to the concept of play in all its forms. It gets at everything I love about play, theatre, role-playing games, improv, experimentation, and creative storytelling--and why those are a powerful, beautiful part of humanity's arsenal against tyranny.
When I wrote this, I was thinking medieval carnivals, where for a day a pauper could be treated as a king, the king could be thought of as a commoner and people could briefly imagine their life and station to be different from how they were.
It's this same imaginative roleplay and social speculation that fueled so much of the amazing medieval and renaissance writing that said "society is a performance and it's mostly bullshit anyway," and that still fuels so much great art.
I also like that the experience of writing this story closely mirrored the content. It began with me unspooling the old "while the cat is away, the mice will play" idiom like a ball of yarn and just playing with the words and the concepts. I had no clear direction for where the story would go, and I just played a game with the ideas until it found its own way to that final line.
In that way, the story is bookended by two idioms, each of which disrupts and illuminates the other. I think it's really cool how that worked out!
