Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Ever had a pen run out in the middle of a story?

I was on the train the other day, writing more of BtB. I was on a roll. My hand was furiously trying to keep up with my train of thought. And then ... it happened.

I spent the rest of the trainride going over the next scenes in my head, just to make sure I remembered everything.

I think I greeted a new pen when I got home before I said hi to anyone else.

Sammy

LOL! This brought back memories.

Ever tried to keep 3 pages of brilliant dialogue in your head during an hour's bus journey until you got home to your pc?

I could never bring myself to actually write a story on the bus. The very thought of someone looking over my shoulder sent chills down my spine. But, of course, since I was nowhere near a pc for an hour, that was when the Muse would decide to write all of her best stuff in my head.

Stuart got very used to me coming crashing through the front door at six p.m., tossing coat and bags on the hall floor, diving upstairs and not emerging from in front of the pc for a long time. Then he got a hello. Poor soul. He's very forgiving.

Even then, by the time I got the pc fired up I'd invariably forgotten half of all those great lines.

So, you have my deepest sympathy!

LabRat

Yeah, I know somthing that is quite similiar. Have you ever written a story and you knew just perfectly how you wanted to go on, everything was in your head? And then out of the sudden you realize that you don't know a certain word. Or you know it, but unfortunately not in the right language. And the next dictionary is like light years away. That's frustrating!

Ooooh, poor Sammy!

And, yeah, bakasi, I was in a similar situation last week.
I was on my way home on my bike, getting struck by a great paragraph. I formulated about ten sentences. Yeah, still riding on my bike, downtown, with music on my mp3 player - so a lot of distraction but I was happy with the flow of my thoughts... they even came in English, I was kind of surprised.

And when I got home, there was this one expression I couldn't quite put into words: No dictionary wouldn't have been a problem but I didn't even know the right word in German - I tried to explain it to my boyfriend but he looked at me as if I was insane, always telling me:
"You can't say that in German."
- "Well, I know, but I could in English."
" "

There's a story that Samuel Taylor Colridge ("Rime of The Ancient Mariner") awoke from a long nap with the entire text of "Xanadu" in his head, but before he could start writing it down, a friend popped in for a short visit. Back in the days of no electronic communication, it would have been exceptionally rude of Colridge to rebuff his friend (no matter that the friend rudely hadn't made an appointment), and by the time Colridge got rid of his friend a couple of hours later, he had only a hazy recollection of what he'd held in his head only that morning. According to the story I was told, he later estimated that ninety percent of the poem was lost forever to that unexpected guest.

I don't know how true this is, but I do know that I have begun stories, stopped to do something, and returned only to find that the point of the story was gone like the morning dew.

I guess that accounts for some of the dents in my wall and some of the bumps on my head.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately Pleasure Dome decree
Where Alph, the Sacred River, Ran
Through Caverns measureless to Man
Down to a Sunless Sea.

...
But Oh! That deep romantic Chasm
Which slanted down the green Hill
Athwart a Cedarn Cover!


Hmmm. Wonder what that would have come out like if that rude guest hadn't called on Coleridge just when the poor poet was going to write his masterpiece down? I have to admit, I like the poem the way it is. (I apologize for my use of capital and lowercase letters, by the way - I quoted the poem from my favorite poetry book, Poetry Comics by Dave Morice, which has to be seen to be believed... but anyway, most poems in that book are written with capital letters, comic book style. So I arbitrarily chose capital and lowercase letters for Coleridge's poem.)

Anyway, what if we could write down all our best and most perfect imaginations and fantasies? I'll never forget a story I read by Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel. Borges created a dream and a nightmare of a library, because it contains all possible books and stories. It works like this. Imagine that every book contains, say, 400 pages. And imagine a certain number of lines on each page, and an average number of words on each line, containing an average number of letters. And imagine an alphabet of, say, 25 letters. Now all you have to do is create all the combinations of books that are mathematically possible by creating all the combinations of pages, lines, words and letters that are mathematically possible!

It boggles the mind, doesn't it? Imagine all the possible variations of Hamlet that you could find in such a library. (Of course, since Hamlet will not run for 400 pages, there will be other stories - or pure nonsense - filling the rest of the pages.) Anyway, there is one perfect version of Hamlet. And there is one where Hamlet says, To be or not to see, and one where he says, To bee or not to bumble. (And one where he says, To zap, snog or zzziffle, that is the pancake. And one where he says, To kltpxyzm or not to mxyzptlk, that is the grshhhwheeezie. And one where he says, To Lois or to Clark, that is the question.) And there is a frightening number of other variations of Hamlet - there is one, for example, where Ophelia doesn't commit suicide but marries Hamlet instead exactly the way that Lois married Clark in Swear To God, This Time We're Not Kidding or whatever that episode was called. (And there is one where Hamlet is Spiderman in the new movie, can you imagine? And there is one where he is George W. Bush, and one where Ophelia... oh, you get the idea.)

So you know, if you ever had a brilliant story worked out but forgot it before you could write it down, remember that your story still exists, at least as a mathematical possibility, in the Library of Babel. (But I shudder at the number of garbled versions of your story that are there in the library, too.)

Ann

Sammie,

Sympathy and <hugs> to you. I'm so sorry that happened. Will you think me crazy if I remind you of a (very) famous and rich author who did not have a pen on the train, and came up with this wonderful idea and spent the train trip plotting out the story, the world of the story, and creating the characters? And also said that she probably wouldn't have done so much if she could have written her story down?

What would our world be like without the characters and stories created by JKRowling?

But I'm still sympathetic! Honest!

mmouse

Ann, thanks for spelling Coleridge's name correctly for me. I knew it didn't look right, but I was too lazy to look it up.

As for a 400-page volume with a certain number of letters per line and lines per page and a 25-character alphabet (you'd have to spell out all your numbers and drop either the 'Q' or the 'X' or not use English), it's possible to come up with a perfect version of every possible book, but the time it would take to generate the correct one and every possible permutation of every incorrect versions would take up more space than the total volume of our planet, not to mention the time it would take to produce all those volumes. We're talking about "To be or not to be" versus "To be or not to by" versus "To by or not to be" versus "To be or net to be"... you get the idea. The thought is quite lovely, but it's completely beyond practical or even physically possible. And where would we get the paper and ink to produce all those volumes?

Huh. I guess that's something of a buzzkill, isn't it? I'm really not trying to be negative, just practical in my imaginings.

I know, that wasn't your idea, but Borges was something of an odd duck who would have easily imagined something so impossible. His work always reminded me of Robert Heinlein's stuff in its scope and reach (not content or style, of course), and he was undoubtedly a genius who didn't live entirely in this reality.

I won't even address the impossibility of finding enough paper to write down all these books, but as for the sheer number of volumes that could be produced if paper was an inexhaustible resource... Oh, the total number of possible versions of Hamlet would take up more space than is available on the entire Earth, I'm certain! Consider. How many versions of Hamlet are mathematically possible? Let's start with all the versions that are exactly like the correct one except for one misplaced letter. The maximum number of such versions that can exist is equal to the total number of letters making up the Shakespeare's original text. There is one such version where the first letter is wrong, one where the second letter is wrong, one where the third letter is wrong etcetera.

Now consider the number of versions that have two wrong letters. There must be many more of those, because you have to consider all the possible combinations of misplaced letters! The wrong letters could be letter number one and two, or one and three, or one and four, or one and five, or.... But then there are also the ones where the wrong letters are number two and three, or two and four, or two and five, or two and.... And then there are all the possible combinations where one of the wrong letters is always three, and one where it is always four, and... you get it. And how many combinations are there where three letters are wrong? You can go on and on like this, and even though we'll eventually reach a point where text is too garbled to be considered a version of Hamlet at all, I'm sure it's possible to lose pretty much all of William Shakespeare's original words and still consider the text a version of Hamlet. I think it would be possible to cover every square inch of the Earth's land mass with books that are different versions of Hamlet, and it is even conceivable that this "Hamlet-book-cover" smothering the Earth might be, perhaps, several feet thick!

So much for every conceivable version of Hamlet... when you start considering every conceivable version of every book in existence - every cookbook, every phonebook, every do-it-your-self handbook etcetera, plus every conceivable version of pure noise and nonsense, you have to wonder if the universe itself would be big enough to house this monstrous library! (Although admittedly we humans tend to underestimate the size of the universe most grievously, which is why people find it so easy to accept that Jor-El and Lara sent their son to Earth, and then later Zara and Ching brought him to New Krypton, from which he later returned to the Earth without having been gone for more than a few years at most.)

Anyway, speaking of the number of possible mathematical combinations. The number of possible books you could generate by randomly creating words with the alphabet is truly staggering, but it is not infinite. Similarly, the number of combinations that the universe itself can come up with using its own smallest building blocks of matter and energy is not infinite, either. This means that if the universe is sufficiently overwhelmingly large, it will eventually have to repeat itself. This in turn means that if the universe is large enough, it will eventually have to create the Earth all over again. Actually, assuming the universe sufficiently big, there is a mindbogglingly staggering number of other Earths that are almost exactly like our Earth. And there may also be one that is exactly like our Earth - or there may be two such perfect Earth twins, again assuming that the universe is large enough. On such an Earth, all of us FoLCs would exist just the way we are here and now, and we would be communicating with each other over the internet, reading each other's stories, watching each other's videos and discussing Lois and Clark and Off Topic and stuff, and there, like here, Sammy Sparrow would have sat on a train one day, writing a new chapter of Begin the Begin, when suddenly her pen ran out and she didn't have a spare one. But there may be many more Earths where Sammy did have a spare pen, and several where her pen didn't run out, and one where she actually looks like Lois is her delightful avatar, and....

Ann (suddenly getting dizzy )

Since I am a math minor, I think I'll give you a glimpse of the true possibilities. There is a mathematical process called factorial, which when applied to a number, means that number times every whole number between itself and zero. (4 factorial would be 4 times 3 times 2 times 1=24) This means that when you have four different objects in a line, there are 24 different ways to arrange them.

At 8, the process results in the number 40,320.

At 10, the number is 3,628,800.

At 12, it's 479,001,600.

That even can multiply extremely fast. But for dealing with letters, considering there are twenty-six letters, the number of possibilities will be 26 to the power of the number of letters.

In a two letter word, that's 26 squared, which is 676.

In a five letter word, it's 11,881,376.

In the sentence "I like Lois" for example, there are nine letters, and the number of possibilities=5,429,503,678,976, or almost 5 and a half trillion. On a page of even 50 letters, the possibilities are innumerable. In a play of quite a few pages, it goes even farther. If you've heard of the word googolplex and know what it means, there would easily be that many copies, just off the the first few pages. And that's only with all the words being the same length.

I remember when I was working at the library in circulation (which is not really thought-intensive) and I used to dream up dialogue and plotlines. Plot I could remember, especially after I'd stewed over it for ages, but dialogue I'd worry about forgetting. So I'd write it on these little scraps of paper we keep at the desk, and, since my dress pants didn't have any pockets, I'd fold up the little papers and put them in my shoes. I know, really weird. But it worked. I'd get home, copy the little notes, and toss them away.