Another 5-Wednesday month has come to an end and with it, another 5-part short story. It always seems to be that the idea for the story at the beginning of the month is much grander than what was actually written by the end. This story, at least, was a little easier to write and that was in part due to telling it backwards.
First of all, I have been seeing news reports of the Danube River receding and exposing sunken shipwrecks. Originally, my story was going to take place somewhere where a WWI or WWII ship would be discovered. But I changed it so that it would take place here in the states. Which means I had to change the war to the Civil War or one prior to it. Once I decided to share a Civil War story, I wanted to keep it vague because as I said before, I am practicing story telling here. Not fact checking. Normally those two things coexist. But not with a small blog with little traffic. So please excuse the lack of minutiae accuracy.
As far as I know, there was no submarine called the USS Hippo but there was one called the USS Alligator. From there, you can see how I took a creative leap and arrived at the fictitious Hippo. Can you imagine the mettle in the crews that boarded a Civil War submarine must have had? I mean, I don’t think I’d do well on a modern submarine let alone one that relied on hand cranks.
Once I had the setting and general plot, I thought it would be interesting to tell the story backwards. When I came up with the idea I was sure there had to be a specific term to call it. Because surely I am not the first one to think of it. Perhaps some cute Japanese word. Or some fun German word. What I found when I googled it was Reverse Chronology which disappointed me. That is neither cute nor fun and certainly not Japanese. Just plain old boring english. But I went ahead and wrote it backwards.
Did I achieve my goal with this technique? Probably not. Will that stop me from trying it again at some point down the road? Probably not.
Thanks for stopping by and reading!
