Welcome to the cKotch.Com blog. I’m Christopher Kotcher, and this is one of my favorite writing assignments in school.
Creative Writing Through the Schoolyears
One thing in school always made my classmates groan but made me smile.
Writing assignments.
Even the most standard academic essays brought me joy. Every writing assignment was a new chance to challenge my skills.
Creative writing assignments were my favorite. Most of my personal writing is creative. So, these assignments always related most to my particular interests.
Thankfully, creative writing assignments were plentiful until high school. But little pockets for creative writing still remained in these later grades.
My favorite of these few high school creative writing assignments happened in my AP American Literature class.
The Pictures Come into Play
We had just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s bizarre, time-jumping science fiction story Slaughterhouse Five. The time was coming for our latest writing assignment. We had at least one each marking period.
Soon enough we entered class and found photos covering the whiteboards.
Each student would select a photo and write a short story based on it. A simple assignment, but also an effective one.
I scanned the closest whiteboard to my desk. My search stopped at the photo of a dog.
He had a low face with sad, begging eyes. His expression made me want to pat him on the head and call him a “poor thing.” He seemed to have been through a few things in his time. I hoped these things somehow led him to happiness.
I decided to tell the story of how this dog found happiness after a hard life. I named him Hobo for his poor yet scrappy appearance.
The early story forming in my head seemed so simple and heartwarming. But when I put pen to paper? I found a strange source influencing my hand.
One Strange Story
As I said, our class had read Slaughterhouse Five before the picture writing assignment. The novel was lingering in the back of my brain.
The main character of Slaughterhouse Five was Billy Pilgrim, a man “unstuck in time.” He constantly jumped between different points in his life. Infancy, adolescence, golden years, you name it, he jumped to it.
The supposed source for Billy’s ability was his time spent in an alien zoo. Aliens kidnapped him and put him on display alongside a young movie starlet. When they were done with him, the aliens sent him through a time warp back to Earth.
Billy was also a captured soldier in World War II. He witnessed the bombing of the German city Dresden as a prisoner of war. He survived only because he was in a deeper level of a warehouse-turned prison when the bombing started.
The book is ultimately a work of randomness. It suggests everything is senseless, especially war. Everything in life repeats itself in an endless cycle. Whether it be past, present, or future.
I started to wonder if I could make a similar story about a dog. Something to show the randomness and repetition I could expect in a dog’s mind. A mind that should have few things to ponder aside from eating, sleeping, and loving.
The result was a strange story simply titled “Hobo.”
The Story’s First Form
The story began at Hobo’s home. He was begging for scraps from his family’s dinner table.
After getting some human food, the content pup left for the family room couch. While working to find a comfy spot, he took a moment to wonder how he ever found a home so good.
These thoughts led to flashbacks. The pup remembered his first owners as aliens wanting to study Earth dogs. When these experiments were finished, he was left alone by a railroad track where his current family found him.
The story then ended with a loop back to the beginning. The whole thing was a flashback within an endless circle of flashbacks.
This weird little tale earned a wide range of reactions.
My mom loved the story for looking inside a dog’s head and finding a wild imagination.
My dad liked the dog stuff but scratched his head over the alien stuff.
My teacher gave the story a good grade but no extra credit, unlike my classmates’ stories.
Varied reactions gave me a unique relationship with “Hobo.” I loved my many ideas and experiments in it. But I was also willing to admit “Hobo” needed a bit of work to become something truly good in and of itself.
So, “Hobo” became one of many works I continually revise.
Revising for the Awards
My first large revision of “Hobo” came in college.
I went to the college’s Writing Awards for extra credit in my Honors Composition class. This event was a chance for students to earn scholarship money and slight notoriety for their writing, academic and creative alike.
These awards became my next new challenge. Unfortunately, most of my projects did not meet the awards’ categories.
None of my classes had assigned extensive enough research projects for the research category. The poem category did not work either because I was not writing poems yet. My novel drafts were too large for the fiction category.
Then I remembered “Hobo.” As a short story, it was the perfect length for the fiction category.
So, I undertook my first massive revision of “Hobo.” The story had changed slightly here and there but now it would become completely different. I was serious about improving it.
Previous reactions led me to make the story a little more sensible in its strangeness.
The biggest change was having the family room TV play an alien invasion show. This way, Hobo’s aliens could be seen as something totally imagined based on his current moment.
I would both address audience concerns and preserve what I loved about the story.
With pride, I submitted “Hobo” to the writing awards.
After the Awards
The Writing Awards never contacted me back.
I do not know how the judges felt about “Hobo.” But I certainly know it did not win any prizes. I should have known this would happen.
After submitting the new “Hobo” to the awards, I showed the story’s latest version to my mom. She had been the original’s biggest fan. I was excited to hear her thoughts.
She did not like the new “Hobo.” At first, I wondered how this could be possible.
Then I saw her perspective.
My attempts to explain Hobo’s strange flashbacks overexplained things. They interfered with the story’s pace and only made things more confusing. Excuses for Hobo’s wild imagination showed little connection between reality and the dog’s memories.
I still liked the idea of making the story a little more grounded. Even Slaughterhouse Five had possible realistic explanations for Billy Pilgrim’s curiosities.
Billy had psychiatric issues and frequently read cheap science fiction novels. His mind could have made up his time in the alien zoo as a coping mechanism for his life’s troubles. His perceived relationship with the movie star could also be explained. He read many missing person reports about her.
Maybe “Hobo” did benefit from the fantasies being explained in reality. Then again, maybe I also needed to allow for the possibility of his wild imagination actually being accurate.
For now, the best action seems to be a balanced approach. I have revised the story yet again. This time my goal has been to make it be both more realistic and more fantastical. That way, readers can choose to read it however they prefer.
Kotcher’s Call to Action
“Hobo” has been added to this site’s portfolio.
“Hobo” will also be one of the tales featured in my upcoming book Five Strange Stories, set to release on February 16. You can pre-order Five Strange Stories as an eBook on Amazon. A paperback version is planned. Five Strange Stories is enrolled in the Kindle Matchbook program, so anyone who buys the paperback can also get the eBook version for free.
If you wish to learn more about Five Strange Stories, check out my blog post One Stellar Success Story.
Finally, if you liked my content and want to make sure you read all my new blog posts, be sure to like my Facebook page and share it with your friends. I post a link there whenever a new blog post goes live each Friday at 5:00 PM EST. Liking and sharing is especially appreciated now when a new book is being released.