“Eulogy for a Mime” was sparked by two things: an image and a dream.  I have no recollection which came first—the image or the dream, but I know they set my brain’s wheels in motion.  The dream is vague, but it had a mime—with a red beret not a black one—and that’s all I remember.  The image was a line drawing that appeared to me to be a cross between a mime and Mr. Bill.  (Picture a mime with the Mr. Bill “O” mouth, and you’ve got it.)  The book with the image is called The Writer’s Book of Matches.

I knew two things when I started the story: first, it would be about a mime who died while tying to get out of his invisible box; and second, the mime could never take off his gloves.  (The growing-back quality of the gloves came to me as I wrote.)

The title of the story popped into my head as I began to work, and at first, I tried to write it as if the narrator were at a funeral giving a eulogy.  No one at the funeral knew him, and there was going to be some big reveal about who he was at the end.  The whole time I tried to write that story, I struggled.  Meanwhile, the narrator was trying to tell me a different story—one of personal recollection—the type of eulogy we all give to those we’ve lost when we think about the role that person played in our lives.

Once I gave in to the story I was supposed to write, it wrote itself.  The growing-back gloves gave way to the transformation, and I was on a roll.  Until the end.  I tried to make it something it wasn’t, to wrap things up, to explain what happened to the narrator after Boyd died.  Several LAME attempts later, again struggling with the writing, I looked back about a page and realized the story—the eulogy—had ended when the narrator left the scene of Boyd’s death.

Want to know what forced writing is like?  It’s when fingers type things like “I could only hope Boyd’s death served as a reminder that things are not always what they seem” and the attached brain thinks for an instant that a cliché like that is good.  That a reader is that stupid.

I’ve burned those lame attempts, so don’t think when I’m famous you can break into my home, steal my computer, and find the crap I once wrote.  It’s gone.  I mean it.  And your brain will explode if try to recover it from my hard drive.  (See how thinking about it already caused a ripple in your mind: you don’t see the “you” in that previous sentence, do ?)

Shawn Hansen is busy writing more stuff.