Midnight Rider

Working on my treatment / character bio stuff.

For anyone who hasn't heard the story, according to literature legend, Hemingway's friends once bet him that he couldn't write a story in six words. He wrote down, "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn" and won the bet.

Basically, my story is about a guy in the early 70s who finds an old newspaper from 1925 that contains a want-ad that reads "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn" and decides to find out the truth -- either the ad is a hoax, modeled after the Hemingway story, or it's a real ad, and there's more to the story than those six words.

My original idea had the guy in college, but I know I can't do that. So then maybe he's a journalist. But honestly, I hate stories about journalists. I really do. I mean, I love "All The President's Men," but that's based in truth and is historical. Otherwise, I find following a journalist incredibly boring, and then I feel like the story is more about whatever the journalist is researching and not the writer's journey. So right now, I'm trying to figure out how to make this guy and his search interesting and make it much more than just debunking Hemingway or whatever.

Grumble. It'll get resolved. Somehow.