Behind the Story: The Light in Her Eyes

As promised to you dear reader, I'm writing you another behind the story this time for my Autumn 2025 battle. There isn't too much of a story as to how the writing went this time (which is honestly a bit of relief) but I thought I'd share with you a little inside information to how my mind works and show you some early concepts I had played around with before settling on my final story idea.

So for this round of battle I had a week to write 2000 words with the prompts of Heist, Observatory, and Naive Student. As I'm sure you can imagine, these are not the easiest prompts to work with... Heist feels like a particularly narrow genre with one through line for tone, think of any of the movies in the Oceans franchise. Then on top of that I had to make it in an observatory with a naive student??? I wasn't feeling particularly inspired, but I was determined to produce something than what I had previously.

So off to the library I went and the first idea that came into my head was to write a story about a bunch of elementary school kids breaking into a space museum in order to steal a chunk of the moon because they believed it to be a piece cheese. The tone would be silly, the characters would be silly, the whole thing felt entirely silly which I wasn't against.

Without much additional thought to the matter I began writing from the perspective of a worker at the space museum and produced this:

Celeste didn’t think the kids would take her seriously when she said the moon was made of cheese. After all, the rock she was showing them was clearly just that, a rock. Sure it was speckled with holes, and had a dusty white colour, but they had to know it wasn’t cheese. Clearly they didn’t, otherwise she would’t be tied up right now. To be fair, her boss had tried to warn her, she just didn’t listen. 

“These are first graders Celeste,” her boss had said. “If you tell them the moon is made of cheese they’re going to believe it.”

“That’s sort of the whole point isn’t it?” Celeste had replied. “We’re trying to get them interested in the cosmos, so why not tell them that a giant chunk of cheese is floating above us?”

“Listen, I get it, really I do, but our job isn’t to fill them with wonder, it’s to give them the facts. With all the teacher complaints I’ve been getting, we’re at risk of losing a substantial portion of money if the school groups stop coming through.”

“Fine, I’ll tone down on the moon cheese thing, but don’t blame me when you start getting complaints about the program being boring.”

She knew why it was a problem now. 

Are you cringing? Because I sure am! Being that I never delete anything that I've written, this is an honest representation of what my raw idea looked like before I lost steam with it and felt like it wasn't going anywhere.

So what did I do in that case? I saved the file and booted up a new document to start again. This time riffing off the idea of moon cheese and delusional people thieving it, but this time with the angle of it being a house wife about to compete in a cheesecake baking competition and needing the moon cheese as her secret ingredient. This is what I came up with:

The clouds finally parted, bathing the domed building in the distance with the soft glow of the moon. Mary-Beth gripped the steering wheel in front of her as the anxiety building within fought against the Xanax melting on her tongue. 

She wasn’t sure if she had lost her mind or if she’d finally found it, but either way the result was still the same. She was going to steal a piece of the moon. 

Swallowing the last bits of crumbling Xanax, she reached into her Gucci purse on the passenger seat and popped a bluetooth speaker in her ear. “Mary-Beth is online. What’s the situation over yonder?”

A soft voice, rich with a southern drawl, crackled to life on the other end. “Sue-Ella checking in

Yes it literally ends that abruptly. Lack of final punctuation and all. Again, this is torturous for me to read, let alone share, but who doesn't love a little ~vulnerability~. This idea as I was writing it was so clearly a flop to me that I didn't even bother to play around with it anymore. At this point after a few hours at the library without a decent idea I was feeling a little bummed and seriously started to consider taking a gamble and switching my genre.

The thing is with these contests is that you have a once shot option to switch randomly into one of the other four genres. Those other genres being Swords and Sorcery, Alternate History, and Vampiracle Romance. I wasn't feeling too keen on Alternate History or Swords and Sorcery, so before I took the leap and made the re-roll I wanted to make sure I had some solid ideas in them first.

So as before, I saved that old file, booted up a new one and started to brainstorm what I could do with the same prompts, but this time in the swords and sorcery genre:

Swords and spells: Could be a story about someone learning the arts of building out the cosmos, they are doing it for their ailing mother who has encouraged them to do it all their lives. They are told that their only goal is to build the cosmos and nothing more. Once they have created, they cannot remove. The student will learn and learn and eventually when they come home one night their mother will be dead. The light will be gone from her eyes and they will be desperate to get the light back, so they will steal a star from the night sky and place it back in her eyes. For a moment there is a twinkle, as if the life has returned, but then the light will just as quickly go out, the star faded. He’ll try again with the same result and then realize that he’s going to need to steal all the stars in order to bring back the light in her eyes. Sneaking into the observatory, he is met with his teacher who tells him that he has to stop, that he can’t keep taking the light away from the sky. There is a brief scuffle, and the teacher is wounded and incapacitated and is begging the student not to steal the stars. But the student is desperate and casts a net out into the sky capturing all the stars at once. He returns to his home and places them in his mother’s eyes and when she wakes up her eyes twinkle like a thousand shimmering stars, but when she gets up she looks up to the sky and begins to wail, she can no longer see the stars. The sky is blank, and 

Again I ended it that abruptly, but does it sound familiar? It should, because it's the idea I ended up going for! You see, as I was writing out this new idea I realized that although I was seeing it through a more fantastical lens, it was still very much a heist. This completely unlocked the story for me and the genre of heist as a whole and thus the story was born!

To be honest, this is probably one of the pieces that I'm most proud of. I think it really flexes my skills, is a unique take on the heist genre, and just overall is an impactful story! Of course, my over confidence in a story typically means that it doesn't go far in the competition, but this time it seemed to be warranted as I once again made it past the initial round of judging into the top 64 stories overall (although I was really gunning for that number one position this time!!)

Still, I really couldn't be prouder of this one, and the journey to its final product was a worthwhile one. As much as I've hummed and hawed about second guessing myself and my not sticking with my original ideas, I think I've learned that what I really should be doing is trusting my gut. I know when an idea isn't going to work, and I know what it is. That's what I should listen to, and I shouldn't feel bad about the time it takes to get there sometimes.

Anyways, this was a LONG one. If you made it to the end, then congrats to you. Let me know what you think of the story and as always, thanks for sticking around.

Until next time,

M