How to Sing Butterflies
Science Fantasy Short StoryThis making-of contains spoilers
When Chuck Wendig did a two-part challenge on his blog to come up with a title for a story and then with a story to one of the titles the next week, “How to Sing Butterflies” just struck out at me. Maybe it was a little too easy to go and take it literally, but that is what I did. I took that title and created a world around it where that would be possible. Thus, architecm was born.
It may say something about me when creating a world where people sing objects into existence is the option I almost think of as being too obvious in hindsight.
There is the notion of people using technology they do not fully understand just because they can. The example in the story is electricity, but the one far closer to our present would, of course, be computers and other electronic devices. There are not that many people who actually know how a computer works, or even a simple part of it like a computer screen. Most people are fully satisfied with things going this way. This has drawn criticism, but in the end, this is the way the world works more often than not.
I did not know, writing this story, butterflies are a common symbol of the soul, making the scene even more fitting to its title than I initially thought. Coincidentally, this is also the story that made me realize how dangerous it is to be a protagonist in one of my stories. Death is, of course, a very powerful ending to a story and a very clear one at that, but it also seems a bit uninspired to me now. With its setup, however, “How to Sing Butterflies” just could not end any other way.
I ended up using the title for this collection because I thought it represented my kind of thinking about stories really nicely. I think of my ideas as being deliberately strange, constantly experimenting with the ways literature can go way beyond our everyday experiences into worlds impossible to the physical world, but inspiring to the mind. This, to me, is the very essence of writing stories. It is, of course, also how I ended up writing far more speculative fiction than anything else.
To me, fiction of the fantastical, even the impossible, is fiction used properly.
A small note about this story: The first sentence in the third paragraph has been changed between early and later publications to make it more easily understandable. Originally it said “The girl just sang.”
May 2016
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How to Sing Butterflies
