Behind the Story

I missed submitting story 1043 last week. Life’s been picking up speed, and by the time Saturday rolled around—with an unexpected turn helping at the Lanterns for Liberty event—I was running on empty. Five hours on my feet, coordinating people and chasing down participants for their turn to speak, was enough to drain whatever creative energy I had left.

This week’s final challenge of the month was “Pick Two,” with a list of keywords to choose from. One of them, “a dead plant”, immediately pulled me back to an older idea: Gerald the Ficus is Dead, a piece from my Shakespeare in Sweatpants series when first experimenting with Riffusion.

That project was a collection of absurd monologues in which I experimented with using AI-generated music tools to produce spoken-word-style output in an Oakland coffeehouse I used to go to in Pittsburgh, called the Beehive, usually in a raspy, theatrical voice. The place looked like a castle on the outside, with “Police Patrol Station” engraved in the stonework above the second floor, and it had a movie theater on the first floor. An arcade was later built on one side of the second floor, while another room had a stage for readings.

When Google acquired the platform after it was rebranded as ProducerAI, the transition wiped out user content and metadata almost overnight. There wasn’t even a proper export option: just whatever you had the foresight to copy and paste. However, I was able to retrieve the original text from my notes elsewhere later.

Before finding the notes, I worked from memory. The premise came back in fragments: house-sitting a plant for a boss, discovering it’s dead, tracking down a questionable replacement, and the boss returning none the wiser, if not oddly pleased. From there, I rebuilt it into a 100-word story.

I drafted around all the keywords at first, even though I only needed two. Instead of directly using the phrase “a dead plant,” I let the idea exist implicitly in the story. Afterward, I refined it, adding a line about shouldering guilt and adjusting details, such as the woman’s hair brushing against clutter rather than explicitly mentioning a hairbrush. I like pushing against the edges of the prompt when I can. It keeps things from feeling too predictable.

When it came time to generate the background instrumental, I logged back into Producer.ai, only to find it had already been renamed again. This time to Google Flow Music, or simply “Flow Music.” Not exactly unexpected, but still a bit clunky. Most people will probably default to calling it “Google FM.” And honestly, with a name like that, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it evolve into some kind of AI-driven radio service down the line.

I did my usual with post production, cleaning up the spoken audio, generate an instrumental based on the words of the story itself, clip portions, and scatter throughout at -20 db to change the mood throughout the story.

I submitted my 100-word story. Afterward, I managed to track down the original version—or at least enough of it to recognize what I had done.

What surprised me most was how much of the core idea stayed intact, even though the tone and structure shifted quite a bit.

The original was, as intended, much more of a monologue. It took its time. It started simply, “water the plants”, and then spiraled into a full-blown internal crisis. There was panic, overreaction, and a long series of increasingly ridiculous attempts to fix the problem. It leaned heavily into theatrical absurdity, as a performance piece, questioning whether I was somehow responsible for the plants’ deaths and trying everything from plant CPR to playing music for them.

The 100-word version strips all of that away.

Instead of watching me spiral, I jump straight from discovery to solution. The plant is dead, and rather than attempting to revive it, I immediately pivot to replacement. The pacing becomes much tighter, and the humor shifts from exaggerated reactions to a more dry, deadpan delivery.

One of the biggest changes shows up in the replacement scene. In the original, it’s grounded in a very specific, almost mundane setting: a parking lot, a named seller, multiple plants with personality. In the shorter version, that same moment becomes more surreal. The setting turns into a questionable alley, the seller becomes more ambiguous, and the line “this one matches your aura” replaces a lot of the original detail with something stranger.

The ending follows a similar pattern. The original spends time reflecting on what happened, even offering a kind of tongue-in-cheek lesson about responsibility and covering mistakes. The 100-word version removes the reflection entirely. It ends on a quieter note, with the boss accepting the situation and me holding on to a more understated sense of guilt.

In a way, the difference comes down to scope. The original tells the full story, with all of its escalation and commentary. The shorter version captures just the essential beats (problem, replacement, resolution), and lets the absurdity sit without explanation.

What I find interesting is that the rewrite doesn’t just shorten the story. It subtly changes the tone. The original was loud and performative. The new version is quieter, but also a little more off. There’s a hint of something not quite right beneath the surface, which wasn’t as prominent before.

So while the two versions share the same foundation, they end up doing very different things. One is a full comedic spiral. The other is a tightly contained moment that trusts the audience to fill in the gaps.