We’ve all done it. Grabbed the nearest scrap of paper, tissue, or your girlfriend’s skirt and started scribbling the idea that just hit us before it vanishes into the aether of short-term memory. Then you get home at night, empty your pockets, and realize you can’t read a darn thing you wrote down all day. Or maybe you shot up out of a deep sleep and had some dream that inspired your new plot twist. You fumble in the dark, stub a few toes, step on the cat, fall down the stairs, manage to find something that feels like paper and scrawl your dream scum onto it. Then you wake up in the morning and realize some epileptic chicken did a tap dance on your notes.
What would it be like if we actually preserved all those little tidbits of ideas and story? How important can those scraps of paper be?
Someone decided to find out. And so the Napkin Fiction Project was born. So far, it has secured mental scraps from almost a hundred writers from across the world, from Robin Black to Rick Moody to Mike Heppner. Springboarding off a desire to capture spontaneous inspiration and those intimate moments that occur in restaurants, bars, homes, and bus rides, Esquire magazine sent 250 napkins in the mail to various writers, asking them to jot down anything they wished at any time and send it back. Here are the results. A mixture of charming, sparse wording, little poems, drama, hilarity and slices-of-life that might’ve been lost forever, but are now preserved forever… or at least until the downfall of the Internet. Or when the server crashes. Or when napkins are banned from common usage. Hey, anything can happen. It does every day.
I see that smile.