HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: Greg Bardsley

Story ideas rain down on me.

Yesterday is a good example. I was at an event thinking about one of my characters when I overheard someone mention a very common workplace tradition – the two thoughts fused, and an interesting story idea was borne.

Sometimes, it’s something that makes me scratch my head.

My favorite example is when a colleague walked past my cube as he gnawed away on some type of food on a stick. For a moment, it looked like he had an animal on that stick. It was only a corndog, but – again -- an idea was borne and I had the beginning of one of my favorite pieces, “Some Kind of Rugged Genius.”

Other times it’s something I can’t stop laughing about. Earlier in my career at a previous job, a coworker came to me with a grave concern. He was convinced that an executive had inadvertently used a little-known sex term to describe his strategy for winning in the market. I’m not sure I agreed, but he took great pains to plead his case, going it into great detail. In the weeks that followed, I laughed every time I thought about it, and I realized there had to be a story there. Soon after, I had the inspiration for “Headquarters Likes Your Style.”

Perhaps the story that sparks the most questions is “Upper Deck.”

People still ask, “How’d you ever come up with that one?”

I tell them it’s all because of my sister Jennifer.

Poor Jenn. She had to grow up with me. I was her foul, obnoxious little brother who LOVED potty humor. In those adolescent (and dare I say teen?) years, my sister was subjected to an untold number of pranks, jokes, stunts, boobytraps, drawings and even displays. She also knows that, yes, even after all these years, I am still not immune to the charms of potty humor. So when she comes across something really disgusting, she will pass it along to me in the same way someone may present a smoked pig ear to a dog.

So, about ten years ago, Jenn grabs my arm, squeezes hard. She’s breathless. “Greg,” she pants. “I have a friend at work, and he told me about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. And it’s all the rage at parties.”

She was talking about “upper decking,” something I knew nothing about. Something almost no one knew anything about. This was 2001, after all, and upper decking was still very underground, still something practiced without ceremony or fanfare, something performed in untraveled locations -- in this case, in the tucked-away bathrooms of young, unsuspecting San Franciscans.

Learning about it was like watching a 3-D movie for the first time, or unearthing the fossil of a previously unknown species that would forever change our understanding of evolution.

Jenn and I laughed about it, and I would ask for updates.

“What’s up with you friend and the upper decking?”

Her face would brighten. “He’s going to a party hosted by this total jerk who laid off his entire staff. He’s gonna do it.”

“Tell me how it goes, okay?”

For whatever reason, I let that nugget sit for four or five years, until finally I had an idea for a story – to create the most disgusting and amusing man I could imagine, make him an upper-decker, place him in a world that’s a bit tilted, and then put him on a crash course with unforgiving conflict.

And I was off.

The story practically wrote itself. At least it felt that way.

My readers really liked it, so I decided to test the waters, which was not soon after I had discovered the transgressive journal Murdaland, which included Anthony Neil Smith’s phenomenal story, “Lovers Through All Eternity and Forevermore.” I liked the piece so much that I Googled Smith and landed on his blog, which just happened to be announcing the resurrection of Plots with Guns.

I sent him “Upper Deck,” heard back within 20 minutes, and my writing life has never been the same.

Guess I can thank my big sister. And Neil.

Greg Bardsley is a former newspaper reporter who covered crime and government in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since then, he has worked as an editor, ghostwriter, speechwriter and video producer. His ghostwriting has appeared in a variety of publications, including Newsweek, USA Today and Financial Times. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Sex, Thugs and Rock & Roll [Kensington Books], Uncage Me [Bleak House Books] and By Hook or Crook: The Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year [Tyrus Books]. His stories also have appeared in Plots with Guns, Crimefactory, Storyglossia, 3:AM Magazine, Out of the Gutter, Thuglit, Pulp Pusher and Demolition.