Burger Wuss
I worked at McDonald’s one summer when I was sixteen. It did not go well. On the first day, I had to go into the women’s bathroom and clean up something that looked like an industrial disaster. To keep people out while I mopped, I put up a sign on the door that said, “Out of McOrder.”
My manager almost fired me right then and there. He said I wasn’t taking the McDonald’s name seriously. I pointed out that their corporate logo is a clown. How seriously do they expect to be taken?
Anyway, only a few of the scenes in the book are taken from life – like the scene in which someone pulls the emergency ring above the fry vat just to see what will happen. Most of it was made up. The book is about people taking revenge on each other. It was incredibly fun concocting all of their schemes – all the ways they’re trying to trick each other. And it was fun planting the clues so the reader can guess who’s pulling a fast one on who.
This is the first time I wrote an outline for a book, scene by scene, before I began writing the book itself. Sometimes (as with my book Feed) I’ve written without knowing what is going to happen. Sometimes (as with most of my books) I know some of what happens, but not all of it. In the case of Burger Wuss, I wrote a complete description of every scene’s main events and functions. This was great. It meant that when I sat down each day to write, I knew exactly what I had to accomplish – and all I had left to do was make up all the fun stuff: the dialogue, the eccentric characters, the descriptions of settings.
This book was a great pleasure to write.
A piece of trivia for writers: At the time I wrote Burger Wuss, I was in grad school, studying something called Jacobean revenge tragedy – these crazed, murderous plays written in England around 1600. I thought I’d try to write a revenge tragedy, but set in a burger restaurant. At first, I tried to steal the plot of one of the old plays directly. That didn’t work – too much murder and mayhem – so I made up my own plot. There is still a faint memory of Jacobean revenge tragedy in the novel, however. Many of the characters, for example (Cyril Turner, John Webster, John Fletcher) are named after Renaissance playwrights. And the main character, the revenger, is named Anthony, as he would be in a Jacobean revenge tragedy.