How do you switch a body?

The other night, I watched Family Switch on Netflix, a classic body-switching romp that goes delightfully through all the tropes one expects from that premise: parents and kids who just don’t understand each other, the one day that seems to contain the big important events for everyone, and reveling in one’s new body by dancing or eating dairy as desired.

I don’t need to review this movie in any meaningful way: it’s lighthearted family fluff that doesn’t really go above and beyond the call of duty. But it did bring to mind something that I often come up against in my writing: how do you switch a body?

In this particular movie, the change is supposedly enacted by a once-in a-lifetime alignment of the planets, which prompts them to undergo a sidequest to fix the broken telescope at the Griffith Observatory before learning that it was really the magic of all-knowing Rita Moreno, and that the switch would be reversed when everyone had duly learned their lesson.

That’s not a very involved explanation, but in a movie like this, it doesn’t have to be. It’s in the same vein as the culturally insensitive magic fortune cookie in Freaky Friday, or the fountain in The Change-Up: just a thing that happens. This decision, however, made at the beginning of a narrative, can have a big effect on where the story goes (and keeping it from being bogged down with unnecessary plot, since at the end of the day we aren’t here for the mechanics of it… are we?)

I’ve written x-number of transformation stories and many more captions besides. So I’ve had to come up with an answer to this question many times, which has a way of either guiding the writing of a story, or needing to be fit to the story I want to tell.

When I wrote I Changed Sexes With My Wife, I wanted to put our protagonists into anatomically functioning bodies through no fault or instigation of their own. I had them become desperately ill, and the only cure being, in effect, a body swap to two complete strangers. A little contrived, but I think the audience agreed it did what it needed to do: this way, the characters know there’s no going back and won’t spend the story fighting against their fate.

For Kristi’s Mom, it was really by asking the question of: why would this woman do this, what tools would be available at her disposal, and what rules could I create that would help me get the story to the ending I wanted? This is a magical story but it’s not one where transformations happen willy-nilly.

For Partsexchange and A Holiday Wish, I was a lot more casual: the nature of the transformations are a little more ambiguous and mysterious, and much like in the Family Switch or other movies, the enchantment pretty much lasts just until the story needs it to end. They’re lighter, and I think the tone is forgiving as long as I include a mysterious masseuse or a flickering light from an old Christmas star as a token nod of “Something’s up.”

Then there are captions I write that simply go “Oh no, the body swapping device malfunctioned!” I mean, nobody’s expecting a really tight plot: just 30 seconds of reading, and a picture of a hot body.

I have so many more stories and premises that I haven’t even told you about yet: government sanctioned body swaps and reality shifts, nanobots, potions, body-sculpting devices, supernatural curses, possessions… fair to say that a lot of my time as a writer is spent trying to figure out ways to turn one person into another. Each of these would in some way reflect the story I’m trying to tell. I deliberately grounded “I Changed Sexes With My Wife” in medical imagery, and “The Princess Awakening” in old-world hokum. But the truth is, that’s a part of my work that can be frustrating to me. Sometimes I would much rather cut to the chase, because the story isn’t usually about the mode of transformation, and yet a story that doesn’t do its due diligence by at least insinuating a cause to set the plot in motion is cheating the audience a bit.

I appreciate a good meta-premise. Part of the reason I was excited to write for the Trading Post all those years ago was because I knew it was an idea that could be used in many, many different ways to tell many different stories (I still feel like we only scratched the surface, but at the end of the day it was only a few of us, and most writers will tend to stay in a similar line of thinking time and again.) Jay has often said he rigged up the conditions and rules to that premise to nudge the characters toward specific types of behavior, and I think they work well. It has a lot of leeway, but also barriers on it.

I respect old “verses” from Fictionmania and similar sites like The Great Shift and the Medallion of Zulo from Altered Fates (I wrote a few Altered Fates stories.) Even the Ovid universe, as problematic as it seems from this distance, at least has an interesting starting point and an intriguing set of rules/guiding principles. What’s great about these is to be able to slot in different characters and situation and get a similar but varied product, time and again. I have one or two “big ideas” like this in my pocket for when the time is right. For instance I intend on bringing back Sexual Automorphogenesis from Steven: A Love Story.

But man, it’s work. And it’s a reminder that I’m not just here to bang out endless stories. I had an idea a few weeks ago that I thought was a winner, and I believe that if I ever get around to writing it it could be, but lacks that crucial early step to kick the story into motion. Not having that makes the whole work feel flimsy, before I even get to unpack the characters and plot that are supposed to make it special. Until I have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I think, I don’t have a story.

Family Swap unfolds exactly how you would expect it to, but it does the work to unfold (perhaps a smidge too overtly, but nevertheless.) It’s a worthwhile model to follow for anyone who wants to write this kind of story.