Welcome to the WhatIf Writer’s Room

This is a non-commercial sandbox dedicated to humorous stylistic experiments and literary parodies.

Imagine a writer’s room full of legendary authors, all arguing about how to rewrite the most famous works ever put to paper. Some of those works belong to the authors in the room — which is half the fun, because the one ironclad rule is that nobody rewrites their own. You don’t get to parody yourself. But the colleague three seats down? Fair game. So Hemingway might find his spare little sentences ballooned into gothic excess by someone who’s never met a subordinate clause he didn’t love, while their author sits right there, watching it happen, slowly turning a dangerous shade of red.

The humor’s in all of it: the parody itself, the banter between rewrites, the way each author needles the others and deprecates themselves, and the slow dawning recognition of exactly how each one thinks about the craft. The source material doesn’t escape either — it gets maligned, stretched, and bent to every author’s particular strengths and… proclivities. And when the dust settles, a few of them wander off to a corner to sulk, nursing wounded pride over what’s been done to their pristine prose. Hope you enjoy the ride.

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The Room Convenes

The room is a bar, or it has been lately. Dark wood and darker corners, low amber light pooling under green-shaded lamps, the air thick with smoke that no one is smoking and something herbal and green poured from a fountain against the far wall. There is no far wall, quite. The edges of the place don’t hold — the booths soften into shadow where you stop looking at them, a row of leather wingbacks becomes a zinc bar becomes a cluster of café chairs around a marble table, and the ceiling goes up into a haze that might be rafters or might be weather. Comfortable seating everywhere, arranged in little islands: deep chairs by a fire, a long settle under a window with the wrong night behind it, stools at a counter that reflects more bottles than it holds. Nothing is fixed. Everything is comfortable. If you watch any one detail long enough it will, gently and without apology, become something else.

WODEHOUSE: —and I maintain that a man who opens with a shipwreck has simply run out of better ideas and is hoping the weather will distract us.

HEMINGWAY: It worked.

WODEHOUSE: It worked for you, Ernest, which I’m afraid proves my point rather than yours.

Conversations drift across the room without much regard for who’s sitting where. Poe is leaning over the back of someone’s chair to argue a point with Butler, who is winning. Shelley has wandered from the fire to the counter and back. No one stays put, and no one keeps to their own kind — a century in a room with someone tends to wear the edges off whatever kept you apart. Adams sits a little apart from all of it, not in any seat of honor — there isn’t one — turning a teaspoon over in his fingers and watching the room the way a man watches weather he’s seen before.

LOVECRAFT: (to no one, uneasily) The window’s gone over to rain again. It was snow not a moment ago.

BUTLER: It’s always doing that, Howard. Leave it be.

LOVECRAFT: I don’t say it’s wrong. I say it bears watching.

BUTLER: You’d say that about a sunrise.

LOVECRAFT: (after a beat, quietly) Sunrises also bear watching.

An arm reaches over ADAMS’s shoulder and sets a conch shell on the marble in front of him — a writer’s arm, ink at the cuff, the sleeve of someone who’s been at this a while. Whoever it belongs to sets the shell down with the ease of long practice and drifts off again into the room without a word. No one turns to see which of them it was; they all know. The shell is pale, ridged, entirely solid in a room where nothing else quite is. ADAMS looks at it with the mild resignation of a man who has been volunteered.

ADAMS: Ah. Me again.

THOMPSON: You’ve got the hands for it.

ADAMS: I have the hands of everyone, apparently. Very well. We need a book.

This is when Andy Weir, who has been bouncing slightly in a chair too near the fire, sees a thing happen — a shell, a decision, a room turning toward a single point — and reasonably concludes it is his moment.

WEIR: Oh — oh, okay, I’ve got one. Do mine. Seriously, the math in it is airtight, I worked the whole orbital—

PALAHNIUK: (not even looking up) First rule of Book Club, man.

A ripple of groans around the room, followed with a few chuckles. Someone by the fire mutters “every time.” Hemingway exhales through his nose, which is as close as Hemingway comes to laughing. Weir looks from face to face, getting none of it.

WEIR: …What’s the first rule?

PALAHNIUK: (finally looking up, almost kind) If you have to ask, it’s not your turn yet.

WEIR: But I don’t even know what the second—

WODEHOUSE: No one does, dear boy. That’s rather the charm.

Weir subsides, baffled but game, filing it away. He’ll get there. They all did.

ADAMS: (tapping the conch, moving them along) A book. Someone who isn’t Howard, because Howard will pick something that ends with everyone dead and the furniture weeping.

LOVECRAFT: That happened once.

ADAMS: It happened the last four times, Howard.

SHELLEY: (from the fire, not unkindly) I’d let him have one eventually. He’s grown. We’ve all had the centuries for it.

A small thing passes through the room at that — not solemn, just understood. These are not quite the people the world remembers. Whatever they were when they were alive and certain and of their time, they have been here, together, long enough to have argued it out of each other over a great many cups of something green. The room does not relitigate the past. It simply doesn’t do that here anymore.

ADAMS: Noted, Mary. Eventually. Today I want something with a desert in it. I’m in a mood for sand and bad religion and a boy who takes it all far too seriously.

TOM ROBBINS: Now you’re talking. There’s a worm—

BUTLER: There’s a great deal more than a worm.

THOMPSON: (sitting up, suddenly very awake) Wait. The desert one. The kid, the old witch, the box with the hand in it.

ADAMS: That’s the one I had in mind, yes.

THOMPSON: Give me the opener. The box scene. (jabbing a finger at the conch as though it owes him money) I had a mescaline dream about that exact scene in a bathtub in ’seventy-one and I have been waiting fifty years for someone to hand me the excuse.

ADAMS: (spreading his hands — the chair allowing it more than granting it) I wasn’t going to give it to anyone else. You’d have made it weird regardless.

THOMPSON: (already reaching for paper that wasn’t there until he reached) Damn right I would have.

ADAMS: Then it’s Dune. Heaven help us. (to the room, drier) Hunter has the box. Everyone else, behave — or don’t, it’s never once helped.

The lamps dim by a degree no one calls attention to. The window has gone to desert dark. THOMPSON is already writing.

The Gom Jabbar Scene

as channeled by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who has been awake for three days and is not “doing the assignment” so much as settling a score with it

[HST] Okay. Okay okay okay. The brief says “boy in a bed, old hag with a poison box, tests him to see if he’s people or livestock.” Fine. FINE. But whoever wrote it the first time did it SOBER, and you can smell it on the page. Watch this. Hand me the brown bottle and don’t talk to me until the witch shows up.

The night came down on the castle like a wet wool blanket soaked in someone else’s bad decisions, and the boy lay in the dark running the oldest scam in the book — the Fake Sleep, the possum gambit, the slow theatrical breathing of a kid who knows damn well there are two predators in the room and one of them is his own mother.

`[HST] Love the mother. The mother is COMPLICIT. Nobody talks about that. She let the witch in. She held the door. Put that in — make her shoulders look guilty.

She stood there radiating the kind of composure that costs everything to fake, and beside her loomed the other one — the old woman, the crone, a thing so ancient and dried-out she looked like the desert had been practicing on her for a few centuries before it built a whole planet. She ate the light in the room. She ate the air. The boy, behind his counterfeit eyelids, felt his heart going like a snare drum in a burning church.

[HST] “Burning church.” Leave it. Bill me later.

Then his mother — the traitor, the accomplice, the woman who carried him and then STEPPED BACK — moved away from the bed. And every cell the boy owned screamed the same single syllable, which was: no.

He opened his eyes and gave up the act.

What hung over him was older than currency and meaner than weather. And in one withered claw: a little box. A dull green cube. The single most threatening piece of carry-on luggage in the history of the universe, because nothing held by a face like THAT is ever just a box.

“In the box,” she told him. “The hand. Now.”

[HST] See, I’m not gonna give you her real line. Her real line is too polite. This woman does not say please. She talks like a parole officer who already knows you did it.

And here came the bred-in panic, the ancestral red alert, ten thousand years of don’t-put-your-hand-in-the-dark-thing lighting up his spine like a pinball machine tilting straight to hell.

Then: the needle. At his throat. Right on the big artery — the express lane, the one that empties a man onto the floor before he can finish apologizing.

“Little something on the tip,” the crone said, bored as a god. “Kills animals. Just animals. You’ll be fine — if you’re not one.”

[HST] THIS is the scene. Right here. Everybody thinks Dune is about sand and worms and spice futures. It is NOT. It is about a terrified kid being asked the only question that has ever mattered in any bar, any war, any election, anywhere: are you a thing that runs, or a thing that stays? I have been answering that question my whole life and I will tell you the answer is usually “run, and bill the magazine for the cab.”

The boy reached for the thing they’d drilled into him — some little prayer against fear, some breathing exercise the schools hand out like aspirin.

[HST] Stop. STOP. They’ve got a real one in the original — this whole solemn little chant about fear being the mind-killer, fear’s the little death, let it pass through you, all very monastic, very incense-and-candles. And it’s GOOD, that’s the hell of it, it’s the most quotable thing in the book. Which is exactly why I’m not typing it. I’m gonna write the version this kid would actually need at 4 a.m. with a needle on his neck. Hold my drink. Hold the OTHER one too.

[HST] THE LITANY, REVISED — for use in actual emergencies: Fear is the freeloader. Fear is the bastard in the back seat grabbing for the wheel. I do not get to make him leave — I get to make him SIT DOWN. He can scream the whole ride. He does not drive. When the screaming’s done there’ll just be me and the road and whatever’s left of my hand, and I will count the fingers myself.

He put his hand in the box.

For one merciful idiot second: nothing. Cool dark. Empty space. The cruel little intermission before the building falls on you.

Then the pain kicked the door off its hinges and came in firing.

[HST] Don’t write “it hurt.” If you write “it hurt” I will come back from the dead and feed you to my own lawyer. Make it BIOGRAPHICAL. Make ’em feel the knuckles go.

It started as heat and got promoted instantly to inferno — the full screaming conviction that his hand was being fed into a furnace one knuckle at a time. First the fingertips, going bright and then white and then gone, the way a cigarette goes when you’re too wrecked to feel it reach the filter. Then the meat of the palm, crackling like fat in a pan. Then the certainty — total, unanswerable — that the bones themselves were charring to black sticks inside the cooking flesh, that he was being rendered down finger by finger into something you’d scrape off a grill.

Every individual nerve stood up to file a separate lawsuit. His whole body issued one unanimous demand — RIP IT OUT, you lunatic, the hand is GONE, can’t you SMELL it — and the body was right, obviously right, no creature with a brainstem endures this, every animal that ever lived would already be three miles gone and nursing a stump—

“The animal ones rip free and run,” the witch said, from the far shore of the fire. “Costs ’em a limb. You’re gonna sit here and keep yours.”

[HST] And here’s where she uses the Thing. The Voice. The original’s got this trick where she can drop her register and the words just go straight past your ears and start operating the levers in your spine without asking. I don’t know how I feel about that as a writer — it’s cheating, it’s mind-control, it’s the worst kind of editor — but God is it effective. Lean on it. Let it land like a hand on the back of the neck.

She spoke again and this time the words came in underneath — not a sound so much as a pressure, a low note that bypassed his ears entirely and reached straight down into the old reptile cellar of his skull and threw a switch he didn’t know he had.

“Be still,” the Voice said. And the screaming animal — stilled. Not soothed. Not lying. Pinned. Held down on the table by something that did not care how loud it howled.

And in the half-second of horrible clarity that bought him, some cold ancient sniper in the back of his head lit a cigarette and took notes: No furnace. No char. There’s a green box and a mean old woman and a current running lies straight into your nerves. The body is a panicking animal. You are the thing holding its leash. Hold the leash.

[HST] That’s the line. THAT’S the whole religion right there and Herbert buried it under forty pounds of desert ecology. Hold the leash. I’m getting that tattooed on somebody. Probably not me. Probably my attorney, while he sleeps.

So he held it. Held it while the fire swore his hand was ash. Held it while the smell of his own cooking meat filled a nose that knew, somewhere, that there was no smell. Held it through the part where it stops being pain and becomes a kind of weather, a climate, a place you live now. Held it past dignity, past sense, out into the bare country where there’s nothing left but the animal coin-flip — flinch and die, or stay and find out what you are. He stayed in there longer than any sane ledger would allow. He stayed until “hand” stopped being a word.

And then — gone. Switch thrown. Fire vanished. His hand whole in the dark, intact, shaking, betrayed by nothing but a tremor.

“Out,” she said. “Look at it.”

He looked. Five fingers. No ruin. Skin and bone and a tremble.

The old monster regarded him with something that wasn’t warmth — she didn’t stock the stuff — but maybe the cold professional nod of one survivor clocking another across a very long, very bad table. The needle was already gone from his throat. He never felt it leave.

[HST] Cut to the mother. ALWAYS cut to the mother. The accomplice has been standing in the hall doing her own dead-calm routine and FAILING, because you can fake calm for strangers but never for the kid you handed to the wolf.

And when she came back through the door and found him sitting up — alive, human, whatever that was suddenly worth — something dropped out of her shoulders that had been holding them at attention since the witch first darkened the door.

The boy sat very still and cradled the hand that the universe had just tried to lie him out of, and thought:

They’ll dress this up later. Call it an honor. Tell me I passed, that I’m something special now. But I know what just happened. An old reptile set a box on top of my fear and asked the only question worth asking out here in the dark —

and God help me, God help all of us — I stayed.

[HST] …Yeah. Yeah, that’s the one. Don’t touch it. Don’t let the sober people near it. Send it. And tell the front desk I am NOT paying for the lamp.

Sandworm Ride: H.P. Lovecraft

Gentlemen, I have read the brief, and I must register — at the outset — my profound unease. You have asked me to render a scene in which a youth MOUNTS one of these things and rides it, as a frontier lout might break a horse. I put it to the room that you do not ride such an entity. You are, at the very most, briefly tolerated by it. But I shall proceed. Avert the lamps. I write better when the corners of the room are not fully accounted for.

There are latitudes of the waking world into which the sane mind ought never to wander, and I have come to believe that the open desert of that accursed planet is foremost among them. It was there, beneath a sky the color of old bone, that I witnessed the thing I am now compelled — against every instinct of self-preservation — to set down.

The young man stood upon the crest of a dune as though he meant to do something reasonable.

Note the dune. I have specified that it is the WRONG sort of dune. The geometry of these formations is subtly incorrect — they do not lie as wind-blown sand ought to lie. Something beneath arranges them. I shall not say what. The reader’s imagination will furnish a worse answer than any I could provide, and that is the entire art.

He carried with him certain implements — hooked instruments of barbarous design, worn smooth by the hands of countless predecessors, few of whom, I should think, survived to pass them on. The people of that place had taught him their use with the dreadful casualness of a folk long accustomed to bargaining with the unbargainable. They did not regard what was coming as a beast. They regarded it as a sacrament, which is far worse, for it means they had thought about it carefully and decided to worship it anyway.

This is the detail that unmans me, and I want it underlined. It is not the monster. It is never merely the monster. It is that the natives have a LITURGY for the monster. They have made their peace. A thing you can make peace with is not nearly so terrible as a thing other men have already knelt to.

He drove one of the hooks into the sand — no, not into the sand, but into something beneath the sand, something vast and segmented and patient that had been moving toward him for some time with the slow inevitability of a tide that has decided, this once, to take a personal interest.

And the desert rose.

Restraint, here. RESTRAINT. The amateur describes the creature. He catalogues its teeth, its length, its glistening this-and-that, and in the cataloguing he murders the horror, for a thing fully described is a thing diminished to mere zoology. I describe only what the watching mind can BEAR to perceive — and let the rest press against the edges of the page, unspoken.

I shall not say how large it was. I have tried, in the privacy of my own correspondence, to commit its dimensions to paper, and each time the pen has stopped of its own accord. It was large in the way that certain thoughts are large — the ones that arrive at four in the morning and concern the true age of the earth and one’s own infinitesimal tenancy upon it. It came up out of the deep sand trailing a hot wind that stank of cinnamon and centuries, and where its leading edge breached the surface the very air seemed to bend, as light is said to bend about those gulfs in space from which nothing, having entered, returns.

The young man did not flee. This is the part I cannot forgive him.

Any RATIONAL organism flees. Flight is the one unambiguous proof of a functioning mind. The lower creatures flee. The higher creatures flee FASTER. And yet here is this youth, scrambling UP the flank of the abomination, fitting his little hooks so as to hold open a single segment of its hide — for it cannot, you understand, abide the abrasion of its own inner flesh against the sand, and so it rolls the wounded segment AWAY from the ground, and in rolling, it LIFTS him. He has not conquered it. He has merely made himself a splinter too irritating to grind out. I find no comfort in this. I find, if anything, the opposite of comfort.

And so he rode.

He stood astride a living thing older than the cities of men — older, perhaps, than the notion of cities, older than the first ancestor who looked up at the wheeling stars and felt afraid — and he balanced there upon its rolling immensity with an expression I can only describe as concentration, as though the proper management of the hooks were the whole of the matter, and not the bottomless and blasphemous fact of the thing beneath his feet.

Behind him, upon the dunes, the desert folk had gathered to watch.

And THEY are smiling. Mark it. The watchers are smiling. To them this is a coming-of-age, a thing to be celebrated with whatever grim festivities such a people permit themselves. To me it is the single most horrifying image in the entire account — for it means this is NORMAL here. It happens. It has a name. There are SONGS. I should like very much to go home now, except that I begin to suspect there is no longer any such place, only a thin pretense of one stretched over the same patient dark that waits beneath every desert and every dune and, I am increasingly persuaded, every floor.

The boy turned the creature toward the deep desert, toward the trackless waste where the maps surrender and the names run out, and the people raised a cry that was half triumph and half prayer — and I understood, with the cold and total clarity that comes only once or twice in a life and is never afterward welcome, that he was not the master of the thing.

He was its newest priest.

…Yes. End it there. Do not let them see it set him down — a thing that has been ridden and dismounted is merely an animal, and we have worked too hard to keep it from becoming one. Leave him atop it, dwindling into the waste, and let the reader supply the rest from that bottomless storehouse of dread we all keep and never speak of. …Why is the naturalist fellow raising his hand. Why is he looking at the worm like that. I do not like the look he is giving my worm.

The Room: On Worms

Someone has left a glass decanter along with a series of mismatched glassware at the corner of the marble bar. The fire is casting more light than before. More wood? Bigger fireplace? Less in the way? It doesn’t matter. Several chairs have been arranged in close quarters, unoccupied, nearby. There is a dampness to the air, like fresh rain, though the floor is dry. Thing wisps of smoke wander lazily about.

THOMPSON: Somebody explain to me why Howard’s worm draft is four pages of him refusing to look at the worm.

LOVECRAFT: It is called restraint. A thing fully described is a thing diminished. I leave the dimensions to the reader’s imagination, where they may fester appropriately.

THOMPSON: You left everything to the reader’s imagination. The kid, the hooks, the ride — it’s all happening in a fog bank. I’ve had hallucinations with better staging.

LOVECRAFT: I do not doubt it.

ADAMS: (not looking up) To be fair, Howard, you did describe the sand as having “subtly incorrect geometry.” Which is a lovely phrase for a dune.

LOVECRAFT: Thank you.

ADAMS: It wasn’t entirely a compliment. It’s a desert. The geometry is sand.

LOVECRAFT: Something arranges it.

THOMPSON: Something arranges it. He says that about everything. Howard thinks something arranges the cutlery.

LOVECRAFT: (quietly) Something does.

WODEHOUSE: I thought it was rather good, personally. Bit thick on the dread, but I once spent a whole novel on a man trying to return a cow creamer, so I’m in no position to throw stones at pacing.

ATTENBOROUGH: (mildly, from the end of the table) May I say something?

THOMPSON: Please. God. Somebody.

ATTENBOROUGH: The trouble isn’t the prose. The prose is marvellous. The trouble is that Howard is frightened of it. And you mustn’t be frightened of it. It’s an animal. A very large animal doing a very large thing, with no interest in us whatsoever.

LOVECRAFT: It is a blasphemy older than the cities of—

ATTENBOROUGH: It’s a Tuesday, Howard.

Silence.

LOVECRAFT: …A what.

ATTENBOROUGH: For the worm. It’s a Tuesday. It isn’t haunting anyone. It’s simply very large and going somewhere, and a small clever creature has worked out how to go along with it. That isn’t horror. That’s one of the most elegant arrangements in all of nature.

THOMPSON: See, that I’d read.

WODEHOUSE: Hear, hear.

LOVECRAFT: You wish to take my worm—

ATTENBOROUGH: Only the same scene. The same beat, exactly. You’ve done yours. I’d simply like to show what it looks like with the lights on.

LOVECRAFT: (darkly) The lights are how they find you.

ADAMS: David, give it a go. Howard, you can keep your version — nobody’s deleting the fog bank. We’ll run them side by side. Same worm, two universes. The readers can decide which one they’d rather be eaten in.

THOMPSON: Or not eaten in. That’s sort of David’s whole point.

LOVECRAFT: (retreating to the corner with his pages) It was never going to eat him. That was never the horror. The horror is that the natives have a liturgy.

ATTENBOROUGH: (rolling up his sleeves, kindly) Yes, Howard. It’s called a rite of passage. They’re rather touching, actually.

He begins. LOVECRAFT watches from behind a chair he has positioned, for reasons of his own, between himself and the window.

Sandworm Ride: David Attenborough

Dawn, on the open sand. The heat has not yet arrived, and in the brief cool the desert holds its breath.

We must whisper now. Not for fear — the animal cannot hear us — but out of respect. One always whispers near something this old.

Here, on an exposed ridge of sand, we find our subject: a juvenile primate, lean, recently separated from his natal group. He has travelled a great distance to be here, and he has come, remarkably, alone — a behaviour almost unheard of in a creature so young. Most of his kind would not survive a single night in the deep desert. This one has survived rather a lot of them. We do not yet know why.

And note — he is carrying tools. This is significant. Tool use among the young males is the culmination of years of instruction, and what he intends to do with them is, I promise you, worth the wait.

He waits. Patience, in this environment, is not a virtue but a survival strategy, and he has it in abundance. He is listening — not with his ears, but through the soles of his feet, reading vibrations in the sand the way you or I might read a letter. Somewhere below, something enormous is approaching. He has known it was coming for some time. He is, if anything, early.

Now. Here is the moment. I’d ask you to keep very still — though of course it is I who am narrating and you who are reading, so we shall simply have to imagine the stillness together.

He drives a tool into the sand. And the desert, with no fuss at all, begins to rise.

Forty metres of it. Perhaps more. The largest land animal this world has ever produced, and one of the largest the recorded universe has to offer — emerging not in anger, you understand, but simply because that is where it was going. We so often mistake size for menace. The animal has no opinion of us at all. That, I always think, is the truly humbling part.

It breaches the surface in a long, unhurried arc, trailing a wind that carries the warm and unmistakable scent of the spice for which this whole desert is, in its way, a single vast organism. The young male does not run. This is the behaviour we have come all this distance to observe.

And THIS — oh, this is wonderful — watch what he does. He does not attack it. He could not possibly harm it; the notion is absurd. Instead he fixes his hook so as to hold open one segment of its hide. The animal cannot tolerate sand against its softer inner tissue, and so it rolls that segment gently upward, away from the ground — and in doing so, quite without meaning to, it lifts him clear. He has not defeated the giant. He has simply made himself a small and manageable inconvenience. It is one of the most elegant arrangements in all of nature.

And now he rides.

Few sights in the natural world can match it. A creature weighing perhaps a tonne at most, riding atop a creature weighing tens of thousands — not by strength, never by strength, but by understanding. He has learned precisely how the animal wishes to move, and he has simply… asked it, in the only language it knows. The giant carries him out toward the deep desert, entirely unbothered, possibly unaware. To the giant, he is a passing itch. To the boy, it is everything.

On the dunes behind, his people have gathered to watch. They do not interfere. They have all, in their time, done this very thing, and they know better than anyone that it cannot be helped from the outside. It must be earned alone.

To them, this is a rite of passage — the single most important morning of a young life. The herd watches the juvenile and sees, perhaps, a god in the making. Or perhaps the most embarrassing thing they have ever witnessed. Nature, so often, declines to tell us which — and I have learned, over a very long life, not to insist that she choose.

The boy turns the great animal toward the open waste, and the watchers raise a cry — of triumph, of welcome, of something older than either. And the giant, indifferent to all of it, carries its small passenger out across the sand and into the shimmering distance, where the dunes blur into heat and the eye, at last, loses them both.

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Good Faith & Artistic Intent

This project operates in good faith with genuine respect for the literary works and authors we parody. Our intent is to celebrate, analyze, and comment upon great works of fiction through the lens of stylistic experimentation—not to exploit, diminish, or compete with them.

We believe that transformative parody enriches literary culture and serves the public interest in education and artistic expression.

Last updated: June 2026