Noodle Incidents in Your Work (If You Have Any)

For some reason, I have a liking toward the Noodle Incident in my stories. I just like the mysterious nature they induce.

For example, in the current stage play I'm scripting, Shoplift, one of the protagonists shoplifts a dress. For the second time. The most information we get out of it is this:

Even I don't know what Emma shoplifted the less time, less the exact relationship between these two.

So, have any Noodle Incidents in your own work?

edited 22nd Jun '12 7:49:15 AM by chihuahua0

There are a few. They're mostly more serious than comedic, though, past incidents in the character's life that people in the story are aware of but which are not elaborated on.

There's something involving a toy box that elicits an "I was five!" reaction from one of my characters whenever it gets brought up.

I don't know. I sometimes forget what the audiences know and what I know.

Not exactly the same thing, but I've been writing chapters of Derrek's predecessor, Clayton Cobb, who abused the hell out of his cheating death powers (Enough that he ended up being mentally around 130 years old). So he frequently refers to events that 'never happened'. I imagine in the right scenario I could play this card with a slight alteration.

And one of my favorite Noodle Incidents from Samand Max Freelance Police (Hit the Road) :

Sam: "Oh we don't go upstairs." Max: "...not since the accident."

Oh yeah, I had something like this in a story I wrote. Thanks to the feedback I got, I realized that it didn't work at all. In hindsight, I should have known better than to do that. What I am trying to say is that you shouldn't include this type of thing unless you either create enough clues and implications for the reader to figure it out herself or himself or you elaborate on it later. Don't just mention something that the reader has no clue about and then never bring it up again. As a reader, coming across that is more annoying than anything.

...?

Thank you for including this.

As a general rule, my attitude towards Noodle Incidents and similar "throwaway" background references is that the author should always know what they are. This might not, and often shouldn't, even come up in the story, but it does add a slight feeling of verisimilitude if the references being thrown out there aren't just being made up as they go along.

I like exploiting what I know about a character that the audience doesn't, so these show up from time to time. Sometimes it's just a matter of playing off of how two characters react to some shared past experience, be it for humour or something else.

I have a habit of creating much larger and detailed backstories that could ever hope to be relevant or appear in the work I happen to be writing at any given moment, so I generally settle for alluding to things in the backstory like this instead of dreadfully boring information dumps the audience will be bored through. It seems to be more amusing that way, at least.

I actually you in mind when I added that.

A lot of the time, I at least have a general sense of what happened during the Noodle Incident (ie, The Cat Incident in Manifestation Files I have all planned out for a flashback scene).

For the work that I mentioned in the OP though, I only have a sense that it was one interesting shoplift. I'm not sure how a shoplifter can get a mall cop almost fired.

However, the above two are "plot important" Noodle Incidents, as opposed to "throw-away" ones (like "spartan wrestling" in one of my other story ideas).

edited 22nd Jun '12 5:08:03 PM by chihuahua0

In a very, very, early draft of The Chaos, Nick was in his car with car with his best friend, Paul. Paul mentioned at one point in school, he decided to prank the girls in the bathroom by bringing realistic toy snakes to scare them shitless.

I scrapped this scene (and Paul altogether) because it was an unfunny Noodle Incident. >_>

edited 22nd Jun '12 5:19:47 PM by Masterofchaos

I know exactly what happened in the two major incidents of my story; it's even been written. I simply don't want to include them in the story since they take place chronologically well before it.

Two major incidents:

1) That Time at the Pool.

2) Matthew + Alcohol.

Wordkeepers has the Candle Incident. It's something that happened between the first and second books, and the protagonists do their best to pretend it never happened. Despite the prying from Ran's mother, they never reveal it.

From stuff that's currently written in a semi-decent stage, the Suenyaverse stories have the Earth Rules—rules and recommendations that Suenyans visiting Earth for the first time should abide by, so they don't look like total crazies. The rules themselves aren't the incident, but rather, one of the rules is "The small, brightly-colored creatures are not humanity's slaves; they aren't even alive, in fact." Among a bunch of other normal rules, this seems pretty nonsensical, but it does make the Prince blush when it's brought up, so presumably it's his fault.

Given that I write in an Alternate History, I generally do Cryptic Background References rather than noodle incidents, but those're similar.

Xavier is expressly forbidden from talking about what happened on Penglai. The New York housing riots were pretty important. And absolutely no one likes to talk or even think about the attack on Flight 682.

I'd say that it's completely OK to not explain things in your work, but you should know what happened, and you should avoid making something look like it'll be important in future and then it just turned out to be color. Mention a Noodle Incident near the beginning of a fairly serious work, and your readers WILL think it's foreshadowing and important.

Quite a few.

In TBDC-BABF 04-A, Billy is blackmailed into doing something he really doesn't wish to do by being reminded of an incident involving a marshmallow pie, a cheese log, floor wax, and a neighbor's cat (http://www.freewebs.com/smokingcatcomicsandcollectibles/bdcomish14.htm#14000002).

When summoned to the principal's office for some innocent matter in TBDC-FABF 12-A, Josh immediately tries to explain how some missing (and presumably used) cheerleader spankies came to be for sale on eBay. (http://www.freewebs.com/smokingcatcomicsandcollectibles2/Webpages/bdcomish80.htm#80000002).

edited 24th Jun '12 2:27:01 PM by HaggisMcCrablice

I've got a few. My story's a superhero work, so one of them is someone mentioning just getting back from fighting Nazis on the moon. And also stopping Osama bin Laden from using a hate beam on the US. A couple other things like that.

And, of course, the occasional incident in the backstory of the characters, though I've expanded on a couple of those. I can't really think of them off the top of my head, though.

Is it wrong that this thread in and of itself made me want to think of one?

From my Boys' Love Genre novel, Crushed:

Maya jumped up and down excitedly.

"I'm so glad you guys are coming with us to the anime convention," she said, "hopefully it'll be better than the last time we went!"

Nigel stopped and tilted his head in confusion.

"Wait," he asked, "what happened last time?"

"You don't wanna know." said Toby.

"Hey," said Joseph, defensively, "I had NO idea that that guy would-"

"PLEASE DON'T FINISH THAT SENTENCE!" shouted Toby."

Also, I'm not sure if this counts but the following in Sins Vs Virtues:

Diligence/Myra: You don't get the severity of this situation, do you kid? There's a reason we don't let anyone besides one of the Chosen Virtues on our team.

Puck: Hey! I'm Tory-uh, Humility's best friend! You gotta let me on!

Diligence/Myra: You wanna know the reason we don't let stragglers in? C'mere. We used to. You wanna know what happened to them? Pride got them. And you know what happened next? They ended up in Gluttony's stomach. So if you're going to be part of the team, I suggest you use that "big brain" of yours to figure out what you're getting yourself into.

I might list more if I can think of any.

edited 29th Jun '12 7:59:11 PM by CJCroen1393

Both of the fanfics I'm working on have several noodle incidents. April, the Intrepid Reporter protagonist of my Pokemon Super Fic, has a lot of them, including one that acts as her Cynicism Catalyst. In my Power Ponies fic, everyone on the team has had at least a few (especially Sky and Glory), and Saddle Rager's origin story is basically one big noodle incident.

As anything included in a work has to either advance the plot or reveal something about the characters and a Noodle Incident refers to things past, it should at least let you know something of the characters and/or their relationship with each other.

Ideally it should be relevant to whatever's currently happening or foreshadow something to come.

What does the Noodle Incident say about the current situation? The characters? Their relationship? Does what it reveals about the past make a future event less of an apparent Ass Pull?

I would say that you could have no more knowledge of the Noodle Incident than a vague idea like "Bill got drunk once and screwed things up" provided it was relevant to mention it at the time - fine detail isn't needed but you must be clear that, whatever it was, it was significant. If you're going to hint at details, then you need to know them.

It can be a great tool to drop important information about the characters without derailing the story with lengthy expositional Infodump/Flashback - if you can sum up a lengthy incident with "Just remember to stay away from the booze this time" or similar and then get on with the "here-and-now", all the better.

I use them when I want to convey relevant history as succinctly and unintrusively as possible. Perhaps it makes it less jarring when a particular character does something later because we have clues as to their past, perhaps it conveys that the situation could be made worse if the characters aren't careful, perhaps it shows us that the two have a particular kind of relationship that's relevant ("I didn't leave you hangin' in London, did I."), perhaps it explains why someone did something. ("Did you think I'd desert you after what you did for me?")

edited 19th May '18 6:51:28 PM by Wolf1066

I have one scene opening with your typical "You can't be serious" and moving on to "Yeah, but on your bedsheets?" My protagonist's Annoying Younger Sibling was a bit of a prankster in their younger years, and had drawn up plans to dye Hair-Trigger Temper Perpetual Frowner big sis' hair pink. On big sister's bedsheets.

Big sister's only bedsheets. (During their time in a quasi-military Gang of Hats)

In permanent marker. (Because of course it was)

The only thing saving little sister from a legendary ass-kicking was the teacher.

More a Cryptic Background Reference, but Abigail.

Though it's in my notes, for now I won't be making clear exactly what Abigail was or did, aside from that they were an AI, and that what they did before being put down made AI research not just illegal, but so forbidden that even the Mega Corps won't flaunt the ban, even though they theoretically could get away with doing so.

Edited by KillerClowns on Jul 12th 2018 at 5:59:24 AM

The Web of Friendship has a lot of "offscreen" drills and exercises Gone Horribly Wrong (thanks to meddling pranksters and a side helping of Noodle Implements) that lead to Tactical Reminiscence "onscreen" later on.

Also, thanks to an unspecified You Tube video that a human showed to a Mayatan, it's become an in-joke among the Web of Friendship that any pair of tones that make a binaural beat are nicknamed "lavender tones".

One of my characters has worked with nearly every hero in his universe at some point (kinda like Nightwing or Ben Grimm), so there will occasionally be these if a teamup should occur: "(Character name)? Wow, I haven't seen you since that business in Zamunda!"

"Has it really been two years? Weird!"