Today’s Peace of Wisdom Can Be Found When We Recognize That One Person Willing to Step Forward Can Become the Bridge Between Chaos and Order
The Content Barge arrived last night and this was unloaded for you.
Writers & Just for Fun
Meet the Great Woolly Pug:
A Creative Writing Project
You just watched a short film prove, with a straight face and serious music, that the pug in your lap is the shrunken descendant of a mighty Ice Age beast. It isn’t true, of course. But for two minutes it almost feels like it could be — and that “almost” is the whole point.
The film takes something completely ordinary, a pug, and builds an entire fictional history around it. Every “clue” is a real thing pugs actually do: the bulging eyes, the love of fruit, the way they turn to dead weight in your lap, the snoring, the snot. The story never invents a single fake trait. It just explains the true ones in a wonderfully wrong way.
The Challenge
Take an ordinary, everyday object — something nobody thinks twice about — and invent a fictional history for it.
Objective: What story can you write that seems true?
You don’t have to make a video. A written story is perfect. The only rule is the hard part: it should feel real while you’re reading it.
Send us what you write. We’d genuinely like to read them, and we’ll publish the three best.
Want to go deeper? Tap any bar below to open it. Inside you’ll find the writing tricks the film uses, step-by-step ideas to get you started, discussion questions, and how to send us your story.
Before you start, it helps to see why the woolly pug is so convincing. The film follows a simple recipe you can borrow:
Start with something true. Explain it with something false. Tell the whole thing in a voice too serious to be joking.
Real detail plus straight face equals believable. Break any one of those and the spell breaks with it.
Watch the film again with a writer’s eye. Here are the specific moves it makes, and where.
1. Borrow a trusted voice
The pug. This loyal companion has been with man for thousands of years.
The very first line sounds exactly like a nature documentary — and nobody argues with that narrator. By stealing the sound of an authority, the writer borrows its credibility before making a single strange claim.
2. Start with a real detail and call it a mystery
It all started with a question. Why are a pug’s eyes so huge?
Pugs really do have enormous eyes. The writer invents nothing here — it just points at a true thing and acts puzzled by it. A genuine detail is the seed the whole fiction grows from.
3. Anchor the invention in a kernel of truth
Records of pugs associating with humans date back to ancient China, but there are few details.
This part is basically accurate. Notice how the writer leans on the gaps — “there are few details” — because empty space in the real record is exactly where invented history can move in unnoticed.
4. Build a logical-sounding bridge to a ridiculous place
Animals with large forward-facing eyes are universally nocturnal.
That sentence is true — but the film uses it as a stepping stone to “therefore the pug was once a nocturnal Ice Age creature.” Each step sounds reasonable; only the destination is absurd. That’s how a reader gets carried somewhere they’d never have agreed to go directly.
5. Recruit the reader’s own experience as proof
As anyone knows who’s owned a pug, it’s very difficult to get up once a pug has plopped itself in your lap.
When a story reminds you of something you’ve seen with your own eyes, you nod along — and once you’re nodding, you’re halfway to believing the made-up part too.
6. Dress it up with experts and hedges
…the atoms of their stout bodies are packed tightly together for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand.
The claims are always pinned on someone — “some scientists,” “Ice Age pug believers,” “theorists” — and that closing phrase is a magic trick: it sounds scholarly and quietly makes the claim impossible to disprove. Watch the dates, too — 50,000 years, then 10,000, then “more than 20,000.” They don’t even agree, but a specific number feels like fact, so we let it slide. That’s false precision doing its job.
7. Deliver the most ridiculous line with the straightest face
The great woolly pug was able to defend itself by charging at its enemies full force and then simply sitting on them.
The funnier the idea, the more seriously the film says it. The humor lives entirely in the gap between the solemn tone and the silly content. If the narrator so much as smirked, the joke would collapse.
You don’t have to write in order, but this is a reliable way in:
- Pick your object. The more boring, the better. A paperclip. A rubber duck. A traffic cone. The single sock that vanishes in the dryer. A crayon. A garden gnome.
- List what’s actually true about it. Study it like the film studied the pug. What does it really look like, do, or cause? Get five or six honest observations.
- Invent the history that “explains” them. Where did it come from? What was it originally for? Let its real features become the evidence for your wild backstory.
- Choose a voice too serious to be joking. A documentary narrator, a museum plaque, a scientific journal, a breaking-news report, an old legend passed down for generations. Commit to it completely.
- Never break character. Don’t wink. Don’t say “just kidding.” Let the reader discover the joke on their own — that’s the fun.
Objects begging for a secret history
A paperclip, a bar of soap, a shopping cart, a stop sign, bubble wrap, a coat hanger, a doorknob, a spork, a fortune cookie, a squeaky floorboard.
Phrases the pros use to sound believable (steal these shamelessly)
- “Some historians believe…”
- “As anyone can plainly see…”
- “For reasons still not fully understood…”
- “Records date back to…, though details are scarce.”
- “This remains hotly debated, but most agree it is a plausible explanation.”
The film never once tells you it’s a joke — and it’s funnier because of it. What specific words, details, or moments tipped you off that it wasn’t serious? What do you think would happen to the humor if the narrator stopped to admit, “Okay, none of this is real”?
The woolly pug only works because pugs truly do have bulging eyes, love fruit, and feel impossibly heavy in your lap. Why is a made-up story so much more convincing when it’s built on true details? Where else — in ads, headlines, or things you scroll past online — have you seen real facts used to make something untrue feel believable?
Andy’s challenge is to write something that “seems true.” Think about the line between a story that’s playfully, obviously false and one that could actually fool somebody. Where does your own story land — and does it matter which side of that line it’s on?
This project works from upper elementary through high school; the difference is mostly how far you push the craft. Younger writers can aim for one true object, three invented “clues,” and a confident voice. Older writers can be held to genre precision, controlled tone, and a real revision pass — challenge them to fool a classmate before the reveal.
Use the film as a mentor text. Watch it once for fun, then a second time with the techniques list in hand and pause on each move as it happens. Naming a technique the moment students see it working is what makes it theirs to reuse.
A built-in media-literacy lesson. The same tools that make the woolly pug delightful — borrowed authority, a kernel of truth, confident numbers, “experts say” — are the exact tools behind misinformation and slick advertising. Let students enjoy the trick from the inside by building one themselves. Writers who have made the illusion are far quicker to spot it later in the wild. That’s the real gift here: a laugh that quietly teaches a lifelong skill.
A quick self-check before submitting:
- Is every “clue” based on something actually true about my object?
- Did I keep my serious voice the whole way through, without winking?
- Would a reader who didn’t know better pause and think, “wait… could this be real”?
Ways to share the work. Written stories are the heart of it, but the format can flex: a mock documentary script, a fake museum placard, a “breaking news” bulletin, a page from an imaginary encyclopedia, or — for the ambitious — a short narrated video in the spirit of the original.
Write your object’s secret history, then send it our way. We’d love to read them, and we’ll publish the three best on Wisdom Harbour.
So — what’s the most ordinary thing near you right now, and what’s it hiding?
Email your story to harbourmaster@wisdomharbour.com, or simply reply to the Content Barge email.
Discover Something New at Wisdom Harbour
How Do I...
Prepare to Be Creative
with Jimmy Yeary
Have you ever struggled with “creativity?” Do you sometimes feel like you just can’t get your brain into a higher gear? Fortunately, there is a very effective process you can apply that turns uncertainty into razor sharp creativity! One of the most creative people in the world, songwriter Jimmy Yeary has fourteen Number One Hits and three Song of the Year awards. In this conversation from the How Do I? dock, Jimmy reveals his secret to creativity—preparation. Watch as he teaches you exactly how to prepare!
Discussion Questions
- 1)On presence: Jimmy’s whole technique hinges on getting “outside of this brain and get in the present moment” by describing everything he sees as fast as he can. Why do you think forcing yourself into the present — noticing the rust on a fan, the grain of the wood, the screws — clears mental fog more effectively than simply trying to concentrate harder? Have you found other ways that pull you into the present before you need to perform or create?
- 2)On following a thread: He points out that you never actually run out of things to talk about — a scratch in the wood leads him to wonder about the worker who made it, then that worker’s name, home, and family. How does noticing a small detail open up into curiosity and story? Where else in life or work does one observation lead you somewhere you didn’t expect?
- 3)On discomfort as the point: Jimmy repeatedly admits the exercise feels silly, embarrassing, and awkward — and insists you do it anyway and “roll with it.” Why might the willingness to feel foolish be essential to creativity? What’s a time when pushing past that self-consciousness led you to a better result?
From the Contributor's Dock
Jimmy Yeary
JimmyYeary.com
Jimmy Yeary was writing songs long before becoming the lead singer of the Grammy Award winning supergroup SHENANDOAH. These were years that saw Jimmy performing #1 hits like Mama Knows, Somewhere In the Vicinity of the Heart, and Sunday in the South.
Today, in Nashville and Los Angeles, one of the most common calls in the music industry is from an artist’s representative to Sony Publishing requesting availability on songs from Jimmy Yeary’s catalogue of music. It’s not surprising. Jimmy has written more than two-thousand songs, many of which have been featured on albums selling millions of copies–Grammy winners, gold and platinum awards among them. Fourteen of Jimmy’s songs have been certified “Number 1” hits as singles by Billboard Magazine.
Recently, both the CMA and ACM awarded Jimmy Yeary with “Song of the Year” for I Drive Your Truck–the inspiring song he wrote about the father of a fallen soldier and how he continues to remember his son. Jimmy’s most recent Number 1 was “I Called Mama,” a song he wrote for Tim McGraw.
Have You Downloaded the Wisdom Harbour App?
Have You Downloaded the Wisdom Harbour App?
