This is in anticipation that somebody may ask me, “How does
a story start? Where do you get your ideas? Why do you write?”
Who is going to read this or anything else you or I write, and
does it matter whether they do or don’t? The answer is pretty much nobody, and no. A
story might start with a feeling, or a voice, or a picture, or perhaps a
fragment of a dream. When it grows and develops to where it can no longer be
retained in memory, it gets written down. Yeah, we want people to read it, but
the story isn’t going to be much good if it’s written for that purpose.
About five or six years ago I was getting this recurring
picture of me as a young man and I’m working for the city, digging in a ditch. There’s
a young woman on the sidewalk, walking away.
I have to catch up with her, to see her face because I think she is
someone I know or should know, and I have the feeling she is walking right into
some sort of trouble, like maybe she’s going to walk right off the edge of a
cliff, or in the path of a speeding car.
The ditch I’ve dug is too deep and I can’t get out, or maybe
I’m afraid that if I follow her I’ll lose my job.
Some months later I started getting visits from this character,
a ragged, carefree, friendly young man who follows me around and becomes
something of a pest. His name is Willy and he’s always telling me stories
involving people who he assumes I know, and becomes agitated when I ask him to
identify any of these people: “Joe!” he says. “You know Joe! Geez, don’t you
know anything?” I never know what he’s talking about, and his stories seem to
be rambling and pointless, though there’s a sense of urgency in the way he
tells them. I might be out pushing my mower around the lawn, and Willy starts
talking to me: “I’m trying to tell you, but you don’t listen! Nobody ever
listens to me! Geez, why don’t people listen!”
Maybe Willy is trying to tell me the identity of the young
woman, and I’m resisting the knowledge. He might be saying, “What are you,
crazy? Are you stupid? Go after her, man.”
If I climb out of the ditch and catch up with this girl,
turn her around to face her, she might not even have a face.
I suppose that somewhere in the back of my mind I already
know who the girl is, though I’d pretty much forgotten about her. It was a long
time ago, and though her facial features are not entirely clear in my memory, everything
else comes back to me. I needed Willy to help me with this, and that’s why he
came along.
Willy is partly me, partly the person I could have been,
partly the person I could never be.
This all started about six years ago, and I don’t know
anymore how much of it happened as I describe it. Things get reconstructed, and
the mind works in strange ways. But I think I’ve fairly and honestly described
the process, how and why it happens: I write to search out some non-objective
truth, to explore dreams, feelings, characters and ideas. A story begins with
an intrusive and persistent voice or mental picture. So if somebody asks me for
advice on how to begin writing a story, I’d tell them to forget about “story”
in the sense of “this happened and that happened.” That part of the story can
only develop after you’ve had a dream of some sort, so you first have to look
to your dreams, particularly if one is recurrent, persistent, or makes a
striking impression on you. It doesn’t have to be anything mystical or
mysterious, just something you truly care about. Don’t worry too much about who
is going to read it, because not many people will read it in any case.
The common thread running through the two imaginary scenes
which I described is a feeling of loss, guilt, and regret, as though I killed
somebody. So there’s the start of a crime story. A young woman has died, and
only Willy knows that it’s murder. He feels guilty that he didn’t save her, and
he determines to track down the killer. He is a detective stalking a killer,
but that is mostly a metaphorical expression, because he is really stalking
himself.
The only way I could follow this story was to write it down.
The writer is, like Willy, a detective, following and stalking, trying to find
out what happened inside. The truth is always inside, and that’s where the
action of a story really happens, though it takes the form of external physical
events. The big mistake that writers and readers make is they put the physical
events first, when actually the physical events can be interesting only as they
develop as an expression of what goes on inside. This is what so many of the
stories on television, movies, and books are lacking. “This happened and then
that happened” is boring. If you don’t believe this, think of the last time
somebody described to you a movie they saw. Were you interested or bored with
their description? Why or why not?
So I wrote it down—first as a novelette, then as a play, and
finally as a short novel—and showed it to some people and also put it out on
the internet. Most people were totally uninterested, but of those who read and
reacted, women liked it and men absolutely hated it; so I knew I was onto
something.
This blog entry is a part of a loose and rambling thing I’ve
been working on intermittently for a long while now, tentatively called My Life as a Writer. I’m thinking this project might give me some
ideas for my next novel, which might be about a guy that writes a book, and the
book gets acquired by a major publishing house, and what happens next. Then
maybe my third novel will be about a guy who writes a book about a guy who
wrote a book about a guy who wrote a book. The protagonist is going to be a
writer who has always been very antisocial and keeps to himself, such that he
has nothing much to write about.
My next blog installment will be about how Willy introduced
me to his friends, I visited with them in my basement, and it became a novel
which came to be acquired by a major publisher, people’s reactions to that, and
my experiences and feelings about it, which are not at all what I would have
expected.
