Where do the ideas for
stories come from? There are formulas
you can use, workshops to help, and you can study the issue. I did, in grad school. I taught those same strategies in creative
writing and composition classes for years. And I still don’t really know where
it is that the indefinable spark finally comes from when it comes. If it comes.
You can consciously
construct a story – gathering all the elements essential for a precise story
arc and gluing them together. But HOW
you choose to glue them together, what it is that makes you reach for that
setting rather than this one, this structure rather than that one – how the
story, how the heart of it, forms, is quite simply mystery.
For me, becoming a
collector was an essential step in eventually becoming a storyteller. I have stacks of notebooks and writing pads
filled with snippets, moments, observations, news clippings – things that
strike me for reasons I can’t even pinpoint. They pile up there in notebooks
and often, unwritten, in the back of my brain.
Then, something – a sight, a sound, a news story is an unexpected
(sometimes even unwelcome) catalyst, and six or seven or ten of these disparate
elements fly together from parts of memory and thought, and the process
begins. Begins, and leads me. More often than not, purpose is the glue that
holds draws them together and sets the story in motion. The purpose may be what I hope the story will
say, or how the reader of it will feel, or what the story will show of us and
to us.
One story began when I
walked into an old and run-down trading post on a back road in Montana, and
wondered what it was that was behind the eyes of the three old men who sat at
the lunch counter. Another began when someone
asked me what it would be like to be the only one of your kind, anywhere. Neither of these stories made it to paper
till long after these incidents, but the process was begun, and the various
pieces of memory and sensory impression and information began to move together
to form a stage on which the characters could develop.
So how, when you want
to make a story, when you feel that urge, do you make it happen? He answer is
both simple and a lifelong pursuit:
attend.
Pay attention.
Attend. To life, to people, to
surroundings, sights, sounds, smells, instincts. Listen to the words of your favorite writers,
of the great writers, of writers you know, when they talk about what they
do. Young and old, modern and ancient,
popular and obscure, working writers pay
attention.
