Giving Up On Words As a Route to your Story

“When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet

Long, long ago, I was at a conference in Tacoma, Washington.  It was the third day of a three-day conference, and, near mid-day, I found myself sitting in the back of a lecture hall filled with people, not listening to the lecture.  I don’t remember why I chose to go in there, and to this day have absolutely no memory of what the lecture was about.  In the previous three days, I’d been to workshops and seminars, panels and lectures, brainstorming sessions and break-out discussions.  There had just been so many words.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a good conference - intended to explore the methods for bringing women’s studies and studies of minority groups effectively into the curriculum at public institutions.  There had been inspiration, there had been connection, there had been just a hurricane of ideas.   In that same year, on the campus where I worked and taught, I’d met and befriended a young Apache artist who had told me of a tradition in his tribe called “giving up on words.”  Sitting in the back of that hall, surrounded by whispering people with the words from the stage blaring from speakers overhead, I gave up on words.  On the pad in my lap, I began writing about silence.  Not the kind of “being silenced” that had been discussed so much those past three days, but a welcome silence, a silence of choice, a silence of awareness.

Silence is seldom discussed when talking about writing - words, both spoken and written, are our stock in trade, not absence of words.  But words alone will not drive you to a story.   In the end, you have to know what it is the story is truly about.  There must be, for a story to be real, to connect to readers in any way that matters, a truth to it.   Those stories, those pictures of life as it is, are the stories worth writing.  And this means, that, as the writer, you must be paying attention - which is hard to do when you’re swimming in words.  

I believe that, in the development of the story, there are two essential tasks - finding the character, and finding the truth of her/his story.  Often that means, as I wrote in my last post, immersing yourself in the character - knowing that person as well as you know yourself.  At other moments, it becomes more important to know where they are going, and why.  There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that John Steinbeck used to, in writing a novel or a story, put on the wall in front of his writing desk a slip of paper with a one-sentence statement - a statement of what he wanted the reader to feel or think after reading the story.  In the circles of writing statements, it came to be known as “the Steinbeck Statement.”  I still encourage my students to write them.  

But what you find to center your story, to center your mind and your purpose in the writing of the story, doesn’t always have to be a statement - for me, sometimes it’s an image, sometimes a few bars of music.  The search for that thing, that heart of the story,  can be long and frustrating, but if you don’t know the heart of your story, how can you expect your reader to respond to it?   Pay attention - listen to the things you hear in public, what’s coming over the radio in your car - look at things you might not ordinarily notice, pay attention to things that fall unbidden into your hands - if they speak to you, listen.  Perhaps just sit in silence, attending to how that feels, how it sounds.   Pay attention to the world, to people, to the lessons of silence, to your and your character’s heart.  And then write.