The Writer at the Dump

One of my fondest memories from childhood has to do with the dump in my hometown of Kalispell, Montana.  I don’t know what kind of waste facility that city uses now, but, at the time, there was a large open pit where people would back up their pickup trucks and just throw things in.  Bags of garbage, paper, old sinks and toilets and sofas….and bicycles.   I only have one clear memory of being there, and I can’t have been more than five or six years old, as my father was there, and he died when I was seven.  There isn’t much of a memory - seeing the downslope into piles of things - and lots of flies - my father’s hand holding mine, the sound of his voice.  

What I do know about that memory beyond doubt is that it was part of my father’s gifts to his kids.  My family couldn’t afford to buy bicycles for six children, but my father had a full home shop.  At the dump, he salvaged parts from multiple bicycles and back home at his shop, built three bicycles for the three older girls in the family.  One was painted red, one blue, and one black.  Those three

bicycles were, over the years that followed, shared and passed down among all of us.  When I visited my mother’s home in my forties, the red and the blue still leaned against a wall in her garage.  It wasn’t possible to look at them without being flooded with memories- my sister Jean riding up the front walk on the red one, laughing until she fell off;  riding the blue one through a column of ants that invaded the town the summer I was twelve;  my sister Kathleen and I riding both down a hill east of town one year when we were home for a family reunion.

Those bicycles were made from bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam discarded by others, and they evoke bits and pieces of memories - flotsam and jetsam rising out of the murk of years past.  My father knew there was value in those discarded parts, and he sanded and polished and oiled until all of them came together in three brand new bicycles for three very excited girls.  Finding the value in memories takes no less work.  

I am currently reading Joshua Foer’s excellent book, Moonwalking with Einstein - in which he examines a movement to retrieve the kind of memory power that was the cornerstone of early civilization - the ability to remember huge amounts of information at a moment’s notice.  He details many methods for improving memory and recall, and he examines, sometimes humorously, the current efforts to offer everyone the training to perfect memory.  

The nature of memory has been a theme for me in my writing and in my studies for as long as I can remember. Theories abound.  But the nature of memory, how it functions within human consciousness, is elusive.  My favorite was a proposal mused aloud at a conference once by psychologist Karl Pribram who muttered, in discussing the nature of thinking using the metaphor of a hologram, “Perhaps the world is a hologram.”   He supposed that the entire nature of the human brain could be gleaned from any small piece of it, and the same with memory, and, he supposed, the same with reality.  

That notion suits how I think about the world.  And how I think about writing.  It took only the random thought that I needed to take some things to the dump to evoke the flash of memory of my father’s hand in mine, and the bikes he built, and the site of my sister Jean Marie laughing under her fallen bike, and sister Kathleen arms spread wide, speeding down an eastside hill ahead of me.  And it’s not much of a leap from there to the nature of the kind of life I’ve led, to an understanding of something essential to it.   

As students of writing, we are always being told to “show, don’t tell,” don’t bury your reader in exposition by telling them what kind of person your character is - instead, lead them to understand the character by showing the reader the life the character has lived.  Don’t write a biography (unless you need to for backstory) - build a picture of his life by showing the reader small pieces, like my father built a bicycle from parts taken from here, and from there. Build the character from the flotsam and jetsam of her or his memory. A red and a blue bike, leaned against the grey wall boards of an old garage, leading to an awareness of a full life.

To really bring your reader into the world of your character, you need to mine the depths of your own memory, find what it leads you to, and pay attention  - those memories will show you how a world is built, so that when a character steps into your mind, the world you build for that character will be one that will bring your reader home to their own memories.         

Gorillas in the Namib Desert - Why Writers Need Solo Time

“No, mémé, you should not do that.”   The matron at the school stood looking at me, her brows furrowed, shifting from foot to bare foot in the courtyard sand.

“Why,” I asked, “is it dangerous?”  

She hesitated, pulling a the strings that fell down from her collar.  “A woman can’t….a woman does not do this alone.”

I did not quite know how to respond.  It was clear she was worried about me, but whether it was about my safety or my reputation was not clear.   I’d been working here, at the Eluwa Special School (‘special’ because it was for deaf and blind children) for four months, and it was time for me to leave.   The group flight carrying the forty volunteers in the country back to the States did not leave for  two more weeks, but my school  ended its term more quickly than the other schools in-country that took volunteers, so I had time on my hands, and I wanted to go out to see the south Atlantic and the African coastline.  I also knew that the two women who supervised the American volunteers in country - Maggie and Josie, both considerably younger than I - regularly drove around the desert, from village to village where volunteers were placed, alone.  Perhaps that was acceptable because it was for their jobs, condoned by the Namibian government - but I intended to go adventuring, and that was different.

I’d already found a place to rent a car - I’d rented one once before to take a group of fellow volunteers to visit the nomadic Himba tribe in the northeastern reaches of the country.  In nearby Ongwediva - a semi-westernized town with markets and a few stoplights (called “robots” by the locals),  the office of a rental-car company whose name I recognized from American ads was  in an upstairs office in a cement block building without elevators or AC.  The young man behind the desk recognized me from the first rental, and was happy to take my American credit card again - as it turns out, continuing to submit charges on it for six months after I had left Namibia, until I finally had to close the account.  I believe that I got the same car both times - a little white coupe of some European make that I didn’t recognize, with deep red upholstery inside.  

I suppose there was danger.   Two of my fellow volunteers had suffered attacks and thefts in the city of Windhoek during our initial orientation, and certainly there were dangers in the desert.  Long stretches of lightly maintained roads, in a countryside filled with wild animals and few people - but a childhood in Montana, where vast reaches of land could be driven without encountering another soul, and which was also filled with its own share of wild animals, did not make this particular caution seem too problematic to me.  I had never felt unsafe in Ongwediva, the town where I worked, since I’d arrived, and I’d enjoyed the other (briefer) trips I’d taken around the countryside by myself or with other volunteers from nearby villages.  I’d walked the six mile stretch of desert road between Ongwediva and Oshakati alone, I’d been to cuca shops alone, and ridden in back of bakkes (pickup trucks) bouncing across the desert, and risked my life many times in the rusted metal carcasses referred to by the locals as ‘taxis,’ once accompanied by five other travelers, a stack of luggage that would make a burly baggage handler  blanch, and a goat.  I wasn’t afraid of driving around myself in a relatively recent model rental car.  That  was, perhaps, foolish, but, nevertheless, off I went.

Three days - and a considerable amount of adventures - later, I arrived at the wild south Atlantic coast unharmed.  I had a destination -  Walvis Bay - but took my time.   I was raised in the high mountains of Montana, and there were sights that, as a child, I never would have been capable of foreseeing:   thousands of pink flamingos gathered in the shallow water of a sheltered bay; an enormous gorilla sunning himself in the middle of the desert road, not seeming to realize how

completely out of place he was in the desert;  the amazing red dunes of the Namib sweeping down to the foam-white Atlantic.   I’d stayed overnight at a roadhouse meant for those on safari, where the doors didn’t lock and all night the hot breezes through the window shifted the necessary mosquito netting around the bed.  At breakfast the following morning, I’d spoken with travellers from all parts of the world.  I’d passed through multiple road blocks with men in camoflauge and rifles slung over their shoulders.  I’d encountered three women in an unlikely roadside stop which had an ACTUAL bathroom, and who spoke the remarkable “clicking” language that area of the world is so famous for, but spoke no English at all, and yet we were able to communicate.

So many memories - accumulated on a trip taken entirely solo.  It isn’t the only solo adventuring I’ve done - and it wasn’t my first.  I recall once, travelling to an archeological dig, I discovered that there was not a campsite for the volunteers (or ‘diggers’) but a few local camp sites were

recommended by the assistant archeologist organizing the dig. Checking in to one near the river, a small campground surrounded by deep forest, the somewhat grizzled  site caretaker looked over  my shoulder, checking out my jeep and its contents.  “You’re camping alone?”  I nodded, digging the campground fee out of my back pocket.  He shook his head.  “Well, you’re brave.”  There were adventures on that trip, too - some in the daytime as I worked with fellow volunteers at the dig site, others in the solo dark nights at my camp.

This morning I was saying to a friend from my Africa trip that it would have been nice to have someone to share memories of that solo trip with, but, almost immediately, I realized that I was wrong.  It was their very solo nature that has made those memories so much to be treasured - that I am the only one who knows what happened with the gorilla, or at those roadblocks, or what conversation was passed around the breakfast table at that safari-inn.  None of these memories will be passed around a bar table over beers shared with friends, laughed at and shared in mutual memory, because there is no mutuality to them - they are mine.

It is these kinds of memories the writer needs - the un-shared ones, as much as the shared.  Perhaps needs even more.  It is these memories which shape us in the privacy of our minds and hearts. Not just the big memories - gorillas and guns on an African highway - but the little ones - the stretched-out-in-bed alone time, or the sitting-on-a-park-bench thinking time.  It is through these moments, taken and experienced alone, that we understand who we are, which is the only thing that makes it possible for us to understand who our characters might be.  

When History Burns: The End of Civic Stadium - OR - Why a Writer Cares About Baseball

It was a place where you and your history made peace with each other, at least for the duration of the game.  It was a place that made sense in a way that needed no explanation, a place where strangers became instant allies as the ball streaked away over the fence and you all came to your feet.  It was summer evenings in a grassy field, the smell of hotdogs and beer, the score cards balanced across a knee, the feel of dirt under your fingernails sliding into home when you were nine years old. And, yesterday, it burned to the ground.

The ballpark had been abandoned by the local triple-A team five years ago, and in the intervening years, battles raged in the community to save the historic structure, which had been, in 2008, listed in the National Historic register.  Work to renovate the old stadium for use by local youth and sports groups had been set to begin in just six weeks, but, in the midst of 90+ degree heat June 29th, fire broke out, from initial reports in the old press box, and within moments the entire stadium was engulfed in flames, burning to the ground within two hours, after nearly 78 years standing.

Within moments, pictures and videos were everywhere on social media.  It is how I learned of the fire.  I had been out most of the day, running errands for a family wedding happening later in the week.  Finally at home, I settled into my most comfortable chair and picked up my computer to check emails and lazily surf the web.  The first thing that I saw was a picture of the fire, with a “Farewell, Civic” tag line on a friend’s Facebook page, posted less than fifteen minutes after the fire began.  After the initial “NO!" my first reaction was to be flooded with memories - the game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth at the game friends and I went to on my birthday, taking my grandkids to their first ballgame ever, munching popcorn with my buddies and spitting beer as they made lascivious remarks about the youth (and tight pants) of the young players.  I have only lived in this town for 16 years, but the memories were overwhelming.  In moments, everyone was telling their stories - from those who first visited the park as children, to taking an old friend to his last game there before he passed.  Everyone had stories, and told them.  Even as the old structure still burned, stories were told and shared, and cried over.

It is what happens, in the human tribe, when things end - stories of its life are told, shared, held

close, as though the stories will keep the destruction, the ending of things, at bay.  And, in a very real way, they do exactly that.  Stories are what maintain our history, polish it, make it shine, change it into something that connects us. Civic Stadium, with its wooden grandstands and funky ancient bathrooms and wide view of the surrounding hills is now a pile of charred wood and embers, but the stories maintain.

It is, quite honestly, why we tell stories, why those of us who write tell them, make them up, fashion a history from whole cloth and get to the point where we believe in the reality of what we’ve created - to hold close to those things that shape and define us, and to share that with others.  Like any baseball fan, I’ve been to many a ballpark, watched many a game, witnessed many stories.  At ballparks, people I’d never seen before and was never to see again touched me - the marriage proposals, of course, the strangers in the crowd helping a disabled fan to his seat, the little kid catching his first ever foul ball in the stands.  Civic stadium to me was memories of dirt-lot ballgames in the high mountain summers as a kid, it was the raggedy stadium my husband and I went to just a week before we learned he was dying, it was the summer we regularly had tickets to The Mariners games at the old King Dome, and watched Randy Johnson pitch a 17-K game from just two rows up behind home plate, and, later that season - The September to Remember - bouncing up and down with joy in the living room with my daughter as she and I watched the game that sent the M’s to the playoffs.  

It is the point of stories that they bring up my memories for me, and yours for you. It is something all writers should remember each time they sit down to write - that history matters, and the telling of it in personal stories, whether real or fictional, is the way we keep the truth of our lives.  It is the reason to write those stories - that whatever fictions they may contain, they contain the essence of the truths that all of us know, so that we do not forget them.  

The 4 A.M. Breakthrough and the History of Sleep

Two days ago, my eyes popped open at 4 in the morning, and all I could think was, “NO!  I need sleep!”  I produce a small local theater company - we do single-night showcase performances a few times a year - and we had a show that night. It was going to be a busy afternoon and long night;  rest was essential.  I closed my eyes, but, predictably, did not go back to sleep.  After a while, I got up, made myself some Sleepy-Time tea, and sat down to drink it.

Two and a half hours later, I looked up at the clock, then back down at the table and the 23 pages I’d just written.  As I had sipped at my tea, more and more a scene from the boyhood of my main character grew in my mind, playing there like a reel from a film, till I had no choice but to write it down. Reading back over it, I was delighted with every word.  And it was now 7 in the morning, with one of the busiest days I could imagine (not to mention that loooooong night) ahead of me.  I knew that I had to be busy, out the door, running errands, loading up props, etc, etc, no later than noon, so I set an alarm, went back to bed, and slept for 2 ½ more hours.  I woke and burst into action, running from that moment till the actors took the stage at 7 p.m., and then adjourned with all of them to the after-party, where I was among the first to excuse myself and head home around 11:30 p.m.  

When I got there, did I sleep?  Did I fall into bed and crash to sleep the sleep of the over-worked?  No. I sat back down at my writing table, and wrote another dozen pages.  Then I slept.

I had recently ordered (and read) two books, called  The 4 a.m. Breakthrough,  and The 3 a.m. Epiphany.   I recommend them.  While they don’t exactly tell you how to make this kind of breakthrough happen, they are filled with unusual (sometimes bizarre) writing exercises that keep your writing chops edgy, like finger exercises for a piano student.  In graduate school, my adviser had often given us random elements we were required to try to work into whatever fiction we were working on at the time - a requirement which led to some of my favorite work. Intentionally bending your own mind, making your inner self uncomfortable challenges your creative self in productive ways.  Try these books out.  But I hadn’t done any of these exercises in quite some time, being very focused on the discovery and development of the characters for my most recent piece.  So I don’t think that’s what caused this sudden flush of nocturnal juices for me.

Some time ago, a friend sent to me (on social media) a copy of an article about sleep.  After reading it, I did more research.  It seems that waking at night, and breaking your sleep pattern into two distinct chunks, is the natural human pattern.  For centuries, it was referred to in multiple cultures and in multiple languages, as first sleep and second sleep.  Less than a decade ago, after reading research which detailed references to first and second sleep in literature going all the way back to Homer, a researcher named Thomas Wehr conducted a study with hundreds of volunteers.  For four weeks, each of the subjects was only allowed exposure to light ten hours a day, and no exposure to artificial lighting.  By the end of the four-week period, every subject had fallen into a pattern of what is now referred to as segmented sleep.  They (like I normally do, though for years I worried that it was some kind of aberration) would sleep soundly for four hours or so, then be awake for anywhere from one to three hours, then sleep again, more lightly, for two or three hours.  It seems, from this research and others, that segmented sleep is the natural human pattern.  The invention of artificial light, however, changed things - tempting people out into the streets at night, extending work days, and compressing the amount of time available for sleep.

So I am, apparently, not as weird as I thought I was - or at least not for the reason of my sleep patterns.  I am, these days, pursuing segmented sleep.  I reject the notion of getting by on as little sleep as possible (really?  Margaret Thatcher only slept four hours a night?  Or LESS?).  Sleep is as essential to good health as diet and exercise, and it is no wonder, in this cram-everything-possible-into-your-day kind of world, where many glory in such pronouncements as “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” .. that we are all so fundamentally, all-consuming tired.  But it isn’t just for my health that I now actively respect my night-waking pattern.  It doesn’t take long, when looking into the research on segmented sleep, to discover that, historically, artists and writers and scholars thought of that interval between first and second sleep as their most productive, most creative, most free-thinking time.  Certainly, at those times that I honor it, like that night two nights ago, it has been for me.  

So, friends and fellow writers - sleep well - for four hours.  Then, when your eyes drift open and you think to yourself that you must be awake just to go to the toilet, reconsider.  Pick up a pen, or a book, or a drawing pad.  Sit quietly with it, and let go of your preconceived ideas about how and when and for how long you should sleep, and let your mind do what it really wants to do in those hours.  

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For more information on segmented sleep, or "second sleep" - follow these links:

BBC News Segmented Sleep
Rethinking sleep: The New York Times
A History of Bimodal, or Segmented, Sleep

Purge and Renew - The Slow Path to a Story

A former roommate of mine used to accuse me of talking like Yoda - when I would do it, she would quip:  “Joda speaks!”   The first words that came into my mind as I thought about beginning this entry were:   “Away from this a while, I’ve been,” and hence came the Joda-memory.  I have been away a while - wrestling, as writers so often do, with my own demons.  The writing process is odd - unique to each individual, often unique to each project.  This time, I have the entire story I have been working on in my head - beginning, middle, and ending.  It’s a piece I began years ago, wrote more than 400 pages, and then put it away because I’d realized that I’d gone off in the wrong direction, away from the truth of the story.  Recently, it’s returned in the person of the main character’s son, and I have been struggling to get close to him, to feel him flesh out, because it’s clear to me he is central to that truth for this story. It has been, and remains, a difficult battle.  More difficult than any story I’ve written since my first published novel - which tells me that it’s worth the battle, that there is something important here.

I’ve tried all the tricks I know - everything I’ve walked writing students through, every strategy discussed in seminars in grad school, every trick ever published in any book, and there have been no late-night revelations, no 3 a.m. breakthroughs.  Progress has been slow, though there has been progress.  

Last night, a short series of words came to me as I was driving home from the store, and, when I got home, I sat down with my old Olympic typewriter and a stack of reclaimed paper from work - printed on one side, blank on the other - and began typing.  Several pages later, I was inches closer to a real understanding of this young man, and the battles, secrets, and betrayals that have shaped his life.  That part is wonderful - unlike those 3 a.m. breakthroughs, the deep night revelations, his is a slow growth in the story, a careful, considered unfolding of events.  I am learning to respect him.

But what really hit me this time, as I sat back last night, warm tea in hand, and read through the pages that I’d written, was the truth and necessity of the transient, the temporary.   I haven’t been able to write a word of this story on my computer - everything I’ve written so far has been either by hand or on that old Olympic.  If I were to write on my computer, there is a sense of permanence in the words electronically saved - even if the computer crashes, somewhere that file is held in the Cloud - permanent, fixed.   

When I write by hand, (or on the Olympic), those pages are as transient as a puff of smoke - once crumpled or torn or burned - the words are gone, saved nowhere, existing nowhere but in memory.  Since so much of this story is about the transient nature of life and loyalty across the generations of a family, that seemed appropriate.  It’s freeing.

I am sitting here remembering clips from old films of a writer at his desk, ripping the paper from the typewriter, crumpling it and tossing it away -  across the room, into a trashbin, into the fire - pages essentially, fundamentally gone - and then beginning again.   For this story, that sense of purging and renewal is central not only to the story, but to the nature of these characters, so of course I have chosen a temporary, destructible medium to write for them.  And, as it turns out, for me.   

I heard a story once, possibly apocryphal, that Amy Tan once came home to find her house burned to the ground, her nearly-finished manuscript with it.  She had to begin again, from word one, to rebuild it, and said ever after that it was this purge and rebuild that made The Joy Luck Club so strong.  I don’t know if this is true, but the sense of purge-and-rebuild speaks to me.  I can rip pages from the typewriter, or from under my pen, and demolish them - whether they sang or were awful, I can let them go, and take a step toward the story’s truth without them behind me.  I face each page like my characters face each day - with the past burned away behind us, and only one direction left to go.

Training Your Muse

I want to take my muse and send her to school.  She is annoying, and badly behaved.  She wakes me at 3 a.m. with the perfect idea when I have to be at work by 7.  She sends the resolution to a problem when I’m speeding down the freeway with no hands free to write it down, and (of course) she steals that idea from my brain by the time I am able to pull over.  She teases me with an image that I just know is the heart and  soul of a piece I want to write, and tells me NOTHING ELSE about it.  Hell, she probably sits back and laughs as I struggle to figure it out.  She visits me

with vivid dreams about my characters, and whisks them away as soon as I wake.  She’s poorly trained.   If she were a dog, she’d be pooping on the carpet and running off with strangers, maybe even biting little kids.  In short, she’s a bit of a bitch.

According to the ancient Greeks, there were (are?) nine muses, and they (the Greeks, not the muses) believed those nine were responsible for providing all creative inspiration, from poetry and dance to justice and philosophy.  In The Odyssey, there is a passage where Homer attempts to invoke the muse, to bring her out to speak to him, to begin the tale, so that ….. well, so that he could freakin’ write it.   

So, I guess those muses were a bit of a problem for writers even back then.

It seems, though, that The Nine (with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkein) are even more errant these days - I hear more and more from fellow writers, from poets, from artists of all types, how hard it is to find their muse, much less get that inspiration flowing.  We can blame it all on the pressures of modern society - on information overload, or the variety of stresses in our lives.  Or we can blame it on the muse herself.  I say the latter.

And I say we train her.   This idea surfaced during a conversation with a fellow writer a while back - commiserating in late-night conversations on social media (when she was in London and I was in Oregon), we proposed that there needed to be a training school for a bad muse - just like there is for bad dogs.  (Well, she can be a bitch, can’t she?)  

The McKenzie/Ferguson School for The Muse would have lessons paralleling some of the common lessons for errant dogs.  Like Sit, Speak, Stay, Roll Over, Play Dead (no, let’s forget that one), and, above all, House-Training.  Let’s train the muse to Sit with us while we write, to STAY (for the love of heaven) with us while we work on a piece, to Speak regularly with the words we need to hear, to Roll Over and show us the real underbelly of a story, and, (also for the love of  heaven) to not find that spot in our story and in ourselves where we are most vulnerable, and make a no-no of self-doubt there.  

And, of course, she can be trained - like everything else in our lives - it’s up to us to do so.  She may be a bitch, but she’s our bitch, and we need to take charge.  So, my writer friends, sit, sit at your writing desk, stay there, speak on the page, and when those no-no’s happen within you, scoop them up in a doggie-bag (a muse-bag?) and dump them - and get back to work.

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Dedicated with affection (and shared misery) to awesome H. Ferguson

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For your edification, Homer’s invocation of the muse:

Speak, Memory – Of the cunning hero

The wanderer, blown off course time and again

After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

Speak Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,

The suffering deep in his heart at sea

As he struggled to survive and bring his men home

But could not save them, hard as he tried –

The fools – destroyed by their own recklessness

When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,

And that god snuffed out their day of return

Of these things,

Speak, Immortal One,

And tell the tale once more in our time.

(Stanley Lombardo Translation)

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.