Spinning Stories

I’m still reading through Joyce Carol Oates’s journals.  The way she talks about being consumed by a story, about not wanting to do anything else but write, it’s hard not to feel inspired.  Writing is often that way for me too, but not always.   With novels especially, there is just so much time to find yourself distracted, unsure of where to go next, or even bored.¹

But there’s a part of the process that I always find overwhelmingly engaging.  It’s the kind of fun that makes me skip around my apartment with a smile.  For me that’s planning out stories.  It’s all the fun of writing fiction, but with far less pressure, because I’m just getting ideas down and it doesn’t matter so much whether they’re right or well written.    The ideas flood my brain even as I do dishes or search the library for missing books.

I think the most engaging part is that I’m discovering what happens to people I care about.  It’s like hearing really good gossip, but without any of the guilt.

It’s not exactly like playing God.  Some parts of stories are very deliberate, but a majority seem to come together like puzzle pieces of a puzzle I’m working on, but didn’t create.  As one character comes into greater focus, it changes the people they interact with. As one plot point settles itself in concrete, what happens before and after solidify too.

I’m reading this book of interviews with another one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, and she describes how a collection of images come together or a voice emerges.  Then she says, “Starting a book is like jumping off a cliff.  You’re never ready, but you just feel that you have to start sooner or later.  So you start and you know that it’s probably going to be bad, but it doesn’t matter: you have to start anyway.”²

I’m not working on the novel I thought I was going to work on next.  That one started to seem too tedious and serious, so I picked up one I started in the Summer of 2006.  I liked the characters, but I never thought I’d do anything with this story because it seemed too simple and superficial.  Now that I’m looking at them again, I see depth I didn’t before.  They still need more to do, though, and I’m working on that now.  My experience writing fiction has taught me that those people who say you can just have good characters and no plots are big liars.  Characters have to have something to do and you have to have something to write.  But, it’s okay, because this is the fun part.

1. It’s exactly like being a grad student, actually. [↩]
2. Margaret Atwood: Conversations, 164. [↩]