The way stories unfold

Ideas for stories believe in a 360 degree freedom to enter. This is more than the mind being like a fortress that is besieged because inspirations for plots do not need the fortress gates to open. Ideas have the power to come in anyway and they could very well walk through the walls as if they were not there. However, ideas are snobs that circumambulate the outer walls and have to be lured in. I mean, incentives work here as well… unless, of course, the mind employs subliminal earth movers to extend their retractable arms over the walls and scoop in a few ideas at a time. Now if you think I am going over-board imagining or making-up things, you really haven’t watched your mind in action as yet. The mind needs to find a voice, not necessarily its own, to begin constructing a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a story, or even a novel. After all, as Voltaire once wrote, ‘writing is a painting of the voice’.

Writing, however, is far more than a voice waiting to be painted as this voice has to be defined. Therefore, writing is a metaphor and can be like conjuring, travelling, being in a therapy session, writing a letter, conducting a business meeting, working out, supporting issues, being inside a revolution, living a new life in one’s imagination, creating opportunities, knocking on closed doors, looking out of windows, sketching, singing, playing, uncovering the past, and more that come together or come in groups. Writing thus needs a person to be a combination of a choreographer, designer, artist, stylist, referee, reader, researcher, analyst, administrator, chronicler, detective, scientist, accountant, and even a home-maker. What all this means is that finding your voice is more complex than it appears to be. All of what I have written so far indicates that the source for a story plot is unpredictable and depends entirely upon what a writer has chosen to be during the period of actual writing.

Good stories begin here

Stories communicate. Stories tell something important by showing or making characters actually enact them and do not depend so much on a reader to interpret or imagine. If all is left to the readers each of them will watch a story unfold according to their level of awareness and perception which is definitely not what a writer wants.

It is important that every story begins with an exploration of what happens and what the characters must do to make it all sound real. The easiest and the most dependable landscape for such an exploration is always a writer’s own life. It could be an incident, an object, or even a word that can zoom in and launch a train of thoughts that get woven with it allowing a story to slowly emerge. I recently wrote a story connecting masks and politics… and the primary inspiration came from the set of masks in my personal collection at home. The incidents popping up in that story took off from news reports and the way I chose to integrate them made me use a bit of imagination and make-belief. The entire process of sourcing material for a story starts with exploration and even E L Doctorow has written that ‘you start from nothing and learn as you go.’ I would add that the entire process of writing a story is more like a military operation with discipline, foresight, research, and strategy making their appearance at the right time. A writer is almost like a platoon leader in a battle taking place inside the mind and must decide when to advance or retreat or when to lay an ambush or plan a counter-attack. This platoon leader needs to have advance information from the observation posts ahead and must also plan round-the-clock watches and challenge every unwelcome intruder. Writing a story is more like jumping right inside your own life which is no less than any thriller and then go searching for clues as they had happened… and for the sake of clarity, let me call this a conversation with truth. There will obviously be other such conversations with truths at different times in one’s life besides conversations that are heard, over-heard, and imagined – all these conversations are generally brought together to form one cohesive whole that performs the prime dance of creativity, that is, persuade, inform, or entertain.

If you’re the sort of learner who believes that writers sit with a pen or are in front of laptops and bleed as a necessary precursor to good writing, you cannot possibly be further away from the truth. C S Lewis wrote: ‘Writing is like a lust or like scratching when you itch. Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.’ Even impulse has elements of logic ingrained because writers are people skilled in thinking, assimilating diverse thoughts, analyzing huge amounts of obfuscating data, and are constantly trying to dress up every action with reason (sometimes even wanting disorientation in idea sequences to look logical). This is the reason why I believe that writers understand themselves slightly better than those who never write.

The past is always ready to open up and is willing to share stories but is invariably hesitant to let them out without a wee bit of sheen from the closet of imagination. This isn’t compromising with honesty because the connect with one’s self remains intact. The true conversations inside me and the ability to activate imaginative conversions within me do not necessarily have a defined ratio of participation and thus there is no formula for the way stories unfold.

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#StoryWriting #indispire #indiblogger

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Arvind Passey
14 December 2018