Talismans (writing process)

[rushthatspeaks]

I've been thinking on that old canard, the Eternal Question that everyone supposedly asks writers: Where do you get your ideas?

Nobody has ever asked me that question, which is kind of a shame, because I actually do know.

My fiction is the application of a mood to the natural consequences and outgrowths of a fact.

Not just any fact, or any mood; it has to be a fact that I find really interesting, that sticks in my brain like a burr, and over the years and years of it sticking there I will come back to it every so often and think, well, if this, then this and this and this; if not this, then this and this and this, and the extrapolations accrete, and the mood comes out of the prevailing tone of the accretions, or from how I felt when I picked up the piece of trivia, or from nowhere. And then all of this, this spiky wad of facts and half-dreamed possibilities and ways to feel about them, sporulates, and produces people to live in and between the possibilities, to have the feelings; and then, of course, one has a story.

What I find interesting is that then the story centers around the people, the characters involved; and quite often it centers around them so thoroughly that not only do a great many of the original possibilities drop out, but so does the original fact, the core piece of information.

Which is all right, because then I can use it for something else.

So far I've written three short stories, two of them adult work and published, about the fact that the standard patterns of cosmetics usage in many cultures duplicate (intentionally or unintentionally) the appearance of someone who has just been beaten up. Reddened lips, blackened eyes-- it disturbs the hell out of me. It's never mentioned directly in any of the stories. It fell out. But that's where they came from, nonetheless.

One of those stories is also about the particular institutional shade of green that the housing authority in Columbus, Ohio used to paint the doors of public-assistance housing, so that you could tell the financial status of the people who lived there just by driving down the block, tell specifically which neighbor was better off than another neighbor, governmental stigmata. That didn't fall out, but I'm the only person who would notice the single sentence it got into as incidental detail. The story wouldn't have happened without that sentence.

I've written or tried to write fiction, short or longer, about, among other things:

the vast similarity and difference between the human skeleton and the skeleton of the seal;

the fact that bunraku puppets are structurally centered on bamboo;

the way rabbits, in harsh circumstances, can reabsorb their young before birth;

the increased respectability of traditional fiber arts and the way they've started turning up in museums;

and the concept of having enough fur to make yourself another cat.

The stories may bear no relation to these concepts at all, but I do know where they came from.

Then there are the facts that stick, and stick, and that I don't know if they'll ever come to anything, or if I want them to. The most impressive one of those has been on my mind a lot lately.

Some years ago, on the PostSecret website, which is where people send anonymous postcards of secrets they've never told anybody else, I saw a postcard of the World Trade Center in New York City with the towers scratched out in thick cloudy swirls of marker. In small neat black handwriting down the side: 'everyone I knew before Sept. 11 thinks I'm dead.'

This quite literally haunts me, because I don't know how to think about it. I literally cannot imagine what could have gone through this person's mind; what would drive someone to do this; what I would do if I found that someone I thought were dead had done this; what I would do if I found that someone I know had done this, was living afterward now. My brain stops dead, stutters at the unimaginable, and gasps in pain.

And if I ever do learn how to think about it, if I ever find something to put around that, something that helps explain or make sense, something true about that, then I'll have the kind of novel that I desperately hope to be a worthy enough person to be able to write, the kind that genuinely deals with the unthinkable. I don't know if I'll ever get to that. I hope so.

And that's how they work for me, ideas, big and small, serious as that or small and silly; facts and accretions; all story comes out of that.

How does it work for other people?

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Pretty much the same way. I find out the most insignificant piece of trivia and suddenly my brain says "what if?" That's the basis for all of the Wicked Fairy Apologist stories and poems..."what if it were the opposite of what they told us?"

Honestly I wouldn't want to be able to identify the thought process of where my ideas come from, because if I did, I'd obsess on it and stop having actual ideas. And I'm self-defeating enough, as a writer, without that.

[ckd]

That PostSecret stuck with me, too. Absolutely unforgettable.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

More and more, I want to read what you write.

Nine

[sovay]

One of those stories is also about the particular institutional shade of green that the housing authority in Columbus, Ohio used to paint the doors of public-assistance housing, so that you could tell the financial status of the people who lived there just by driving down the block, tell specifically which neighbor was better off than another neighbor, governmental stigmata. That didn't fall out, but I'm the only person who would notice the single sentence it got into as incidental detail. The story wouldn't have happened without that sentence.

I wondered about that detail, actually, when I read the story, because it kept recurring and it wasn't a social shorthand I knew. Thank you.

[assume-a-virtue.livejournal.com]

A word. Or a turn of phrase. And if you write it down too fast, it hasn't had enough time to grow. I usually have to water these beginnings with good books and interesting facts and give them food with music and midnight walks, but if it's done right you end up with something fairly interesting and worth expanding.

Sometimes not, but there you go.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I used to start with a key phrase that I found scribbled in a notebook somewhere: "brink of table," "grow teeth," "it was raining, and I was engaged to three women." (sadly, that story turned out terrible) I would let the language guide me to one or more of the thematic undercurrents running around in my head.

Later I had specific things I wanted to explore: "the way you can interact with a particular archetypal female figure and learn some particular small lesson, at which point of learning the woman vanishes, both undercutting and driving home the lesson." I wrote a bunch of stories about that. Or "person placed into role of common machine, bringing character but not story to the role, allowing them to play as a foil to actual people with actual agency." I still need to do more with that one actually. These ideas come from my own life and noticing patterns in myself and other people.

Lately I've been writing a novel and for that I have a whole big sweeping idea of what I wanted to do --- I started with "a compelling and enjoyable compulsive liar" but then when I met his girlfriend it became "a retelling of the Dubliners with my particular dark interpretation of epiphany." Now there's this giant weight hanging over my head. I have notecards. It's happening to my short fiction too --- the story I am working on right now I figured on page two exactly what I was trying to say about roles and agency and it was actually kind of paralyzing. I miss having a more general goal.

I guess these more complex (or, if being less generous, highfalutin) ideas are also based on my own experiences and observations, but they're less directly gleaned and more analyzed comparative to other experiences and literature. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing; it gets me some really great ideas but it makes writing them much harder for me. Sometimes I miss just starting with a phrase and seeing what happens. Maybe I should do it again soon.

It's odd, I don't find that PostSecret unthinkable; in fact, I've come close to doing the same thing myself. I can see how the opportunity would be tempting. It's like a giant reset button, right there. Wouldn't you want to push the button and see what happens? ...I guess not, since you said it was unthinkable. :) If you're interested I could try to explain more.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It's not the reset-- there have been times in my life I've considered doing that myself, just heading for the hills and starting completely over. It's the disaster aspect, the idea of inflicting more pain when so much pain is being inflicted already (and will keep on being, all over the world), of making one's disappearance part of this thing that it isn't related to: immoral as hell, that. There's a difference between faking your own death and faking your own murder. I can see circumstances in which faking your own death might be moral (if you are trying to escape an abuser who will chase you to the ends of the earth unless they think you're dead, for example). I can't think of a circumstance in which faking your own murder would be moral. There might be one, but I can't see it in this circumstance. The thing I gasp at, tear at, can't drag my mind around is trying to figure out if a person in good conscience could for *any* reason *ever* fake their own death via terrorism (I suspect not), and what the fall-out would be afterwards, and what might drive a person to that even knowing it to be wrong.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm more sociopathic than I thought I was, but I don't consider that any more immoral. I mean, if you fake your own death, you're going to be misdirecting anger anyway; what specifically makes misdirecting the anger towards a terrorist attack worse?

I mean, it's selfish, but faking your own death is always selfish, even when it's reclamatory-selfish instead of bad-selfish or just end-of-the-rope-selfish.

I'd be interested in discussing this in person sometime, actually, if you are.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd also be interested in talking about it in person sometime.

One more thing here, though: the reason I think misdirecting the anger is immoral is that it's about blame. Surviving family become very angry at murderers. If I ever write that novel about this, one of the characters I could have in it might be someone who has in grief and anger at Sept. 11 signed up for the army in the Iraq war. If someone faked their own murder in a less disturbing incident, an innocent person might be arrested for it. With a faked suicide, at least the blame falls squarely where it ought: on the person who is gone.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That's so interesting.

Also, that card, yes, we want them to be alive, all of them, but we know they're not, so that possible exception stands for all of them.

(When they jumped out;
they stepped, they leapt,
they swooped, they flew,
rising on the air currents,
with such expressions on their faces!
Joy, exhilaration, startlement.
They did not fall.
No sparrow falls.
They never hit the ground to break
in sprays of blood and heaps of shattered bones.
There were no screams
only their singing filled the skies
as they soared over Manhattan.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I... wish I lived in that world.

We have a piece of paper that flew over the Hudson River, the day of, that Ruth picked up off the Promenade, wreck of some office or other, grayish with soot. It's blank. I look at it and wonder if even words were too heavy to survive.

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

ah, darlin', and this is why i love that you tolerate me on your friendslist. because you put things so well, and illuminate whole corners of the process for me.

what do i do? hmm. for the little AU (which i have no idea if you read or not, don't blame you if you don't, it's terribly niche) i usually wait until they talk to me. occasionally i have a question for one of them, but usually i have to wait.

for other things: poems, it's a synesthetic thing- a scent brings a phrase which brings a sensation which brings tone which brings more words.

my ya novel grows out of my own memories of my first day of being a real nurse.

and i guess that's it, really. i've not got a big body of work. yet.


[that post secret card stayed with me, too, for reasons similar to yours, and wondering 'why tell, even this way? what motivates bringing that to light, here, now, this way?']

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I don't know why tell, either, except that it's the only way that could be told without the consequences coming back on the teller, and I'd imagine it would be the sort of secret that would prey on the mind as time goes on.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Reddened lips, blackened eyes-- it disturbs the hell out of me.

Since other details-- flattened, reddened nose, purpling cheeks-- are entirely absent from the makeup spectrum, I have to think this is entirely coincidence. Are we to suppose that red fingernails equates with a woman trying to defend herself? As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The PostSecret card is amazing. I found myself thinking the same kind of thing after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis-- what if someone had been contemplating running away from his or her life, and then the collapse happened to the person, who hearing himself or herself reported dead, decided to make it so for that identity? Rather like secretly burying a murder victim in the middle dirt of a recent grave, another possibility which occurs to me sometimes when I see such a grave.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I've been looking for the source for the makeup-related hypothesis, but I actually can't find out where I read it; I would submit, however, that blush could well do the cheek-coloring thing. I'm not going to argue very hard for this idea about makeup as a fact, though, because I cannot in fact find the theory involved and because there is such cultural relativism about the ways in which cosmetics are applied and used that I know that it is decidedly not a globally applicable fact even if it may have some bearing on Western patterns. Which it... may or may not.

However, as an idea, as a point, it's a fascinating one, the way that appearance and femininity and violence and expectations and conformity and sex can all smash at one another. And I've got publishable work out of thinking about it, that whole nexus of meanings, and I'm not done poking at it. Sex and death, those are the things I think cosmetics tie into, and those are very closely related.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Ah, sex and death. "Two things that come once in a lifetime...but at least after death you're not nauseous."

[eredien]

I was thinking about fiber arts the other day, too, going past the museum on the train. If you want to talk with me sometime about the story that came/is coming out of that, it'd be neat.