Talismans (writing process)
Oct. 22nd, 2007 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI'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?
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?
