I am plagued with a malady that
probably bothers all writers: a fear of running out of ideas.
When I was first starting out, I
had a book that I worked on for years. I started it in study hall of high school, and I re-wrote it in various ways, from several
different points of view. The one thing I never managed to do was finish it. I
had the beginning and the end, but there were huge gaps in the middle.
Writers tend to have a variety of
superstitions. At one point I said aloud what I’d secretly feared throughout
the years of writing that book: What if I finish this story and never get
another book idea for the rest of my life? (To put this in perspective, my mother wrote a book when she was 12 and never wrote another. And it's pretty good for a 12-year-old.)
I couldn’t imagine life without
creative ideas surrounding me and assorted characters knocking at my brain to
come out and play.
To date, that book that I started
when I was about 16 has never been finished. I put it away, deciding I would
never get the middle bits right. It became my talisman against running out of
ideas. The reasoning (unreasonable as it is) is that if I ever do finish that
book, I will, indeed, never get another story idea.
So it sits in a folder in my
filing cabinet ( and on a thumb drive somewhere -- or maybe it was lost on a 5 1/2" floppy) with completed novel first drafts, and I go on to other
adventures.
But I don’t rest on a simple
superstition. I also have some proactive (I hate that word, but a better one
escapes me just now) protection against writer’s block. I also have a folder of
“story starts”. These are ideas that I thought were great at the time – and possibly
they are – but that never went anywhere because I got distracted by an idea
that interested me more.
Until I went through this folder,
I had no idea I was so frequently distracted.
These beginnings aren’t bad, if I
do say so myself. I’ve read most of them many times and thought, “That’s pretty
good. I wonder where I was going with that. Someday, though, I’ll get back to
it.”
That is usually enough to spur me
on to a new idea, and yet again, the original story start is left in the dust
of a different novel.
Other writers are probably not as
distractible as I am. Some carefully plan their stories. I know this
because I’ve taken courses in writing particular types of fiction, and the
instructors in nearly every one teaches how to do just that. But I’m sure that
not all ideas, no matter how carefully planned, pan out the way an author would
like. Some ideas simply have to be left by the side of the road.
Just once I’d like to run into an
instructor who says, “Here’s an idea: Come up with a name for a character.
Decide where they’re from, what they look like, and then look in catalogues and
magazines and try to find a picture of your character. Then try to find
pictures that look like what they may have looked like as a child, a teen,
etc., and then start a rumor about them.
Yes, this is one of the ways I
have started on my journey to create a novel. I always start with a character.
I may not need the catalogues and magazines anymore, but I will make a family
tree. I’ll come up with something that happens to the character, and thus begin
my story. But I have never started with a plot.
“‘Christmas won’t be Christmas
without presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.” (Little Women, Louisa May
Alcott, 1868) and “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or
whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
(David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1850) were the two most influential story
beginnings for me.
Both stories begin with a main
character setting up the situation that makes the reader say – or at least
think – I wonder what that’s about?
The stories I rejected as a child
were those that began with long-winded descriptions of scenery, and pages of “stuff”
before a character ever appears, much less says anything. To me, they were like
going to an art show, and since I was never any good at art class, I was never
much interested in looking at an endless array of still-life paintings.
Yes, people look askance at me in
art museums as I quickly wander around a room of pictures, thinking, “That’s
nice,” or “That one’s blurry. Why didn’t the artist put his glasses on to paint
it?” I don’t spend time studying the two-dimensional-looking portraits from the
Middle Ages where the faces look hinged. And sculptures are nice lawn ornaments,
but they’re just kind of bland. I always want to paint them. I guess that’s why so many of them are naked:
to generate some interest.
When I went on a tour of the Hermitage in Russia, I didn't need as long in each room as we were given, and I confess, most of my time was taken up looking at the architecture of the room, or perhaps, Oh Heaven! if I found a Faberge egg on one of the mantles. The pictures? Eh! The were nice, I guess.
Before I am burned at the stake
by art lovers and critics, let me just say I could spend hours in the Medieval
Room of the art museum looking at the armor and swords and such. And I do love
Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” And to put things in perspective, I don’t spend any
more time in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum than I do in an art museum. I’m
just not into reading a bunch of tiny plaques and drooling over paintings and
space ships.
I require action.
And the same can be said for
novels.
I like people – not being in
crowds of them, just being a safe distance away and watching them, listening to
their conversations and seeing what they’ll do next.
I don’t like all people. Those
who are pompous and full of themselves and those who pretend to be stupid just
to attract others make me want to flee.
The fastest way for a person to
make me dislike them is to hear them say to someone, “Do you know who I am?”
No. Should I for some reason? Do
you know me at all? Is there some reason I might even care who you are?
Actually, you’re just a person like me, no better and no worse.
Characters like that don’t last
long in my stories, if they make an appearance at all. They are the foils for
the good guys or something happens to them to finally make them wake up. And if
they don’t, I’ll probably kill them off. (I have a tea mug that says, "Please do not annoy the writer, she may put you in a book and kill you." and yes, I know that comma should be a semi-colon, but it's a direct quote.)
Novels are my way of watching
people, and even sometimes getting close enough to play. It’s safe, they’ll
never turn on me, and so far they’ve never left me scratching my head asking, “What
was that about?” as real people sometimes do.
So I guess I’ll keep my talisman
story in the drawer unfinished just to keep the ideas flowing. And just maybe
one of these days, after I finish the four or five ideas that are on hold at the
moment while I complete another story, I’ll do something with that folder full of
beginnings.
1 comment:
Stephen King maintains that story ideas are never the problem. The work, he says, is in filling in what actually happens. IMHO you will never run out of ideas.
Have you ever considered that you may be autistic?
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