When the Well Runs Dry

 

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.