I know when a story I need to write arrives mainly because I find myself alive to my protagonist. I am with them in their struggle. I’m there, and when I stop writing I find I still hold, in this case, him in my mind. I see him stranded in the Piazalle Roma in Venice, drinking coffee in his local pasticceria, holed up in his attic apartment…I hold him there in my mind until I can get back to the writing.
The spark for my current story was a chance remark a friend of a friend made several years ago. As she spoke I knew there was a story I wanted to write. When it came to me again this week I hesitated. Here I was back with familiar themes – am I always writing about the same thing I asked myself?
Then I remembered Thoreau, ‘Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life….Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.’
We cannot write something that is not in some way a part of us…
even at our most imaginative, even if we write fantasy fiction. As Danni Shapiro says, ‘The traces that live within us often lead us to our stories…It can happen in a split second or as a slow dawning. It happens when our histories collide with the present…when we stumble upon it we know…we know because it shimmers.’
We should learn to recognise these stories. The idea that excites us, makes the hairs on our arms stand up on end is the story we should be writing. Or, as in my case, saving up until it re-surfaces and the time seems right.
What are the stories you should be writing? What is your bone? It’s interesting to try making a list of the themes that we find recurring in our work. Best not done abstractly but done by thinking of the stories we’ve written and listing their themes. This can help us know when a story is ours and when we have found our bone. Arriving at this kind of self-awareness as a writer is the way to get at our best writing.
Here are a few of the themes I recognise in my work…absent mothers, children alone, wild landscape, water, friendship, war, adolescence, birds and what in the prison we always called, ‘the dark side.’
This definitely resonates with me, Avril. I can see definite themes emerging in my own writing, such as mother/daughter relationships; father/daughter relationships; mental and physical illness and their affects on relationships and working class women’s roles. I sometimes too worry ‘should I be avoiding the same issues’ but then I think it’s interesting to view similar themes through the eyes of totally different characters. It is the characters who force their way into your mind that drive the story you must write, after all.
Hi Kate, I think so too! Character is key – they drive the story, although for me sometimes I have the idea or the place and I have to search for the character and it’s not always easy – but then who said writing should be easy? Of course sometimes I worry I’m writing the same character too!