On Writing

Today I was leaving the library (I made three separate trips to the library today) with an armload of books, and I had the thought that the books I was carrying said a lot about me. Some of them were on studio lighting for photography, because trial and error will only get me so far. One was Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, and the rest were on education. From this stack of books, I thought, someone could correctly surmise that I’m a photographer, a writer, and an educator.
Except that I’m not, really. A long time ago, I read Stephen King’s On Writing (the title of this post is no coincidence) and was struck by his idea that if you want to be a writer, and you write, you’re a writer. That’s all there is to it. I’ve applied this philosophy to my life in general, but I’m beginning to somewhat doubt the truth of the statement. I want to be a professional photographer, but I’m not quite there yet. I want to be a writer, but I haven’t written fiction in, well, years. I want to be a teacher, but I don’t yet have my certification. I know that these things are part of me, and I’m working toward them, but there’s only so much you can get by reading a book. At some point, you’ve got to do.

I haven’t written fiction in a long time for two reasons. First, I don’t really have an audience. Even websites devoted to writing and critique have few members with the stamina to read short stories or novellas. They read the shorter poems and ignore everything else. And I’m not part of a writers group, nor am I good enough at writing to be sending things off to publishers just yet. So I feel a little silly writing things that no one will ever read (unless I force my husband to take a look). Also, I just feel silly writing. There are a lot of people out there who call themselves writers but are not very good at it, and I think people tend to poke fun at them. Writing is a scary thing to begin with, because you put so much of yourself into it, and no matter how good you are, there are going to be people who don’t like it. And when you add in the fact that some people are going to make fun of you just for trying, it makes getting started very difficult.
Regardless, if I think of myself as a writer, I need to write. Since it’s been a while, I thought that maybe I would try some story starters online. The first one I tried, which claims to have millions of starters, apparently just combines parts of speech into a sentence, so you get something that goes like this: “The adjective person / action verb  / direct object  / preposition and place / verb or prepositional phrase that probably doesn’t make any sense with the rest of the sentence.”

Some examples:

• The dirty undertaker deleted the email near the vault to prevent the accident.
• The mean haircutter composed a song in a dark alley to discover the dark secret.
• The hilarious tutor polished the table near the dark corner to answer the challenge.
• The funny dog handler scribbled a note in a closed gas station for the killer bees.

While these are pretty amusing, as far as I can tell there’s almost no way to create a believable story from any of these starters. Although I would like to see a story about killer bees who can read. Anyway. What I thought I’d try was to write a story using a technique that Orson Scott Card suggested in his book Character and Viewpoint. Card recommends starting with something simple, and asking questions until you get a good story. Here’s an example of how this might work.

Ok, so I think we’ll start with a guy. The first obvious question is how old he is. Let’s say he’s a teenager. No specific reason, but I think a lot happens to teenagers and so he might be interesting. Ok, so what’s happening to this particular teenager? Let’s say his parents are out of town. Well, why are they out of town? Mabye they planned on being home, but their flight was delayed because of a huge snowstorm, and the person who was staying with him has to leave. So now we have a teenager, home alone in the snow. So what’s he going to do? Well, he could throw a party, but that’s been done a lot. He could do nothing, but then we don’t have a story. So let’s say he goes out to play in the snow. But he lives out in the middle of nowhere, so there’s no one to have a snowball fight with, and no one to see a snowman if he builds one. There aren’t any hills, so he can’t even go sledding. So he’s bored. Maybe he decides to build something to surprise  or amuse his parents when they get home. (We’re assuming he likes his parents. Not sure how believable that is. Maybe he’s a young teenager) How about a fort? He can block the driveway, and build a snowman army, and it’ll be hilarious. So, what happens next?

As you can see, I got a lot out of just “It’s a story about a guy.” I didn’t plan any of this out in advance, I just brainstormed. And it got easier as I went on, with less questioning or backtracking. It’s not a bad technique, though I think it works a little better when someone else is asking the questions.  That way, you don’t get off easy. Card’s point is that you can start with nothing and build a pretty interesting story. He encourages writers to think deeper and move past boring or cliche answers to questions. I’m not sure how successfully I’ve done that in this case, but I’ve tried. In any case, I’m going to write this story, and then post it here. Provided I don’t chicken out. Fiction is scary, folks.

How do you start a story?

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