THE STORY OF STORIES
With Douglas Coupland, Terry Fallis, Edeet Ravel, Sean Dixon, Emma Ruby-Sachs, Trilby Kent, Patrick deWitt, Jon Evans & Ken Sparling
Where do your stories come from? That was the question faced by nine brave authors for this month’s Fiction Craft. It is, I think, one of the great mysteries of humanity, that we impose story on so many things in our lives. There are some people who say it is an evolutionary tool, allowing us to recognize patterns, while others believe it is divine intervention, and still others think of it as a sort of chemical magic. I tend not to worry too much about the precise source of the narrative impulse. Like the proverbial comedian who suffers through psychoanalysis to understand the root cause of the anger that drives his comedy, only to find that the process has robbed him of his sense of humour, for a novelist to dig around too much in the gears of storytelling, will, I think, likely lead to a broken engine.
That said, it is a fascinating subject about which much can still be said — and this, after all, is a column about the mechanics of writing fiction, so like the authors below, I’ll try to shed just a bit of light on my own machinery.
The story for my novel Snakes & Ladders came to me when a friend told me that she had spent a summer weekend at her cottage protecting a duck’s nest from a garter snake. A charming little tale, I thought. Then she also lamented that a rich local farmer had unnecessarily cut down two old oak trees to sell for lumber. When I heard that, I felt something shift inside me, like large blocks falling into place. It wasn’t so much that I was outraged about the trees (though I was), but the juxtaposition of the two events—large vs small; nature vs commerce—appealed to me on a gut level. The two stories fused in my mind and I suddenly felt the presence of a much, much larger story lurking in the depths of the machine. When I sat down to write, what emerged was a tale about the nature of heroism, featuring two children who try to protect both a duck’s nest and a giant oak tree while their family crumbles around them. Heroism was one of the “large” subjects I had been thinking about for some time, and the cottage tales gave it a way to come alive on the page.
I “see” a lot of stories this way, when events from real life collide with something in my subconscious and push it toward consciousness. I don’t know exactly why these moments happen, but I do know they are always deeply connected to a kind of vigilance, an intense focusing and subsequent blossoming of something I want to say.
Now, let’s now see what this month’s authors wanted to say about the sources of their stories.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Generation A, jPod, God Hates Japan and Genration X. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Where do stories come from? Okay ...usually in the course of a week I get a moment here or there in which something happens to slightly jar me out of reality, if only briefly. Last week, I went to the gym on painkillers and it was really awesome. All my usual slowness and reticence to get on with a task was gone, and for the first time in two years of training I could sort separate out what procedures were tiring as opposed to which ones made my muscles hurt. Will that ever end up in a story? Probably. But I don't know how or when. And I'm definitely going to keep taking ibuprofen before the gym.
My aunt once bought a lottery ticket but had a seniors moment and thought she had actually won the lottery ...and then she lost the ticket. So I was sent to help her find it. I did (it wasn't a winner) but this event became a crucial plot moment in a movie I wrote in 2005 called Everything's Gone Green. So plot moments are usual grounded in an examination of real life. My thinking is that the universe works very hard to ensure that unusual things almost never happen, and that coincidences are very, very rare ...so when something atypical happens, it means the universe dropped the football and you got a sneak peek into its inner workings. And that's where a certain kind of seed for certain kinds of plot and story moments comes from.
TERRY FALLIS is the author of two novels, The High Road and The Best Laid Plans. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
This is question writers tend to field at least once at every public reading. You'd think having been asked many times that I'd have figured out an answer. Alas, not so much. The response might be shorter were you to ask "Where don't your stories come from?" I'm tempted to say I pull my stories directly out of my asssss...toundingly fascinating life. And in large measure, that's true, other than the "astoundingly fascinating" part. I think it's nearly impossible for writers, particularly rookie writers like me, to avoid sprinkling pieces of themselves, conscisously or not, into their writing. That old cliche, "write what you know" is a cliche for good reason. It's been said over and over again, and it seems to work. If you cast a critical eye over my frist two novels, but not too critical please, you'll find little bits of my life experience strewn about the pages. In my novels you'll find chess, engineering, politics, a hovercraft, grammar aficionados, an 81 year old grandmother with Parkinsons disease, and I hope, a few laughs along the way. I can write with some authority about all of those things because they've all played roles in my life. I had neither the time nor the money to move to Provence for two years to "research" my novels, though it's a gig I'd like to land sometime. I have very little time and space in my life to fit in writing so it was more efficient for me to plumb the depths of my own experiences in search of storylines, characters, settings, and themes. So that's what I did. What I didn't do, was "research," or at least not much. So for me, I find traces of stories all around me. A newspaper article, an overheard conversation, something that interested me as a younger man, the clothes worn by an old woman on the bus, the amazing pizza I had yesterday. Without being trite, I find stories everywhere and don't always realize when one is creeping into my consciousness. Okay, I know. Just writing "without being trite" doesn't mean it isn't trite. Trite, but true. And by the way, that brief but pivotal S&M scene in my first novel came strictly from the internet.
EDEET RAVEL is the author of numerous novels, including Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth, A Wall of Light, and Look For Me. She lives in Guelph, Ontario.
Just about everything I experience and think about has a narrative shape; you could say that I “think in stories.” This means I have countless ideas for stories all the time. Most of them come and go, but every now and then a story persists. I don’t pursue it; it pursues me. It keeps making its presence felt, keeps coming back to me. And it begins to grow as well. The process of expansion can take place over a period of a week or several years.
If the story won’t let me go, I try to write it down. If the first sentences aren’t right, I abandon it until I can find a way to tell the story. It can take 35 years, as in the case of The Last Rain, or it can happen right away, as in the case of Ten Thousand Lovers. If I can’t find a way that works, I have to give up on the story.
Actually, Ten Thousand Lovers began with a series of three newspaper photos showing an Israeli soldier in conflict with a Palestinian. The photos were on my kitchen counter for weeks and I stared at them as I prepared meals, until finally the first sentences of the story I wanted to write came to me — I was driving at the time.
Held originated in a dream; that’s very unusual for me, but that’s what happened. I dreamt I was in a hostage situation, though the hostage taker was a woman in my dream, not a man. I was trying to explain to her that I was on her side. When I woke, the entire dynamics of that relationship drew me in, and I went to my computer and began to type what became the first version of Held. I then read several memoirs by former hostages, especially those who were part of the Iran-Contra affair; coincidentally I later met one of the hostages, Charles Glass, in Jerusalem — he’d managed to escape after two months.
SEAN DIXON is a playwright and the author of numerous novels, including The Girls Who Saw Everything and The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Sometimes I take stories from classical literature. Sometimes I look at a painting and try and imagine what the story would be. I mean an abstract painting, not a figurative or narrative painting, though that would work too. Sometimes I use the energy of satire, say, if I’m angry about something in the newspaper, to pillory some public figure with an outrageous pack of fictional lies, vengefully constructed, but by the time it’s finished it might be sympathetic, no longer satirical and bear no resemblance to its inspirer. The bravest stories I think involve a character who doesn’t have enough money. My favourite ideas for stories involve someone who is behaving irrationally and/or anti-socially. Not sure why. I should say that I’m not very good at writing a story unless it’s very short, that is, short enough to be used as an anecdote in a novel or a play. Unless by story you mean plot structure. My favourite kind of plot structure allows for pure storytelling, i.e. I love finding an excuse for a character to tell a story inside the story I’m telling. I envy Boccaccio and Cervantes and Chaucer their structures full of anecdotes, and I notice David Mitchell loves doing that too. I wish I could feel for one second what it would be like to be a pure conduit for the stories of an entire culture, like Ovid or, long before him, Homer, back in the days when such writers were nearly alone. I suppose that’s part of the reason why I swipe their stories. Because the attitude with which their stories get told make them feel like they’re the only ones. Those storytelling poets worked within a set of limitations that felt like the whole world to them.
I suppose a way to impose such a limitation in a present-day milieu would be to go into a closed community with the intent of faithfully recording the stories that matter to its members. Examples: Retired SW Ontario farmers or cross-dressers in a Copenhagen nightclub that doubles as a bed-and-breakfast. Do it like documentary theatre à la Toronto’s Paul Thompson, or like the collections of Studs Terkel. If you find stories the way they found stories, you’ll never run dry.
Sometimes I steal stories from my father or my father-in-law or my wife but rarely from fellow writers. I was at a public reading once, a long time ago, at which the writer was about to read a passage when he realized he’d swiped that part from the anecdote of a writer-friend who was sitting in the audience. So he apologized to that writer-friend and the writer-friend said it was okay and then the reader went on. That felt like a cautionary tale. On the other hand, a few years later I got bounced from Lee’s Palace, somewhat violently, snapping the neck of my banjo in half as I rolled on the sidewalk away from the bouncer’s shove. A fellow writer used that story in a play she was making. I was delighted and flattered. But then she cut it from a later draft. Still, every time I think of that event now, I also think of that writer. By writing it up, she became part of the story.
EMMA RUBY-SACHS is the author of the novel The Water Man’s Daughter. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
A lot of times, I'm reading the paper in the morning and something jumps out at me: a name, a case in the courts or a human interest story. Then my mind starts racing. I write about a person in that situation, or how I would react under the same pressure and events from my own life or from other news stories enter the creative process.
Every once in a while one of those stories catches my imagination and spirals out to create its own ideas. It becomes like a little story generator of its own. Then I know I have an idea I can run with. The really good stories have endless permutations. Everything in the day can become part of a new element. Often, I'll write thirty or forty disconnected scenes before I realize that there is an overarching theme or direction or set of characters.
For example, in 2005, I read a newspaper story about a man who was stabbed while installing a water meter in a South African township. Just that small clip pulled over a year of academic research and months of personal experience into the creation of my novel, The Water Man's Daughter.
TRILBY KENT is the author of the novels Medina Hill, Stones for My Father, and Smoke Portrait. She lives in London, England.
I often start with an atmosphere that I want to capture, and characters who struggle against that atmosphere. The book I’m working on at the moment is set in a boarding school on an island in the North Sea. The island doesn’t exist, but as I’d recently spent two years living on site at a boarding school in Dorset I felt that I had material to conjure a place that could exist.
In Stones for My Father, I wanted to explore a part of my family’s history (one of my mother’s ancestors was the Boer War hero Danie Theron) but also to mine the creative possibilities of a conflict that is rarely discussed today. It’s still remarkable to me that the most devastating war of its time — overshadowed only by the First World War — hasn’t inspired more works of fiction.
I like to find ways to tell new stories against familiar backdrops, or familiar stories against lesser-known backdrops. My first children’s novel takes place in 1930s Cornwall: the concept of a book set in that decade which wasn’t located in the Dustbowl was perhaps an unusual one for some American readers. My first adult novel, Smoke Portrait, is also set in the 1930s — but this time in Flanders and Ceylon (it was going to be Germany and India, but that changed when I moved to Belgium).
The devil is in the detail, of course. I’m a compulsive collector of newspaper clippings, postcards, found objects and so on. The model horse in Medina Hill is based on a real artifact in the British Museum; Marten’s moment of revelation in Smoke Portrait was inspired in part by an upsetting incident that occurred when I was on holiday in Greece; the jar of peaches that Corlie drops at the beginning of Stones for my Father came right out of my great-aunt Murriana’s preserves cabinet in the Free State. I never know where the next idea is going to come from, and that’s part of the fun.
PATRICK deWITT is the author of the novels The Sisters Brothers and Ablutions. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Well, they don't emerge intact, I can tell you that much. I've never been a Eureka type of writer where a story presents itself with a beginning, middle, and end. I tend to start with something more humble or vague. For example, the impetus for The Sisters Brothers was the two words “sensitive cowboys” scribbled in a note pad. Something as open-ended as this allows me an entry point into a scenario, and then, in expanding it, there are any number of smaller Eureka moments which eventually account for the narrative. Where the stories themselves come from, though, who knows? Everywhere and nowhere. The process for me is: I look at something day after day, I build it up and tend to it, and sometimes it bears fruit and sometimes it's a blighted disaster. But there's no magic well. It's grunt work.
JON EVANS is the author of numerous novels including Beasts of New York, Invisible Armies, Blood Price and Dark Places. He lives in New York City.
The canonical answer to "Where do your ideas come from?" is "From the idea factory in Schenectady, Ohio," according to the late great Theodore Sturgeon. I note, however, that your question is subtly but importantly different. Sturgeon was so dismissive of that question because ideas are cheap; they're everywhere, they're hanging from trees, all you have to do is pick them. What you do with them, that's what's tricky.
Everyone's different (my friend Jo Walton jokes about someday having a panel at a writing con entitled "Your Process Is Weird", in which authors express shock and horror at what others do) but for me, the important bit — the moment of genesis, if I may wax pretentious for a second — is when two or more previously plucked ideas merge and crystallize into something new. It's something that happens to me, more than something that I make happen, but I can search for it, or at least foster an environment in which it happens. Travel helps, a lot, for me; so do long walks and aimless mental wanderings.
Then I think about the new merged idea, and it nags at me, in an intensely symbiotic cycle. This can go on for anywhere from minutes to many months before I actually start the 99%-perspiration part. But those hundreds of hours of work feel almost anticlimactic next to that moment of crystallization.
KEN SPARLING is the author of numerous novels including Intention Implication Wind, Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt and Book. He lives in Richmond Hill, Ontario.
Creating a story is dangerous. The temptation to create a story leads to the danger of ignoring the continuously shifting connections between words in favour of sustaining your narrative.
When you compose a narrative, you create two stories: the one is the narrative you are trying to tell, and the other is the story your words are trying to tell about the world in which they live together, a world in which it is possible to put this word next to that word and then carry on with more words after that until you have a sentence, and then to put that sentence into a paragraph with other sentences.
The words in your sentences are like people, each word like a person, and the sentences are like a group of people who find themselves together in a subway car. Most of the time, the people on a subway car don’t wonder about or try to develop their connection to one another at all. They each of them continue to exist within the arc of their own private narrative.
If you, as a writer who is bringing these two types of stories into existence — the one a result of the narrative thrust, the other a result of the meeting of words — succumb too fully to the urge to develop your narrative, you might overwhelm and thereby discredit the other story, the story the words are hoping to offer, and so not give the words the room they need to thrive. When this happens, your story doesn’t have the impact you hope for, because the real impact comes, not so much from the narrative that is your story, but from the way the words you’ve used to compose the narrative bang up against one another on the page.
When you go back to revise, you begin to focus your work on the level of the words. You are trying to open up room enough for the words to tell their story, the story of a community of words and how they exist together as an exploration of the authority that allows one word to be set beside another.
When I revise, it just so happens that the work I do looks like an attempt to subvert, or circumvent, or defeat story. What results tends to lack any sustained narrative flow. The language takes over. And through this dominance of language over narrative, I am asking: what is the good of a narrative? I’m asking about the necessity of narrative. I’m asking: Why narrative?
I question the idea of narrative through the work I do in revising, and I think that’s something every writer could benefit from. Before you begin to cobble together your narrative, wonder for a time: Why narrative? I am not suggesting that your questioning of narrative should aim to overcome or defeat or abandon narrative altogether, but rather, I am suggesting that the real impulse to write is the impulse to wonder, and, since narrative is such a dominant force in fiction, it makes good sense to wonder about narrative. The writing you do is active wondering, and the revising is even more directly an active form of wondering about the idea of narrative as a legitimate connecting force in fiction.
One of the things I like to do when I’m at the point where I’ve got my first draft of a novel finished and I’m going back through to revise is to give every sentence its own paragraph. I break each sentence out of its paragraph and surround it with white space. I move though the whole book doing this. Then, later, after I’ve moved through the entire book, or a big enough section of the book that I can come back to these isolated sentences with a fresh perspective, I come back and see if the sentences, each alone, can stand on their own. Sometimes, many times, it turns out they can’t stand alone, and I revise to make them more independent, so that the action isn’t just in the cumulative effect of the sentences as the narrative develops, but it’s also happening on the molecular level, where one word meets the next.
So pry some space between your sentences and see if they can live without the narrative.
Your sentences don’t have to escape the narrative; they just have to get away long enough to wonder about their own independent reason for being. What emerges, as you isolate and then tamper with each sentence, is a different narrative, a story of structure. In the best stories, this structural narrative mirrors the overt narrative, reinforces it, and makes for a very satisfying reading experience.
So, where do my stories come from?
The stories that really matter to me come from the place where one word meets the next, the place where individual words encounter one another, and through their encounters, suggest new and unexpected ways of connecting words, ways that don’t always look to narrative to justify their encounters with one another. It might not look like my books have a story, but they do. It’s just that the story in my books often arrives in the space where words meet to wonder together about how they have come to be together.
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Shaun Smith is the author of the YA novel Snakes & Ladders. He has published journalism with CBC.ca, Quill & Quire, The Toronto Star and numerous other outlets. His book blog "Shaun Smith's Sunday Sundries" appears each Sunday (no kidding!) on Open Book Toronto. Follow Shaun on Twitter.
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