Slow-growing Ideas

Several of my stories and mystery novels were worked out on paper before I began writing. I had blocks of story parts, notes on a particular character, and no sense of how the whole thing went together. As a pantser, I was willing to wait and then let it all come together when I started writing. This is an act of faith, and for some definitely reckless. But for me it feels like pulling a multicolored shawl around my shoulders, sinking into the warmth and richness of it, and letting the idea germinate. But these days the thinking part is taking longer and longer.

Some of my more recent stories are based on ideas or scenes that came to me years and years ago. Most often if an idea doesn’t take form within a month or so, I abandon it, or just as likely it abandons me. But some of these old snatches of a story I overheard, a piece of a scene that still flickers in my imagination, linger and don’t seem to change. When this happens I know there’s a story there, but I don’t seem to know how to get to it. 

This is where I can hear some of my fellow writers telling me to just sit down and write it out. There’s no mystery to it, as you know, Susan. It’s just a matter of doing the work. Most of the time I would agree. But there are some ideas that need more than an artificial structure composed for working them out on paper to be realized. These are the ones that hover in the back of my mind, like a dream that might be bad, might be good, but won’t fade. 

I’m not the only one who feels this way. A few years ago I was at a book event with other writers and found myself chatting with a writer I had met a number of times but didn’t really know. We talked about our work, what we were reading, and the days ahead. And then she said something that I recognized instantly.

“I think I’m ready for the next story. I can feel it growing. I’m ready to start writing.”

I knew exactly what she meant and how she felt. The story idea is there, gestating, growing, pushing through the reticence, the hesitation, the doubt, ready to emerge from the nib of my pen or the keys on the computer keyboard. At that moment I know I need one last step. Who is going to tell the story—that, for me, is the key to unlocking the whole thing. And once I know who the narrator is, the story unfolds before me, and it’s just a matter of me keeping up with the flow. The preparation time, if I can call it that, takes years. The writing takes a couple of days or fewer for a short story, a couple of months, writing full time, for a novel. The closer the story is to real life, a real event, the less rewriting, or fixing, is required. The characters act out according to their natures, their proclivities already established by where I found them in the basic idea. 

The hardest lesson in working on a story that arrives in this manner is to not tamper with it, to trust my own unconscious to deliver the narrative I can feel inside me. Sometimes I don’t know what the ending will be, but when I sense it coming, and understand what it probably has to be, I have to trust where I am and where I’m going and not tamper with it.

Not every story arrives in this way. I’ve constructed plenty from a simple What If beginning. But those that haunt my memory are different, and require a different writer response from me. From the few of these I’ve composed and published, I’ve learned discipline, trust that my writing brain knows what it’s doing, and faith that whatever is happening is something worthwhile. These stories tend not to have a happy ending, but they are realistic and honest. And for me that’s enough.