Rachel Lee's Blog

Well... writing is all about what we know, right?  Or so I was always told.  And it's true that we reach into our personal experiences in life to create characters and stories that will feel real and resonate with readers.

But writing has a few lessons of its own to teach.  The most important may be that the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity.

Writing a story should never be "easy."  If it's easy, something is wrong.  The characters have to face challenges and get into extremely difficult situations.  As I have learned, when I box in my characters in to the point where I want to beat my head on the keyboard for a solution, that's when I have to become most creative.  That's when the challenge I have set for myself and my characters become a huge opportunity to tell a ripping good story.

The curious part comes when I look at some major challenge in my own life, hovering on the edge of despair, this little voice in my head says, "Well, this will be great for a book some day."  And that reminds me that challenge creates opportunity.

If you are considering writing a story, look at your life, at the times when you thought things were beyond repair, or even hopeless.  In those seeds you will find the most important lessons about writing and life.  And you'll have some idea of the emotional intensity you need to bring to your story and the extremity of the challenges your characters need to face.

You may put your characters into a situation you have never personally faced, yet your experience of the "it's impossible!" situations in your own life will give emotional truth to your characters regardless of which challenges you set them.

These challenges and conflicts we face in life give the texture to our days, the meaning to our existence.  These same elements bring a story to life and engage a reader. 

As I said once in a speech, the lower the valleys, the higher the mountains.  Without the lows in life, there are no mountain-tops of joy.

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One of the questions most frequently asked of an author is: Where do you get your ideas?  And the answer is invariably: they're everywhere.  From the back of the mind, from news items, from the world around us.

Just as invariably, that answer proves to be disappointing.

But there's actually no magic to story-telling.  Psychologists have come to recognize that story-telling is how we create our own lives.  It's the way we put information together into a narrative that makes sense to us.  Everything that happens around us is being woven into the story.

How so?  Well, try to pay attention to how you think about things.  If you see a mother scolding a young child in the mall, but can't hear what she's saying, you're apt to come up with a reason for that scolding.  Often even more than one reason.  You'll think, "Oh, the child must have been begging for something the mother (doesn't want to buy) (can't buy) (doesn't think the child should have).  Or you might think the child has been cranky and mother is telling her to stop complaining.  But running on auto pilot, you'll produce a mini-narrative of why the mother is scolding the child.  You may even embellish, imagining the scene that came before, or even a sequence of events leading to that moment. 

And you'll do it all quickly, hardly aware of it, before forgetting about it and walking on.

Your spouse wakes you in the morning, hands you a rose, says "I love you!" and leaves for work without another word.  You look at the rose, and how you'll write the story depends on other stories you've already written about your relationship:

• He's a sweetheart who just loves to suprise me
• He didn't come home until after I'd fallen asleep so he must have been out way too late again and is apologizing
• What has he done ???? (For a novelist, this is the most fertile seed.)

Each of these thoughts could lead to a further narrative, filling in details, all because you received a rose the moment you awoke.

Story-telling is the way we create our lives, and find ways to bring all the little pieces together.  All of us do it, and it's the basic tool of a novelist.

For example, I noticed a car in the parking lot of my apartment house.  I'd never seen it before, and it was parked in a reserved space.  My first thought was, "Oh, those residents aren't going to be happy if that car doesn't move soon."

That car didn't move.  Not only that, it stayed for  a week, with the driver's window rolled down even though we had several heavy rainstorms.

After a few days, I concluded the car was abandoned.  Naturally I started thinking about all the reasons someone could have abandoned  a perfectly good late-model car.  The novelist kicked in.  By the end of the week I had decided there was a body in the trunk, and that's why someone had left the car, to hide a murder.

The police arrived finally, and when they did I went down to talk to the crime scene unit.  The car had been reported abandoned by the management, and the cops had discovered it was a stolen car.  We chatted for a bit as the crime scene technician told me about his methods.  Then I told him about mine.

I said, "I've had a lot of fun with this car this week.  I'm a novelist, you see, and I started making up stories about why it was here.  I finally decided there was a body in the trunk."

All the police officers froze for a second.  Next thing I knew, they were popping the trunk to look.

Yes, I laugh about it and it's a great story...but in that story were the very seeds a novelist uses all the time.  We just encourage those stories to grow, rather than settling for a mini-narrative that's totally ordinary and walking away.

Instead we take the seeds, reach for the outrageous narrative, the most exciting story...and we're off and running.

If you would like to discuss or comment on this, head over to Coffee at Maude's Forum by clicking on  Rachel Lee Blog about Telling Stories - We're all guilty.

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