Raw Materials for the Writer (Beyond Books)
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
How do you write a sentence like that? I’m guessing it has less to do with genius and more to do with the principles of mining, whether you are panning for gold or extracting ore from the earth (I didn’t say it was pretty in the making).
Life surrounds us with an overwhelming abundance of terrific material for short stories, including things we can observe, overhear, research and remember.
We can even strip our other writing (poems, songs, essays) for parts, like you would in an automobile junkyard (a metaphor I’m borrowing from Fitzgerald).
Bring on the Distractions
Sometimes it’s totally acceptable to follow a thread, jump down a rabbit hole or go off on a tangent.
Novels like Pamela, Gone With the Wind, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman were birthed by serendipity, and in John Fowle’s case it was the distraction of a cloaked, mysterious woman standing at the end of Devon breakwater when he was supposed to working on something else.
Are you paying attention and most importantly, will you do anything with it?
Short Story Radar
You can also call this story radar. Are you in the habit scanning your environment constantly for story ideas?
Do you keep a tiny Moleskin or reporter’s notebook at hand or know how to speak into your smart phone’s recording app during a moment of inspiration?
I recently visited a friend in Cincinnati, and rather than take an Uber to the airport (my sole story source would be the Uber driver), I took public transportation from Cheviot to downtown, and then a regional bus out to the airport. Suddenly I had forty stories surrounding me.
I was especially intrigued by a chatty older woman with a silver roller board suitcase at her side on the #21 Harrison bus in Cincinnati, who may have been going on a trip (I don’t know for sure). She was talking to a young man near her and then to no one in particular about how she was consistently treated differently at Walmart stores in Ohio and Kentucky. Who is this woman? Where is she headed on the #21 Harrison bus? What is her back-story? What can I do with that Walmart line? Would it open a story, or become mid-story dialogue to illuminate her character?
Because I can store an infinite amount of text digitally these days, I can collect as much information as I want, that I can one day cut and paste into a short story. I keep a list of future character names, occupations and descriptions of personal characteristics or articles of clothing.
The Obituary Hack
I read the daily obituaries for a North Carolina city where I lived for 30 years, as well as the online obituaries of my hometown newspaper in Southern California. I’m mostly looking for people I once knew, but I’m also scraping the obituaries for character names and biographical snippets that I can build upon.
An obituary is about 1,000 words of pure raw material, and if you fictionalize it in your own story, it’s all fair game; you aren’t stealing anything.
Auto Focus (the story “Selfie”)
Autographical material is the brick-and-mortar for short story writers. Personal details and experiences are perfectly acceptable, as long as they are rendered in language and style that removes them from the original telling.
What usually distinguishes a literary short story from an amateur story or non-fiction memoir is a distancing, an artful rendering and an objective, arms-length approach which makes a story universal and significant.
Family Feud
Consider the Fitzgerald’s, a fine literary family. F. Scott based some of his characters on his wife Zelda, adapting his interactions and experiences with her into his fiction. He copied entries from Zelda’s journals verbatim and put them into his books. Zelda mocked her husband in print, saying that he “seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”
Scott countered by claiming his wife’s only published work, Save Me The Waltz, lifted autobiographical details that he was planning to use in his novel Tender Is The Night. Shame on Scott for talking shop over morning coffee and Corn Flakes.
Creating a hybrid or character amalgam is another tactic, taking your deeply personal experience and grafting that onto someone else’s story in a seamless manner, so that an entirely new character is created.
Six Deep Reservoirs of Story Material
If you find yourself completely stuck about what to write about, here are six reservoirs of possible material for you:
1. Put a modern twist on an ancient text, (Scripture, Shakespeare, Mythology, Folklore), the way Kiss Me Kate is a modern take off on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
2. Newspapers (especially news stories in the Metro section, and the aforementioned obituaries)
3. Court, church, immigration, military and commercial records
4. Letters and personal artifacts (of an era)
5. Museums (Porter County, Indiana has 1,300 transcribed biographies online, including my great-great grandfather Capt. Welty of the Pennsylvania 14th Cavalry)
6. Interview neighbors or friends’ parents and relatives. In high school my daughter interviewed an elderly neighbor for an A.P. U.S. History project. The neighbor had flown bombing missions in WWII and had a wonderful anecdote about the breakfast served to bomber crews. On days the crews were grounded, they were served powdered eggs, but on days they were flying an actual mission, they were served real eggs because they might not be coming back! That’s a poignant nugget you could build a scene around, and possibly an entire story.
Consider Containers and Lists
Another trick for fiction writers is in building out pre-built formal “collection sites” or containers of material. Think of them like retention ponds that capture excess rainwater.
Say you have five short stories you’ve written that you like. Go ahead and create a full-blown manuscript document, the beginnings of a short story collection, knowing later you’ll fill in the rest.
I also keep a “bucket list” clipboard next to my writing desk, with a handwritten list of twenty potential writing projects, poems, stories, plays, book ideas that I’d like to tackle over the next two years. My clipboard is like a grocery store list. Once I visualize my goal and write it down, I don’t forget anything. As a rule, I find that I complete at least half the items on the list.
Note: This post is an excerpt from “I’m Telling!” a forthcoming guide for first-time fiction writers, to be published in November, 2018
Top Photo Credit: International Accountability Project
