The Stories We Tell

When my niece was younger, around two years old, I used to tell her a story. It was a story about an astronaut who got stranded on Mars all by himself and had to learn how to grow potatoes using only what we had, until his friends came and rescued him.

Okay, so I told her a condensed version of The Martian. She was interested in space, at the time, and I modified it a little to avoid the really scary parts (Matt Damon getting impaled with a bit of metal in a storm and abandoned on a planet? Kind of terrifying for a toddler).

Recently, as I sat with curled up her, now six years old, our usual morning read in my hands, I let it slip. 

“You know that story I used to tell you? About the man on Mars?”

“Who grew potatoes using poo? Yes, I remember.”

“I didn’t make it up. It’s from a film.”

She looked stunned.

“I figured, one day, when you’re older, you’d see it, and think they’d plagiarised your auntie.”

“What does plagiarised mean?”

“Stole the idea from.”

She nodded, mulling this over with her characteristic pensive frown buried under a mountain of morning-messy curls. “What about the one with the lamp and the genie?”

I looked at her.

She sighed. “Okay, I knew you didn’t make that one up. I know what Aladdin is.”

For a moment, I worried that I’d burst some wonderful childhood fantasy by telling her the truth.

“What about the one with the pirates in the desert?”

“Oh!” I brightened. “That one was mine.”

Clearly that was a satisfactory answer. “I thought so. I like that one.” She tapped the cover of the book, the conversation closed. “Can you read me one more?”

The pirates in the desert was definitely the most meandering, flimsily-structured of the stories I used to tell her, sat tucked up in coffee shops when we went for cake dates. So much so that my brother would frequently sit and pick holes in the details even as I told it, constructing plot lines and villains as I went.

The ideas part of writing has never been that which I struggle with, as I think is often the case for many writers. I have scores of half-baked ideas sitting across dozens of scribbled-in notebooks and in the notes of my phone. Some of those will never amount to anything more than the cluster of thoughts that they exist in now. Some of them will take root and grow into something real, something with depth. Some, will combine with one another to create something that I could never have imagined them being in the first place.

Telling stories to my niece and nephews over the years has been a challenge in plot development on the fly. They are not generally inclined to allow me the time to construct the perfect pathways for the characters, more interested in whatever nonsense comes spiralling out of my head and straight into being. Even if that sometimes means pirate crews getting stuck in the middle of the desert with a ship that, yes, dear brother, probably would be a nightmare to drag across the dunes.

Unlike all other aspects of my life where I plan and organise to an almost finicky degree, I don’t look so far in depth in what I write. I know where a project starts, I know where it ends up, and I know something about what will happen in the daunting middle, but the story develops day-to-day in how the characters move and grow as they journey on the page. I used to worry that this was the wrong way to write, that there was no way I could ever write anything of worth if I didn’t know every detail of what was to happen before I even started.

I think the current state of my bookshelf says a lot about where the writing side of my brain is at.

But it works for me. When I was asked by Interlude Press if I wanted to write a book, I didn’t even have an idea on the back-burner waiting for such a moment. Speakeasy was born in a moment of well, what would I like to write about? And while I submitted, out of necessity, a detailed summary in a pitch to them, Heath and Art and their host of friends and acquaintances walked off entirely out of my control and created that story in exactly the way it was meant to go.

I recently attended a talk with writer André Aciman who spoke of writing in much the same way. He spoke of not knowing what the characters were going to do, and I felt a moment of such recognition of that plight. I feel so little control over where my characters go, what they feel, what they want or need in any moment. I just follow along and try my best to keep up with whichever way they turn.

I’ve tried this a different way, too. In the past month, I finished the first draft of a mammoth project I’ve been working on that has, due to the nature of it, been so planned and mapped out that there was no room for characters to wander off the page in any which way. It was a challenge for me, and surely a good one, as it forced me to write in a different way. But it’s not the way I like to write, it’s not the way that allows the imaginative side of my brain to grow how I would want it to.

She was definitely making it up as she went along, too.

Even these blog posts tend to wander off in ways I don’t mean to. I had some struggle finding what to write about for this: in part, I think, due to creative burnout from finishing the aforementioned project. Even the act of opening a fresh page has seemed daunting for weeks, so I didn’t. I agonised over the past few days of what to write about. I had some ideas, but the only ones I was interested in felt a little too much to be exploring on a public forum at this moment in my life; a little too close-to-home. 

For whatever reason, my conversation with my niece kept coming back to the forefront of my mind, about the stories I used to tell her. So, I began there. And now, I suppose I’ve written about writing. But, I wrote. And a few locks in my brain have opened up, the gears slowly starting to turn again.

And thank goodness for that, because I have three young women waiting for me to chronicle their adventures and they were getting a little impatient up there.

Even without the quiet of the cottage in Finland, let’s hope I’ll be doing a lot more of this in the weeks to come.