The Whale Belly

The most natural thing for me to write is an expository of a rumination I happen to be in the thick of. I don’t know what you call that really, musings on whatever seems most forefront in my mind. But I would like to write stories and create characters I can fall in love with. For some reason that part of me seems closed off and I don’t know how to access it, or if I should even try. What if instead it’s best to develop what occurs most naturally to me and if forcing some other way to create is bound to fail due to egotism? Then again, am I just creating reasons not to pursue something I’m terrified of failing at?

I think there is a middle answer here, though, and it may be more of a gentle moving towards something rather than charging in, like approaching a meek and frightened animal. I’ve been playing with this idea of making short, paragraph long stories that incorporate all the basic elements of a story you learn in school, Freytag’s pyramid, setting, character, conflict, etc. Brooks’ and Warren’s Understanding Fiction has a much more sophisticated and detailed list of narrative traits to expand this simple list, which I can incorporate one at a time as I steadily expand my comfort zone. And who knows, maybe one of these micro-stories will take a life of its own.

It’s strange that I used to be able to write much more freely with little consideration of form. Perhaps if I had continued to write intuitively I would have been great at by now. Then again, it would have always been a guessing game.

Knowledge is great as long as eventually becomes intuitive. A basketball player can’t think about proper elbow position when he has a split second to make a jumper in a high-stakes game. Likewise, a novelist can’t fret over aspects of the novel while trying to enter into the immersive dream state of writing.

This intuitiveness comes from repetition, pure and simple. There is no shortcut but to do a thing over and over until the action is hardwired into one’s being. And one can’t incorporate everything at once, but needs to take it in slowly, with one focus at a time, or else they risk emotional burnout. A storyteller may begin with getting used to conveying stories with a beginning, middle, end, and ever-rising tension. They may be well-known fairytales with one-dimensional characters, or the simple occurrences of one’s day. And maybe it’s as simple as trying to tell a spouse about something that happened.

I’m pretty sensitive to cues that indicate a person is tired of listening to me. I’m particularly astonished by people who seem to check out three seconds into hearing something that doesn’t directly involve them. It’s gotten to the point where I mostly just don’t talk to people because I figure they don’t care about anything other than marking the number of likes to an Instagram post. It’s only now that I realize it’s an opportunity to change the way I tell stories, to be more interesting. Leading with a problem and increasing tension in a believable way are the tried and true methods of garnering attention. What a storyteller does with that is a moral question they have to figure out for themselves.

Recognition is also an important key. I used to think Aristotle spoke about recognition as an aspect of a drama located in the protagonist, but it makes sense now that the auditor also needs to experience a recognition of himself in the narrative and in the experiences and actions of characters. People tune out when something seems irrelevant to their insular lives, so stories have to be able to resonate enough that they see themselves in it as well. Maybe instead of saying “write what you know,” it should be “write what is resonate with you,” and trust that humans share a common set of hopes and fears under various material guises. It seems undeniable that they do.