The Whale Belly

In two out of the past three days, I sat down and forced myself to write a story from beginning to end. Forced myself to start anyway. Both times as soon as I got going the narrative travelled it’s own path and I just did my best to keep up with it. They were rough, maybe not even worth rewriting, but it left me with the conviction that this is what I have to do to get to my next stage. I just have to get used to sitting in a chair and spinning out a tale I know nothing about until it appears before me, beginning, middle, and end. I have to keep doing this until the cadences and rhythms become intuitive, then I can worry about working on the next weakness in my writing.

I bet getting in a habit of writing out stories in one sitting also changes the way I’ll read. Because I’ll be better able to see the rhythms of a good story in comparison with mine own. Also, sitting and writing out an entire story every day will undoubtedly be exhausting, forcing me to look at others work to see how I can be doing one thing or another better and thus lightening my load. Necessity breeds innovation and such. Just a hypothesis though.

The story I wrote today had to do with a girl who finds a snake eating an egg in their chicken coop. She tells her mother, who then carries the snake into the road with snake tongs and blows its head off with a shotgun. Then they eat dinner and watch a movie. That’s what happens, anyway. The story I wrote two days ago had a lot of sensational plot points and was about four times longer. It ended with the husband of a murdered wife shaking the murderer by the collar and shouting “What have you done? What in God’s name have you done?” I like the one I wrote today better. I think it’s because the stories where I focus heavily on plot end up sounding a lot like any other story with lots of plot. Focusing on characters is more of crap shoot, and thus strangely more exciting, though in more subtle ways. You just kind of think about how these two people would normally respond to a situation and see how it plays out. And for some reason a moment of illumination blossoms.

Maybe that’s not quite right. I think it has more to do with whether events or plot points seem like they could really occur naturally, or if its the heavy hand of the author placing hot irons on a character’s foot to make him dance. The former, at least to me, seems more interesting and is a sign that there’s more of an unconscious element going on in the shaping of a story. Writing the natural stuff feels more like watching it happen, while forcing exciting things to happen feels, well, forced.

Today feels like a win, anyway.