From Echoes to Ideas: How to Create and Craft Stories
There was once a time when I would open a blank page and blog away. Any topic within the broad spectrum of books or ideas. A time when I followed the wealth of ideas concept closely. Such blogging was inspiring, it led to the discovery of new ideas, and as I blogged, I would hear echoes of other writers' sayings, echoes from such disparate names as Flannery O'connor, Charles Mungoshi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ernest Hemingway, Dambudzo Marechera, Chinua Achebe, Robert Frost, E.M. Forster, James Joyce and others. Echoes such as: Don't write, follow the dream; how do you know what you are thinking unless you start writing; I write because I feel too much, start a story with a specific individual doing something and you will have a story, I write to discover what I am thinking, I write to capture the ideas I don't know I have. Hence, I was thinking of my blog, and the process of blogging, as tapping into a wealth of ideas. Yes, there was once such a time. And now, that time is coming back. Well, maybe not the time, but that which I used to do with time on this blog.
There is the matter of story beginnings. One echo says, ensure there is specificity, conflict, character, and credibility in your story beginning. And I say, that's so true. Before long I am on Julius NyerereWay, Harare. I try to follow it, and can't tell, in my imagining it, if I'm not confusing the road with Samora Machel Avenue, but the pictcure I have is of a long, wide street cutting through the north end of Harare CBD. It's going somewhere (from East to West); soon it will leave the central business district, the downtown, so to speak, and go somewhere. Streets always lead somewhere, even where they will make you bump into a wall, or a tree, as often did some Zvishavane streets. But this is Harare we are talking about. This is Harare of the 90s, not to be confused with the 1890s. Down that avenue, a bookstore here, another there, and I'll see a street that branches off and lead to a library. I used to go to all the libraries I could: Russian Center, Harare City, British Council, USIS (where I watched the first gulf war...Iraq, Kuwait, the first Bush, etc), and the UZ library, with that window which gave a me a stunning view of the Avenues' treetops and of the Harare skyline.
There was a small city council library in Glen View as well, near the Makomva shopping center where there was a doctor's office, next the the post office where often as a temporary teacher I collected my direct-deposited pay: they said it was the people's bank,the post office, hence it was. Had branches in the city, if you crossed Julius Nyerere, or Samora Machel, or Union, but especially Bank street, one way or another (and we walked a lot then), you would end up at the main post office with escalators, or the other branch past Second Avenue, which would be more accessible when later as a University of Zimbabwe student I would collect payouts, with others who banked with the post office, and as we were getting more educated, we laughed at the idea, ended up opening accounts with Barclays or Standard Chartered, but continued to use Post Office Savings Bank because of its people status--receive, then extrat--like a tooth--a big chunk of the amount, implant it in the commercial mouth. Back then you could talk of savings, like I hear you can almost do now in 2011. But what was key: you walked a lot, crossed many streets, and if you were ever lost, there was always Julius Nyerere or Samora Machel to get you back on track.
Okay, perhaps a street is not an individual, but definitely can be a character. Read NoViolet Bulawayo in 'Main'; where the street is the protagonist, and she will tell you about life in the Bulawayo I havent seen in fifteen years, which is no one's fault, really. Main does what she does, not because she's a street, but she's a street with an attitude, a street burdened, but working still, taking breaks whenever she can find them, working to feed her children somewhere; you get the sense that she has a family to feed, and she's exhausted, she feels used, abused, but she doesn't give up. She feels. The pressure of the suffering masses stomping on her; she knows they wouldn't do this if they could choose, and if we insist that they have a choice, it's that they know they can bring themselves to the long queues and wait for something they may not find.
It must be Flannery O'Connor who said to start with a character doing something specific and follow the story as it grows, or put simply: grow the story. Then John Gardner said put your reader to sleep; no, not that, but: make the reader dream, and don't use gimmicks that takes the reader out of the dream. Don't.
The other day I asked about Ximex Mall, and someone said it was a little ghetto now. There we used to go to a little studio and pose. She was always beautiful. And when he said, I went to war, I already paid roora, I said, fine then...
There was a Wimpy's too at Ximex--kinda like McDonald's, I say, but they saved rice and such. French Fries too. French what? Oh, chips. And fish? Tomato sauce...and chicken, if you had the money...and, if you didn't quite know how to order...rice and stew. Chips and chicken AND rice and stew? Seriously? [Silence]. And later, you would go home kurukisheni and eat the sadza that had been set aside for you. You: whether you were Babamunini, uncle, Muzukuru, or the one who did temporary teaching during the day and attended the little business college on Julius Nyerere way, in the city, "not dowtown", at night. If you were a Literature major you didn't know what the future held. The echoes were: Do Public Relations. Do marketing on the side. Play with computers here and there. Do something.
They say you keep going, utilizing the right brain functionality of just creating and not worrying about logic. They say, later you can always come back and trim and trim. You can do more than trim; they say you can come back and create more dialogue, work on voice (and often, they never tell you what voice is, or style, and how it differs from tone, attitude, point of view), character, POV, details, details, details. Gardener and Carver are big on concrete details. It so happens that they knew each other at Chico, California; one was the teacher who transformed; the other, the student who was intrigued by his own transformation; and to this day, as one hopes forever, he ramains one of the most concrete short story writers of America, and is very popular in Italy (as someone pointed out the other day). There are gimmicks, he echoes, but there is revision, there is concrete reality, there's Chekhov.
Reflection: So as you go back to what started as a statement, then became a musing, and soon a metafictional piece that mentions specific individuals or places that can easily become characters, you begin to plant the seed of story. You have something to work on. There is matter here: those Wimpy thoughts will lead to a pattern and a story will develop. Julius Nyerere Way becomes a motif, perhaps the unifying thread in a plotless story. But certainly, there will be other things: character, POV, details, setting, credible prose, voice... In short, great ideas for potential stories.
Potential sounds about right.
There is the matter of story beginnings. One echo says, ensure there is specificity, conflict, character, and credibility in your story beginning. And I say, that's so true. Before long I am on Julius NyerereWay, Harare. I try to follow it, and can't tell, in my imagining it, if I'm not confusing the road with Samora Machel Avenue, but the pictcure I have is of a long, wide street cutting through the north end of Harare CBD. It's going somewhere (from East to West); soon it will leave the central business district, the downtown, so to speak, and go somewhere. Streets always lead somewhere, even where they will make you bump into a wall, or a tree, as often did some Zvishavane streets. But this is Harare we are talking about. This is Harare of the 90s, not to be confused with the 1890s. Down that avenue, a bookstore here, another there, and I'll see a street that branches off and lead to a library. I used to go to all the libraries I could: Russian Center, Harare City, British Council, USIS (where I watched the first gulf war...Iraq, Kuwait, the first Bush, etc), and the UZ library, with that window which gave a me a stunning view of the Avenues' treetops and of the Harare skyline.
There was a small city council library in Glen View as well, near the Makomva shopping center where there was a doctor's office, next the the post office where often as a temporary teacher I collected my direct-deposited pay: they said it was the people's bank,the post office, hence it was. Had branches in the city, if you crossed Julius Nyerere, or Samora Machel, or Union, but especially Bank street, one way or another (and we walked a lot then), you would end up at the main post office with escalators, or the other branch past Second Avenue, which would be more accessible when later as a University of Zimbabwe student I would collect payouts, with others who banked with the post office, and as we were getting more educated, we laughed at the idea, ended up opening accounts with Barclays or Standard Chartered, but continued to use Post Office Savings Bank because of its people status--receive, then extrat--like a tooth--a big chunk of the amount, implant it in the commercial mouth. Back then you could talk of savings, like I hear you can almost do now in 2011. But what was key: you walked a lot, crossed many streets, and if you were ever lost, there was always Julius Nyerere or Samora Machel to get you back on track.
Okay, perhaps a street is not an individual, but definitely can be a character. Read NoViolet Bulawayo in 'Main'; where the street is the protagonist, and she will tell you about life in the Bulawayo I havent seen in fifteen years, which is no one's fault, really. Main does what she does, not because she's a street, but she's a street with an attitude, a street burdened, but working still, taking breaks whenever she can find them, working to feed her children somewhere; you get the sense that she has a family to feed, and she's exhausted, she feels used, abused, but she doesn't give up. She feels. The pressure of the suffering masses stomping on her; she knows they wouldn't do this if they could choose, and if we insist that they have a choice, it's that they know they can bring themselves to the long queues and wait for something they may not find.
It must be Flannery O'Connor who said to start with a character doing something specific and follow the story as it grows, or put simply: grow the story. Then John Gardner said put your reader to sleep; no, not that, but: make the reader dream, and don't use gimmicks that takes the reader out of the dream. Don't.
The other day I asked about Ximex Mall, and someone said it was a little ghetto now. There we used to go to a little studio and pose. She was always beautiful. And when he said, I went to war, I already paid roora, I said, fine then...
There was a Wimpy's too at Ximex--kinda like McDonald's, I say, but they saved rice and such. French Fries too. French what? Oh, chips. And fish? Tomato sauce...and chicken, if you had the money...and, if you didn't quite know how to order...rice and stew. Chips and chicken AND rice and stew? Seriously? [Silence]. And later, you would go home kurukisheni and eat the sadza that had been set aside for you. You: whether you were Babamunini, uncle, Muzukuru, or the one who did temporary teaching during the day and attended the little business college on Julius Nyerere way, in the city, "not dowtown", at night. If you were a Literature major you didn't know what the future held. The echoes were: Do Public Relations. Do marketing on the side. Play with computers here and there. Do something.
They say you keep going, utilizing the right brain functionality of just creating and not worrying about logic. They say, later you can always come back and trim and trim. You can do more than trim; they say you can come back and create more dialogue, work on voice (and often, they never tell you what voice is, or style, and how it differs from tone, attitude, point of view), character, POV, details, details, details. Gardener and Carver are big on concrete details. It so happens that they knew each other at Chico, California; one was the teacher who transformed; the other, the student who was intrigued by his own transformation; and to this day, as one hopes forever, he ramains one of the most concrete short story writers of America, and is very popular in Italy (as someone pointed out the other day). There are gimmicks, he echoes, but there is revision, there is concrete reality, there's Chekhov.
Reflection: So as you go back to what started as a statement, then became a musing, and soon a metafictional piece that mentions specific individuals or places that can easily become characters, you begin to plant the seed of story. You have something to work on. There is matter here: those Wimpy thoughts will lead to a pattern and a story will develop. Julius Nyerere Way becomes a motif, perhaps the unifying thread in a plotless story. But certainly, there will be other things: character, POV, details, setting, credible prose, voice... In short, great ideas for potential stories.
Potential sounds about right.
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