My writing is mostly in the form of short stories - anecdotes, in other words, that might once have been tossed out to entertain the customers on the other side of the bar, or friends at a family gathering. They are usually set in a single location, and focused on the words or actions of only a few people - and almost always come to either a humorous or salutory ending.
Novels are a bit harder - at first I tried to work on them as a series of short stories, one chapter at a time, but the reader desires and expects more coherence and logic than that approach provides.
I am getting there though - a novel has been steadily ( well, at times) flowing from pen to paper and then onto the hard drive. The thing that made the difference for me was the starting point - not the chronological beginning of the story, but the point from which I began working.
In the case of this novel the provocation was a well known internet meme that runs "Never upset a writer, lest he put you in his next story - and kill you" I'd seen it before, on coffee cups and t-shirts, but this time it struck a chord. I thought of people who had, over the decades, annoyed me in ways that might make them deserving of a fictional death - and within a few pages and half an hour of scribbling, a story had sprung to life, with that death at its core.
It took a quite a few more pages before I had settled on the place, time, and manner of death, as well as the identity of the perpetrator, but knowing the name and character of the victim, and of the protagonist who might solve the crime, that was enough to set me on course. Of course the names and certain other details have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent alike, but once I had those two characters pinned down, the other characters, and the ensuing action, flowed more easily onto the page.
Once a good starting point has been found - it need only be a few words or a simple concept - the weaving of words can begin. If you have been to a creative writing group and worked from prompts offered by the moderator or other members, you will know how apparently simple beginnings can lead to the construction of excellent stories, songs, or poems.
What about travelling in the opposite direction? Have you ever been struck by a bit of poetry, or song lyrics, and wondered how the writer got the idea, and how they managed to find the words, concepts, rhymes, images, and so on, that, woven together, made such an interesting work? How do you unravell what they have put together, and work your way back to their starting point? You might ask 'why bother' but if you have been writing for a while, and intend to keep on doing so, the techniques of other writers becomes intriguing. How did they do that, you find yourself asking.
It's not easy, and some would compare the process to deciphering a particularly difficult cryptic crossword - in fact, to me, it reminds me of my early years as an angler. In Australian angling history there was a particularly revered local invention called The Alvey. It was an odd looking reel that, attached to a long 'beach' rod, allowed very light baits or lures to be cast a long way out into the surf.
That was its good point - the down side of the technology was a tendency to create massive tangles in the fishing line; "birds nests" was what we called them.
When that happened, the impatient people cut the tangle out of the line (if there was enough left on their reel) and got back to fishing - the cheapskates among us would spend up to half an hour picking at the 'birds nest' of nylon line in the hope of saving it. Success relied on finding the key point in the giant knot - the one that all the others were related to.
Trying to analyse and understand the core of someone else's writing is much like that - you can see the finished product, and get some general sense of the shape and inter-relationship of the various threads, but teasing them out so as to find that core point from which the story began, that's hard.
Why do it? Once you are making your own stories, or songs, or poems, you see works by other people and can't help wondering - how did they do that? What got them started on that particular idea or plot? I know I feel that if I can understand how an excellent piece of work by another author was conceived and constructed, I might be able to improve my own work.
Take Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of The Rose - the central idea, he is supposed to have said, came from a momentary feeling.
"I felt like poisoning a monk" was his description of the inspiration behind the famous novel. Is that true? Was that all? Probably not - Eco had encountered and been awed by the library of a Benedictine Monastery when only 16 years of age, and he may have been aware of the legands around St Benedict of Nursia. Whatever he knew, or felt, there must have been a germ, a seed, a little core, from which, and around which, the whole great edifice was constructed.
Another place of inspiration for me has been the series of interviews conducted mainly by Richard Fidler, on ABC Sydney. They are all available on podcast, and are worth a listen if you are interested in the creative process. Fidler and other presenters have spoken with some great authors, poets, and songwriters, and their explanations as to the seeds that grew particular pieces are well worth listening too.
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