Jackson Browne has a quasi-gospel song that goes:
Don’t you want to be there when the trumpets blow?
Blow for those born into hunger
Blow for those lost ‘neath the train
Blow for those choking in anger
Blow for those driven insane…
The first time I heard it, and to some degree ever since, my story alarm goes off on that last line.
My story alarm is the split-second jolt that wakes some sleeping part of my brain in recognition that a story lies close by. With this song, maybe it’s partly the way JB delivers the line Blow for those driven insane. Whatever it is, my alarm says, “There’s a whole book in those words.” A book fat as The Poisonwood Bible. I just don’t know what story it is.
The alarm is intuitive rather than intellectual, a gut feeling of story awareness, never more than a quick image, an emotion. I’ve had these jolts throughout my adult life, and I’ve never known what to do with them. I come into contact with a thing … a place, a set of words, an object, some information… and know on an intuitive level that underneath is a world of truth about something important, waiting to be dug out and brought into the light. Like in my early years as an advocate for people living outdoors, we served dinner on a corner in front of a boarded up 10-story hotel. Lots of men, particularly those with mental health and addiction struggles, lived in this building with no water or electricity. I started to go in once after hearing there were people who never came out to eat, but the men who were regulars at dinner stopped me and said it was too dangerous. I never saw the inside, but that building has remained in my imagination for three decades. I know it was alive with stories.
This intuition is on high alert in antique stores; in history sections of old bookstores or university libraries; around old photographs, postcards, letters; and, as I said, in random places. I get little sparks of energy accompanied by an image too quick to capture and awareness that some unarticulated thing is true.
I have a collection of these impulses that feel related… a character based on my mother as a child, my paternal grandmother, a lynching, a tent revival. I don’t know what these are or why they are together, but once I tried to use National Novel Writing Month to see how they formed a book. I got part of one scene written, excruciatingly forced out to make the first day’s goal of 1,667 words. Years later in grad school I wrote it as half a short story. It still lives in my imagination, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.
I don’t know how to get at the stories behind these impulses. They feel like secrets I’m not privy to. This is my greatest writing dilemma.
I know they don’t lie in the same place that plotting comes from. I’ve plotted two books and find that to be a mental exercise, largely conscious. It takes place on a completely different plane and uses a completely different voice than these mysterious impulses. I’ve done by-the-seat-of-my-pants writing on the plotted books, when there were big plot holes, and I pants my nonfiction. Getting at the unconscious stories behind these weird image-flashes is a different level of pantsing. It feels like walking alone into a dark cave, with no light or tools or idea of what lies ahead. Why would I want to do that?
I’m a coward by nature. Stories scare the hell out of me. They have power, the way the truth split open can have enormous power. If they are true enough, they can be transformative. I’m afraid to open the door on that. But at the same time, these story alarms don’t go away.
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
