After a revelation – about why I was so enchanted by an author’s work – I stumbled on a technique for story-generation and voice discovery.
The jolt came when I realized that her discontinuous, multi-format structure was resonating with the way time and reality feel to me now (erratic), my attention whipsawed by climate news (threatening the ground of our lives) and by AI news (threatening the mind of our lives). Those of us conditioned to generate plausible story lines might be discombobulated these days.
I was also dazzled by this author’s prose, so perceptively emotionally human, with vivid, surprising sensory details (sometimes even made-up words for a truer kind of speech). This enlivening inner sound rose above the online tide of flat algorithmic machine-speak. Her characters and plot, within a near-future techno-consciousness, emerge from an astutely rendered, eerily recognizable past.
The most thrilling aspect of reading her work was a phenomenon I’d encountered in solving a “problem” in creative writing: When stuck inside a plot outline, I’d vaguely collapse in despair of getting all the pieces to flow, complete and coherent. Then from somewhere, a loony idea would float into perception, and I’d try it, unsure it would survive the next edit. Later, when I came back to it, I found the new solution had infused an odd lilt, closer to my felt sense, invoking a much deeper logic.
In the years before I started having these quasi-mystical creative experiences, I’d read comments by authors about the magic of writing, and I sensed they had talent more elaborate than mine. I’d never pushed much beyond the hero’s journey, the rising-climax-falling rhythm of standard storytelling and its satisfying resolutions.
After these experiences, I was a little awestruck by the willingness of my right-brain subconscious to tune deeply into the ethers to solve a left-brain logic problem for me. Something had changed when I read Jennifer Egan’s Candy House, the startling work mentioned at the top of this post. It had catapulted me into that magical space between ideas, events, and people. A singular personal “voice” became more apparent to me, more consistent in this subtler dimension.
I wondered how to re-create this phenomenon for myself – first as a creator, then as an exercise I could offer here:
Write out two brief stories, one pleasant and one irksome, one in first person and one in third, about people, places, or events that are moderately meaningful to you. If they’re too important, you might not want to dismember them in this exercise; if they’re meaningless, you won’t feel the impact. As you write, focus on why they’re meaningful and how your five senses felt and feel in relation to the memories.
Then physically cut each story into strips of paragraphs (one to three grafs, depending), and put the pieces into a single pile, face down. Shuffle. Then pull one piece at a time, and attach it face up to a sheet of paper. Pull the next strip and attach it underneath. Keep going until all of the pieces are attached. Set it aside for at least a few hours, ideally a day or more.
When you go back to read it, try to hear the consistent music underneath the zigzagging, contradictory story lines. Your subtle self-awareness may shift into a higher/deeper dimension, becoming more curious, capacious. You may also get a better sense of the ways your perception records and interprets realities of all kinds. Your imagination becomes more agile and graceful, free to generate consilient next steps, new chapters, in the autobiography you’re enacting every moment of “real” life, and/or in a material work of art.
The practice may also enhance your capacity to hear ever-stranger things from the external world. The disappearance of solid, reliable ground – physical, intellectual, and emotional – brought on by our shared crises calls us, I think, to discern the most essential life-forces we can find within ourselves. We’ll be less disrupted, better able to commune with this energetic flexibility, able to be together in gentle enthusiasm in our chaotic times.
Photo Credit: Johannes Plenio via Unsplash