Support For an Authentic Writing Practice, Profession, & Community

        

 

RAP #1: THE DRAFT AS QUEST: FINDING YOUR REAL STORY & SUBJECT

You have a subject--an event, a person, a phenomenon.  You think you're going to write about your first kiss or about an astronaut's first flight into outer space or about the disappearance of barns in New England. You have the facts and the details.  But facts and details alone don't make a story.

How do you find your real story?  How do you find the nugget of what your story is all about?  I don’t have all the answers; I have some suggestions, and I have some questions.

Several years ago, short story writer Andre Dubus traveled at night along Connecticut's I-84, one of the nation's most hazardous interstates.  He stopped along the highway's shoulder to aid a stranded driver.  While he assisted the driver, a truck swept by, swiped Dubus, and never slowed down.  Someone dashed to call 9-11. The short of it: Dubus lost half a leg and spent the rest of his life in pain and a wheelchair.  With the aid of an artificial shin and an authentic will, Dubus managed to drive his van and get his sons to school.  He also mustered enough wits to continue crafting some of the twentieth century's most exquisitely constructed and subtly executed short stories.

Still, he didn't write about his own suffering. His own story.

A few years after the accident, new neighbors moved in across the street.  The man befriended Dubus and invited him over for a beer, introduced him to his young son, to his wife.  Days later, the man broached the subject: "What happened?"  Dubus gave him the details.  His neighbor said, "I thought so.  My wife witnessed the accident. She called 9-11 that night."

Hearing the word "witnessed," Dubus said, and then meeting the woman and especially meeting the young son, gave Dubus courage to write his story.  For the first time, he said, he knew exactly what he would write. And he expresses what many of us feel when a real story seizes us: He could not not write the story. 

For most of us, though, finding the real story is not so dramatic--or even life-altering.

You begin with an image, a hint, a glimpse of a thought perhaps.  Maybe you had an experience you want to get back to.  No matter what the impetus for writing, you’re driven.  You don’t know why. You just have to write, and you have to write into this image, idea, topic, experience, or observation. 

I reiterate: You must write into the subject, not about the subject. To write about a subject creates a spatial distance between the subject and the words. Words serve the subject.  When you write into a subject, words themselves help you burrow into the subject and perhaps into the story's core.

 My suggestion, at first, is just to write. To draft. To draft: to draw, to cast. 

You cast your ideas wide across a river, and you draw the net.  You draft.  You see what a day’s work pulls in.  You need not be so deliberate at first about whither and why you’re drafting.  Just draft.

Begin with the concrete.  Begin by describing something--a tree, a particular tree, a specific limb or branch or bark.  The bark of your neighbor’s terrier.   A bold maybe outrageous statement you overhear at Maria's Cafe.  You ground us in the world of details to make what you write believable. And tangible.

 Then, draft in part without a clear sense of where you’re going.  Draft to get lost.  Draft without an outline and without chapter summaries.  Doing so frees parts of your embodied imagination to stir up some otherwise neglected, forgotten but fresh insights, ideas, and memories.  Draft with your eyes closed (unless you're on deadline, which is a topic for another rap). 

Then, when you’ve stumbled upon something that excites you, when you’ve stumbled upon something that doesn’t sound like anything you’ve read before, something that only you could have written not only because of your unique perspective but perhaps also from your unique relationship with words, when you’ve written something that you cannot stop writing, then you may be onto something fresh and worth pursuing.

Then, step back. At some point, amidst all of your drafts, you have to ask yourself some tough questions, “So what?”  “What’s the point?” 

When you read a draft, a rough sketch, ask yourself, “What parts really engage me as a writer?  What parts seem genuine and as if they put my readers on the course of an engaging story?”   “What’s the real story?” 

What’s the real story. What is a real story?

 In a “story” something changes.  Typically, we might define a story as a situation in which something happens to someone about whom we care or eventually about whom we care.  But we’re interested not just in your recount of what happened but in the ‘so what’--the significance--the ‘what do you make of all this?’   The real story is not so much about something happening as something changing--a change of life circumstances, of perception, a change of persona, a change in worldview.  A memoir or essay may include all of these changes. The real story may reside in what changes as a result of what happens.   

So the next and related suggestion: Pull your mind and heart into what’s changing, let yourself be drawn into, drafted into the questions of your quest.  What questions seem to be rumbling underground that keep your pen humming or your fingers skating across the keyboard?  What questions do you want to be stirred in your reader’s mind, hearts, imagination?  What are you questing after even if your subject is crossword puzzles or stealing a pie when you were nine and naïve?

When you find those questions, or when they find you, write them down.  They need not be stated explicitly in your writing, but they may be visual reminders to keep steering your further writing.  When questions compel you, when your innate curiosity to keep writing drives you, then you cannot help but continue to write no matter the consequences.

This quest, then, can guide you as you rewrite and reshape your story and draw your reader into the quest--something we'll explore in Rap #2: BEING HONEST, BEING AUTHENTIC.

RAPS ON THE SOUL OF CRAFT

RAP#1: THE DRAFT AS QUEST: FINDING YOUR REAL STORY & SUBJECT

RAP #2: BEING HONEST, BEING AUTHENTIC

RAP #3: THE SACRED VOICE'S MOVEMENT: FROM WHAT HAPPENED TO SO WHAT

RAP #4: THE DRIVE TO RE-MEMBER & TO TELL STORIES

RAP #5: TENDING THE GARDEN: THE FIRE TO PERSEVERE

Copyright 2006  Jeff Davis 

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