There are People Living in My Head


Wherein Our Heroine Asks that they not Wreck the Joint.
I have always wanted to write a long piece of fiction - a novel or novella. The problem was, I wasn't sure I had a compelling story to tell. I had heard some writers say that the characters in their stories simply "showed up" one day and demanded that their story be told. I envied that. I had had one instance of this - in college, I was supposed to write a one-act play for my senior thesis in the honors program. I worked like crazy on something that just wasn't coming together. One morning I woke up with four characters in my head. I got up, turned on the computer, and the whole story just poured out of me. It was insane - almost like automatic writing. I don't really think the thing was particularly good, but it was a lot better than the tortured drafts of the other project that I had been squeezing out.

I get too attached to vignettes sometimes. I will see, feel, hear, or otherwise experience something and suddenly have the urge to put it down. I do, and it sits there. It is a photograph, not a story. I don't want to write a photograph. But those vignettes, they seem to stop the creative process dead in its tracks. It's like the muse is saying, "Here. That's all you get."

Well, I had a photograph moment a few weeks ago, when Annabelle snuck in and out of the room as I lay in relaxation. I liked the ancillary images that came with the photograph, and I started fooling around with them. I allowed the vignette to remain in my head (I still like it), but moved it off to the side as other images started to flow. A character started to emerge. She didn't stride in and demand her story be told - she's not that kind of person. But inevitably she has started to have a life. A living space, a town, a job, a very unusual problem have all slowly emerged like a developing photograph.

I don't have an ending yet, but pretty soon something will request to get written down. And write I shall. Be careful what you wish for.
Posted: Tuesday - March 15, 2005 at 08:12 AM         | |

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