Stones and strings

In short fiction the other week we took a stab at automatic writing. I doubt it was the first time for any of us, as it’s the sort of thing a professor can have a class do with no preparation, no special equipment, and that passes the time and gives her room to figure out what comes next. Not to say that’s what our professor was doing, but were I a professor that’s exactly how I'd be likely to use it. She had us fully empty our minds for three minutes, then begin with the words "I remember." It met with mixed results. Some people put down a mess of words they couldn't really use, while some of us found that the exercise skimmed the best bits off the soup of ideas we'd not yet come to grips with and got them out in the open where we could work with them.

But it brought home again the message that the best way to go about writing is to sit down and do it. There is no mantra, there is no magic, there is simply the application of butt to chair or bed or however you prefer to work, spitting out words until something useful comes up, finding the end of a thread and then following it to its conclusion. I’d been struggling for the past week or two to get down anything in the fiction mode that satisfied, and in less than five minutes of in-class exercise I not only had a lovely and gripping opening, but an intricate plan for the entire piece laid out, in this case in a zig-zag spiral patter from the center of the page. The story was there, lurking somewhere in my hindbrain, and all it wanted was a moment of pure nothingness and the two words “I remember” for me to pick up the string and begin to follow it.

In my case, unwritten stories exist as one of two types: either a pile of stones that must be made into a wall, or a string played out through a labyrinth. The stone ones are the difficult ones, as I begin only with the knowledge that I need to build a wall, and quite often without any stones at all and so must go find them on my own, or with the wrong stones or the wrong mortar and no plan whatsoever for how it should be done. Whereas with the string stories, all I must do is take up the end of the thread and follow it, winding it up as I go, so as to have a finished ball of string when I find the end of the labyrinth. The string kind, you can probably guess, I tend to like more in the moment of writing, because they are easier, more natural, as they only demand that I follow what I’ve been given without any deviation. The stone kind usually involves a lot of tears, bad masonry, and many moments in which I despair over whether they’ll ever take a proper shape at all. But when the stone kind is finished, if they turn out right, they tend more towards complexity, beauty and pattern and symmetry, with a purpose and a message and an overall feeling of craft and control.

I’ve been advised, occasionally, that I should only write the string kind, since they are faster, easier, and take up less time. But anyone who knows how this sort of thing goes, or anyone that’s read her Greek myths, knows that the gods tend to be capricious, and the Vatic Voice runs dry from time to time, for days or years without any guarantee that it will ever return. No matter how gifted we are or how string-ridden our lives tend to be, it’s always a good thing to develop our bricklaying skills. One day those bits of string I follow so easily may run out, and I’ll be left with nothing but a pile of stones and a trowel.