bacon and books
  • Bacon and Books
  • About
  • Contact
Picture

Story of a Story - Kate Blackwell's Guest Post on Mythical Books

6/15/2015

0 Comments

 
Where do writers get their ideas? What makes a good story? Kate Blackwell writes about writing, published on Mythical Books, June 15th. You can read the original post here. 

Picture
                                                           STORY OF A STORY 
                                                                 Kate Blackwell

Vampires, Hobbits, buried giants, girls who kill by dreaming, or the guy with acne scars sitting in a booth in a King’s Family Restaurant, talking to a young girl. What is he saying? Who are they? Why are they here? You open your laptop. You begin to write.

What draws writers to their subjects? 

Grace Paley: “Almost every story is an argument of some kind. You write it because you do not know something, you write what you do not know about, otherwise you would not bother to write.” 

Fantasy, the paranormal, what we call realism—it makes no difference; the strange and the ordinary must contain mysteries in order to be written about. Forget the old aphorism “write what you know.” Go for what you don’t know, for what is beneath the surface, hidden like a throbbing heart. 

You start with what you can see. The girl looks to be about twelve. She has green-painted fingernails. She is playing with the pepper shaker, walking it back and forth across the table. The man says, “Did I ever talk to you about pepper?”

You add a feeling, a desire, a fear, something from the past. He wants her attention, his daughter whom he doesn’t often see. The pepper stirs a memory of when he was a boy, the same age the girl is now, and his father used to take him hunting. He remembers they used bread to attract the animals, bread smeared with pepper. 

“Pepper can be dangerous,” he says. 

You write the story he tells the girl. You begin to understand him, who he was as a boy, who he is now. Then you write your story. 

None of this is easy. The initial spark—something you observe, something someone tells you, something you dream—may sit fallow in your journal or on your computer for years before you re-discover it and begin to write. It takes time to make art out of the raw material of life or fantasy.

It was five years after I saw the man and the girl in the restaurant that I wrote “Pepper Hunt.” It appeared first in a literary journal, where it won first place in a short-short contest, then in two anthologies, and it’s now in my story collection, You Won’t Remember This. 


photo © duncan1890

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Bacon Press Courses &
    Bacon Press Books

    News about our courses, our books, our authors, indie publishing, and maybe bacon.

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    July 2019
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Bacon and Books
  • About
  • Contact