No Escape

Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under Articles and Essays, Musings

Writing is exhilarating. Crafting stories holds a rare type of excitement. And yet it can, and often stirs a fair amount of discomfort within the writer.

Much of the angst we experience when writing relates to the aspect of revising, choosing the write word and phrasing, re-ordering paragraphs, re-scripting and re-organizing scenes.

Even when composing those first drafts, we weigh words, wondering if one serves the prose or dialogue better than another.

At the center of all this lies the heart of the story, the order of events sustained by tension and conflict on the road to resolution yielded by climax and transformation.

Every good story is about change, the disruption of homeostatic conditions, that which overturns the apple cart at the outset of the story, and displaces the physical and internal home and hearth.

Spurred along by upset, the heroine or hero searches for normality, and attempts to return conditions to the state in which they previously existed.

This is what’s called the hero’s journey. Regarding authors this might be termed the vagabond’s lot.

Like our protagonists, so often what we set out to make right as literary artists lies deeply rooted in the cosmos of our single existence.

And yet to entertain and engage readers we must extend ourselves into another sphere, stretch beyond the self-evident truths of our awareness and enter the skin of another.

The worlds of our characters hold veins that transmit stories of the culture and society that we, as writers surrender ourselves to receive and tell.

Stories find writers more often than writers uncover stories. And thus our writing becomes a process of taking dictation, rather than relaying the ramblings of our minds.

Seeded by the lives and suffering around us, our imagination serves a shamanic purpose, our inspiration fueled by the indecipherable moans of those who lack the words to describe experiences so profound and yet universal so as to encompass humankind most deeply through the individual whose story has yet to be told.

The writer who lends his body and heart to crafting these stories then refining them according to the information she or he channels also commits to working his soul.

The process of writing a novel becomes more than simply telling a story.

It is one of bringing to life the character that sits at the center of the yarn she or he writes, the establishment of setting and theme in the context of a creating the universe wherein the character lives and undergoes change.

The true writer cannot escape this calling. The stories she or he writes dwell within her or him, and she or he within them.

Where do your stories come from?

What kind of changes do you undergo in writing them?