If you are a writer, could you base a novel on a single solitary memory from your childhood?
Sometimes that's all that's needed to jumpstart a story.
For me it was a barefoot boy beckoning from an adjacent dock on a Northern Michigan lake, the boomerang that wouldn't come back, and the boy who lived with his family in a migrant's shack and one day stopped coming to school.
Writing is a solitary business (why writers love to write). Yet we eavesdrop and belly up to the bar where interesting people rub shoulders and words flow and ideas percolate to flow off our fingertips onto the white expanse of a screen or a notebook or a bar napkin.
Some of the reasons I'm passionate about writing and the natural world are explained here (the scary out-of-the-way, desolate places our dad would park our pop-up camper on family vacations), along with some of my favorite immersive fiction from 2023 and the novels whose readers I felt would enjoy Let Evening Come. But I wonder how accurate my assumptions are.
I've been asked, if I had to do anything other than write, what would it be? I would like to hide in the upper branches of a tree. Drop raspberries in a basket tied at my waist and stomp grapes. Walk the fencerow to the rear of the farm to see the eagle's nest I've heard tell of, a mere hundred-acre walk away.
With one project complete and out of my hands while another is stalled and yet another still percolating like a an old coffee pot, I'm stuck in that out-of-sorts time for a writer. So, why not do some of those things? Why let a 20-mile-an-hour wind dissuade me, or a cold rain, or a mass of turbulent clouds skuttling across the sky to hide the sun as if another eclipse were underway? Why do I let the mundane eat away at the day, like the moon to the sun, or suddenly find myself daydreaming in front of the open refrigerator as if dinner will miraculously appear? Why let the out-of-sorts-time interfere with a walk along a fencerow to discover an eagle's nest rumored to be as big as a dining room table and maybe . . . maybe even catch sight of an adult in the act of remodeling or adding to last years structure.
Now that would be something to write about!
8 comments:
After a major accomplishment enjoy the new beginnings, the wonderful time in between.
Thanks Tony. I'm going to concentrate on your advice: "the wonderful time!!!"
I love the list of things you'd do if you didn't write. My mother walked through thickets of blueberry bushes with a white plastic bucket tied around her waste. As she plucked fat dark berries, she peeked under branches always on the lookout for bears.
Vanessa,
At least I don't have to worry about bears!! Thank for sharing the memory. love it!
I love the thought of basing a novel on one memory, one reaction, one thought, just one. I often do that with poems. A let myself "go" from there.
Hi Helen,
That's exactly what I did first. Wrote a poem! And, yes, then let yourself go. Thank you for commenting.
I once saw an eagle nest and they are rather large. It's amazing how they create these with a great peripheral view. I think one could write a story about a single event in life, absolutely. Also, a dream can be the catalyst for a novel as well.
Truedessa,
A dream can definitely be the catalyst for a novel. They are so quickly forgotten once we open our eyes, I used to try to write some of the more vivid ones down. Thanks!!
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