Notes on Stories

Sometimes I stumble upon stories buried in old files or scrawled in forgotten notebooks, and I know instantly that they are mine. Not from the handwriting – though for me that’s a dead giveaway; a chicken-scratch scrawl that has been the bane of every educator’s existence from the day I stepped foot in a school until I completed my undergraduate degree – or from particular recognition of the notebook cover. Often I don’t even recognise the subject matter. Most of the time, the story doesn’t end. An idea, pounced upon and discarded. 

But the voice of it. 

That’s mine. 

I have had the same writing voice since I started seriously trying to write books. My first attempts when I was ten or so – ideas I’ve clung onto, because child-me wasn’t bad at concepts – were filled with the sort of humour that today, I can’t write without. Puns, banter, terrible jokes. The things that make my work feel complete. My first proper book I wrote – age fourteen, buried now in the bottom of a drawer and too embarrassing, even still, to read in its entirety – has my cadence. My preferred paragraph structures. My love of starting sentences in odd places, ending them wherever. Fragments. Beats I feel my way through, rather than write with any sort of intentionality. It is all intentional, and yet it isn’t. These are words that leave me, unconnected ribbons, that I smooth and piece together line by line, writing, rewriting. 

I think this is what they mean by craft. My hands are glue on construction paper, brush on canvas, chisel on stone, moulding and shaping something that is meant to be finished by me. Handmade. Filled with love. 

I’ve been a writer for more of my life than I haven’t been. It takes up space in every part of my day – as a reader, I am deconstructing, examining, being surprised on the daily by choices that writers far more capable than me, far more experienced than me, make. I’m learning every day how to be better. I watch episodes of TV and try to predict the arcs that will come based on the information that I’ve been given. And it’s fun – all of this is fun. Every day I am writing, even when there’s no keyboard beneath my fingers. 

And every day I have ideas. Ideas I babble at my agent with all the poise of that one scene in Elf (premise: asparagus children, self-conscious. Plot: vibes). Ideas that I will excitedly tell my partner in stumbling fits and starts right before I go to sleep when the brain worms turn their attention to something new, or when I rush out of the shower, hair dripping down my shoulders because the urgency of the idea, of what the story will be as I see it in my head, is more important than anything else. 

I want to tell the story. 

The story starts with an idea. 

I’ve only been doing this professionally for a handful of years. But I’ve learned in those years that the idea is the beginning; the telling is the bit where I come in. Where I sit down at my desk and type, or stare out the bus window, or ask myself ‘would my character like this’ when I’m trying a new drink or eating a new meal. The telling is in the jokes I think up while standing at the kettle, or in the precipitous slip between wake and sleep, where the choice is between searing my retinas with my phone screen or risk losing the joke. 

(Usually the phone wins; usually I’ve typed something like ahdht tsauys jugglig?? and I risk losing the joke anyway. Perhaps there wasn’t one to begin with, but it becomes a joke in itself.) 

Sometimes it is painful. Sometimes I want to lie on the forest floor and scream because what I want to do is bigger than what I am able to do in the moment (being chronically ill is part of that; my limitations are more than what I believe they could or should be, and it is a constant balancing act in accepting this over and over again). But often it is magic. Often I have really, really good writing days. They get better the more I practise telling stories. The more confident I get in my ability to stumble through the pictures I’m seeing in my head. To take the feeling I get when I think of a concept, a premise, and trust my ability to turn that into plot. 

All stories have a beginning, a middle, an end. Some will tell you there are only a certain number of plots – probably true, I bet it’s been researched – and that there are only a certain number of story structures. This is the bit anyone can learn. When I hear someone say ‘everyone has a book in them’, I think it’s true twofold: I think anyone could learn the basics of craft, and I believe everyone has enough of a rich inner world, enough of a life lived, that they have a story or stories they could tell that would fill an entire book. 

But in fiction, those experiences shape your stories. Those experiences make it so the story you are writing is yours. And because it’s you, the more you practise, the more your voice comes through. Some writers use a different voice for different works, but you still know it's theirs at the end of the day – and not because their name is on the cover. 

Your ideas come through you. Your plotting and crafting can be learned (and some writers never do; they feel their way through each and every story without ever structuring it, but that is a skill that has to be honed through trial and error and effort, again, again, again). There are millions of stories in the world, and millions of unique voices. There are millions of ways to tell a story, to write people, to dream up places, to use a real place to create something new. There are objectively good books and objectively bad books and books not to your personal taste and books you will tell everyone and anyone about, and what they all have in common is all of the above. 

There are as many reasons to write a book as there are to read one, but imagine, if you will, the process of creation: the idea that sparks it all. The trying, again and again. The learning, the shaping. The experience. The heart that goes in it. The hope that someone wants you to tell them a story, and will pick it up. Releasing it into the world for scrutiny, for enjoyment, with all that effort behind it. The triumph of it finding the ideal reader – the person who laughs and cries and likes your obscure references or the real places or that one line you couldn’t stop thinking about. And that hope blossoms each time you do it. You hope that that reader will pick up the next one and the next one and the next one. That of all the books in all the world, yours spoke to that reader.

They want your stories.

They want it to be yours. 

To offer up something that isn’t throws yours into contrast. To write is not just to write; the alternative is stories about people written by machines who can only copy what came before. Who can only tell you a story borrowed from other parts of stories. It might have a beginning, a middle, and end. It might have an idea – but it doesn’t have a heart. 

As a writer you offer up your heart. You offer up your jokes, your lines, your sentiments, your perceptions. Your characters drawn from experience who say things you’d want them to say in scenes you wrote for them. You offer time clocked and progress made and the highs and lows and all the parts of it, good and bad. And at the end of it, you have something you’ve made. Something you love, that someone else will love too. 

Without that, finding a story in a drawer – one with a beginning, a soggy middle, an almost-ending – will be a story without a voice. An unclaimed thing. An absence of the key component of being a writer: writing.