NEEDLING

(Question asked by writing-group leader Tony to the whole writing group.)

I don’t know that there are three things I think about specifically for every story. I’m not that organized. Maybe that’s one of my problems.

What I do throughout the writing process is that I keep reading the story or poem to myself out loud. I do this over and over again. Sometimes even while watching myself in a mirror. When I first write a text it is usually very awkward, and much of my sentences do not make much sense. I have to read them over and over again out loud to make sure that they do make sense and that they “sound” right. This is especially true with poems. I realize it’s not very professional, but to me, if a text doesn’t read properly, if an actor or a reader couldn’t take my story and read it to a crowd without it making sense to its listeners, then there’s something wrong. I almost prefer to listen to a story being told to me or read to me, than to read one for myself.

I write over long periods of time, which is why I have very little to show for all those years of writing. Stacks and stacks of shit is what I’ve carried over the Atlantic, and most of it just good enough for the trash. Yet in there somewhere are little jewels, and when I feel that I have the strength and or the courage to sit down and read through some of these notes, diary entries, story ideas, rants, self-deprecations, partly written poems, stories, unfinished novels, void-like dialogues, small fables, and, sadly enough, mostly meaningless feeling-sorry-for-myself masturbations, then sometimes I find story ideas. They usually come from a well written diary entry where I actually took the time to go into the specifics of a moment, of something that happened to me, where I might have gone into narrative mode even, or described a dream or a nightmare with authenticity. That’s what I’m looking for, authenticity, believability, credibility... Truth. And I guess that is my second point, one of the three most important questions that I ask myself whenever I write a story: is this True? Not in the sense of did this truly happen, though if that’s the case it makes the writing a little easier, but in the sense of Truth with a capital ‘T.’ And the Truth which interests me the most are the ones dealing with emotions. I usually spend very little time in my stories or poems describing people physically nor do I go in much detail about the action going on, though I think I should probably rectify both of those points, but I try to describe the emotions they’re going through as thoroughly as I can. Not by saying he felt this way or that way, but by trying to put the actual emotions down in my words. When and if somebody reads or listens to one of my stories, then I want him or her to feel the emotions, not to be told what he or she should think the narrator or hero of my story is feeling, but feel them for themselves. So that is another thing I consider when writing: Do the emotions come through my words... and are they True... raw... believable?

All this sounds real pretentious. Just goes to prove that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing whenever I’m writing, probably one of the principal reasons I don’t write more often. I guess that’s one of the points of this exercise. I should attempt to make a small readable list, rather than write all this BS.

1 – Does the story / poem read well out loud?
2 – Do the emotions come through the writing without them being spelled out?
3 – Is the narrative believable, in its own context and universe?

Which certainly shows where my priorities are when I write, and explains to me why I’m having such problems with plot, structure, and the writing itself, meaning syntax. Uhm... maybe I’m lying to myself a little... because I spend loads of time on structure, not on plot, but on the actual physical outlook of the text... in blocks. It is often through the structure that I develop a story idea, the narrative itself.

What it comes down to is that every story and poem is a different entity, and that every story and poem demands its own personalized questions to go from seed to finished text, and though those three items I’ve listed above are important to me, each text is different, and each text has different needs.