The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: stories

  • Panning for Gold in the Dark

    A couple of weeks back the fabulous Confabulators weighed in on where their writing ideas come from.  I may backtrack a bit over some of that territory, because where they come from seems to be connected to the ideas I end up pursuing past the ‘idea’ stage.

    Looking back on the thousands of words I’ve written, I sort of see this pattern: for a novel or short story, what usually what gets me going, and keeps me engaged, is something I’m struggling to understand in my own life.

    For example:

    ~The aftermath of the unexplained death of my father became a short story about the changing relationship of two brothers, as one pulls away from what’s left of his family.

    ~Trying to understand marriage became a novel exploring the lives of a girl traded into white slavery and a man raised in the 1960’s “who did everything right and failed.”

    ~The idea of refuge and the families we make became a novel about the friendships between gay theater kids in college and their circle of friends (‘Fame meets Boogie Nights’.)

    ~Addiction, the allure of escapism, and personal betrayals (both perpetrated and experienced) became a book about a young girl’s search for her birth parents in an alternate reality. (more…)

  • There is always a Story.

    Sometimes it’s not a very interesting story. Sometimes it hides itself from you, and sometimes it’s so buried in the weeds of poorly conceived presupposition that you have to get out a metaphorical brush hog to make any sense of it all. But you can take it on faith that there is always a Story.

    I’m a technical writer by trade. You would think the craft of technical writing is all about— well— technique. Marching one word in front of the other from the start to the finish, and making sure they all line up in the correct order. Choosing vocabulary and policing acronyms. Herding commas, nurturing semicolons, recapturing run-on sentences. Describing things. Mundane, boring, everyday things that require procedures and user manuals and progress reports. It’s not literature, or even journalism. I have built a career out of writing the kinds of books that nobody in their right mind will ever want to read [0].

    But there is always a Story.

    (more…)