Do You Ever Wonder?

Where do stories come from? They come from life, I tell my students. They come from the events of my life. Autobiography.

Or biography. Anecdotes passed down in the family. Something a friend tells you.  A not significant confidence shared by a fellow passenger on a long flight.

They come from a newspaper article. They come from an overheard confession from the next booth in the restaurant. They come from the loud cell phone conversation near you on the train going downtown.

They come from observation. From watching a stranger amble down the street. From seeing but not hearing the exchange between a couple. They come from a handwritten note blowing down the alley, escapee from someone’s garbage. They come from a smashed inscribed piece of pottery discovered on a long walk. (See my friend Susan's story about that.)

They come from the way the sky looks after the rain. They come from the smoke after the fireworks, the litter of pyrotechnics floating to the ground.

They come from the blare of the car alarm jerking one out of my sleep middle of the night. They come from the siren. The pow pow that could be firecrackers, could be guns. They come from . . . anywhere, anytime, stories are waiting to be born. Sometimes they come from questions.

Sometimes they are thrust into you arms, dropped at your doorstep, abandoned by someone who does not want this squalling creature. Or can’t care for it.

The story laid out with index cards

Right now I am working on a screenplay I am writing for someone else.  Based on some real life experiences, the ideas have been supplied to me. My task is to shape this mass of information into a living, breathing story.

Characters, of course, drive the story. The characters may at first be little more than stick figures. Awkward stiff things that have no dimension. But as one works with them, they start to develop muscles and fat, and skin. They fill out. They become three dimensional. Better than that—they become real.

It’s an incredibly exciting moment when you realize the characters are as real to you as the neighbors across the street with whom you are friends.

That has been happening to me as I write this screenplay. I know it has happened when I start tearing up as I tell the last scenes of the screenplay and what happens to the characters. What!!  Tears start welling for something that is just a construction!

Ah, but that is not the truth. It is not just an artifice, a construction. Although the characters and events may not be historically accurate, they are truth.  And the truer they are, the more real they become.

And when those constructed beings start to create an emotional response; when they occupy more of my brain than flesh and blood people—then I know . . . I know that I am god.

And that is why I write.

In the beginning was the word. And the word was with god. And the word was god.