Wednesday 10/30/24
Two stories began back in May with a storm. It was early in the morning--what most people would consider the night, but I had woken up to begin my day, which is to say, to begin work and creating.
I started writing a story about how weather is like a ghost, but only part of a ghost. The heel of a ghost, for instance. A ghost larger than the world. There's no one place where the entirety of that ghost can be.
The story grew over time. it got longer and longer. But I wasn't pleased with it. This story was not the story. Which meant nothing to me. It was not a setback. It was just a matter of what was next. Proceeding.
I copy and pasted the text of the initial document into a new document. I set the former aside. I began ripping words, paragraphs, parts out of the latter. I sliced. I had raw parts. But parts loaded with energy. The story started to become something completely different, but also with a rain component. The first story was perhaps told by a man. We don't know for sure. This story was narrated by a woman.
I worked and I worked on it. As it got closer to what may have been completion, I started thinking about that earlier document. How there was something very different there, even if some of the language--and this is very rare for me--overlapped. The context had changed, though. So the language in the one spot was not the same as the language in the other spot, despite the words being the same. Do you understand?
Returning to that first document, I realized--which was more like confirmed, because I always had this sense--that I needed to work here. That this could be a work the likes of which had never been done. But it would require focus and however long it took.
This story was always going to be called "If Storm It Was." The second story was called "May Showers." I went back to it. Now I thought I was perhaps getting close. It told a story of a mother going to a hospital with someone else on a rainy night, and returning alone while it was still dark and raining. The story takes place later when it is also raining, and she thinks she hears the voice of that other person talking to her through the sound of the rain against the glass of her window.
I continued working on it. There was progress, but it wasn't right. In a sense, it wasn't close to right, but in another, it could be perfect soon.
I copied the text of this story and pasted it into another document and began again. I sliced. I took it apart. But with control, confidence, and knowledge of what I was doing or where I would soon take these words, paragraphs, parts. I can look at words on a page which might seem the biggest mishmash to people, or so disconnected from each other, and I see the story. The integrated story. Then it's just a matter of me doing the work, which is a matter of being myself. Because I am story. I don't have to reach for anything, worry about anything. I simply need to be and the story will be.
Somewhere during all of this, I had sent a letter to some people in advance of sending them these two stories, about the language that overlaps. I didn't mention the stories by name. That letter is now moot, because all of the overlapping language went out of this second story. It became something different again, tonally--more focused, more intense, more gutting, more beautiful--while also being that story about this trip, the rain on that night, the rain now. Blame. Self-blame. Which might not even be accurate. We don't know that the narrator is reliable with this part, this role, that she ascribes to herself, because of the depth of her emotion.
I knew that I had a story as strong as anything I have ever written. But I still had a lot of work to do. Again, in one sense. Not in another. This was a matter of getting every micron of those pages--each speck of black and each speck of white space--correct. This is music but it's more musical than music. This is math but it's more mathematical than math. This is architecture but it's more architectural than architecture. This is painting but it's more painterly than painting. This is sculpture but it's more sculptural than sculpture.
I don't believe there's another writer in the world who understands that's how it has to be.
Do you think any of these people in the prose offs think like this? How much do you think they think about anything at all?
While this was happening, I knew that in "If Storm It Was," I had conveyed, in a story, the very meaning of life. You can say, "That can't be done!" It can be and I did it. And I will challenge anyone who reads the story to say that I didn't.
I couldn't monkey around with that. I worked and I worked and I worked. I set the story aside so that I'd come to it fresh, as if my eyes and my mind had been made new and I was seeing and experiencing this work for the first time, with no bias. I worked on it at three in the afternoon, I worked on it at three in the morning. There were moments when I could feel its power practically knocking me over. I've worked on it today. Worked on it yesterday. The day before. I'm not done, but I am about to be. As I've worked on it today I have burst out laughing. I laugh that this can be done.
So we were about six months in at this point on these two stories. The second one was no longer titled "May Showers," but rather "Words of Rain." I had known for a bit that it was going to be joining the works in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, and what an addition this would make to this book that is unique in history. It is unique for so many reasons. I know it is a book that would make many of the people in this industry hate me even more than they already do because it is by a man, and this man, with what he represents to them, and there has never been a book about women and/or girls that is close to this book. As true as this book. The journey--the journeys--I have had to take to get to here.
Then the story that is "Words of Rain" was finally done. And it had nothing to do with this other story, the story that I had copied and pasted into a new Word document almost half a year before. They sound nothing alike. They are nothing alike. But one morning, I woke up at two, it was raining hard, and I started work and then later there were these two works.
Everything is different. Every process is potentially different. Each story is certainly different. I don't know what it's going to be--the process, that is. I have no expectations. I am all ears. What do you have for me? is something I ask of the story. I don't say, "What kind of character do you want this person to be?" She will tell me. I don't tell her. That's not how it works. I simply need to be present, be available, be listening, and be.
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