Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Magic Formulas

Gerard Houarner

We’re all looking for them: the sacred combination of elements that will open up the locked gates of success (the never-ending locked gates, because as soon as you open one, you come up against another).

Let’s not even get into what “success” means.

I’ve listened to and read a great number of writers, including my fellow-Storytellers, talk about writing. For a while I searched for a path, but as a path slowly emerged for me from bits and pieces of writerly advice, I looked instead for signposts to confirm I was heading in the general right direction. Let’s say west. West is publication. Some folks wind up in LA and movie land, rich. Others in SF, unconventional and yet popular. Still others in Oregon, stylish and literary. Whatever. We may want to wind up in one specific location or another, but the general direction is West.

So in listening to my betters here at Storytellers and elsewhere, I’ve discovered so many of us hold on to particular metaphors or plans for writing that get us through the creative process. That’s something whoever may be clicking in here to visit may be looking for. It’s the thing I yearned for when I was younger – a way to look at doing the work of writing, a technique to open up the gates of inspiration, a means of comforting myself when things looked and felt bad, a way to simply feel like writing. (Now, of course, I am comfortable in my despair and have no use for magic formulas.) (Until I find one that guarantees financial success.)

Right.

Howard Waldrop talks about a story being about the most important moment in a person’s life. I’ve heard other writers use the same approach, though he’s been particularly passionate about it. It obviously works for him. What this implies is that there can really be only one viable story for any character (I asked him about this once and he concurred, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to bring up Sherlock Holmes or other series’ characters, though I’m sure he would have said those examples weren’t very good stories….)

But sometimes I like to return to characters. Sometimes I see an arc with several important moments. How to judge one more important than another? Is there such a thing?

It’s like life. The important moments may change for us as we grow older, experience more of the world, approach death. A young life is filled with crucial turning points as new situations are encountered every day, as hormones and inexperience lend deathly importance to school bullies or first dates or proms, tests and getting the right “gear,” being on the inside or the outside of social circles. Some factors may have greater influence in the decision-making process – temptations, fears, beliefs. And betrayal, in the form of abuse.

It’s easy to dismiss some of these crossroad moments as childish games, juvenile distractions and silly traumas that will be forgotten. But the deals made with one’s self and the world at these crossroad moments, even if they seem minor and trivial looking back, determine directions taken.

These crucial moments evolve into graduation, possible more schooling, jobs, love, children, family. Or pain, isolation, imprisonment, death.

Life goes on, depending on choices and circumstances. Jobs can lead to new environments and people. Disease and death come into play. And birth. Accidents. Nature. Luck. Chance.

One minute we’re taking care of our children, the next, our parents, and then we find ourselves suddenly stricken and helpless and desperate for aid. Sometimes our children come back to us in pieces, or not at all. Jobs and families – roads taken with great deliberation – vanish. It’s a long, strange trip.

Our lives are filled with important moments. They appear sometimes suddenly, devastatinlgy, or pass by almost without notice. We stuggle with them, or get through them, or sometimes pass through them unawares.

So, with all due respect to my betters, I choose to see that people and characters and stories may sometimes have more than one crucially important moment. Lives can be shaped, and re-shaped, and re-imagined. Directions can change more than once, or more than one event can reinforce a decision to stay the course.

So here’s another way to conceptualize storytelling, in a bluesy Tommy Johnson/Robert Johnson at the crossroads devil dealing/soul selling kind of way.

All stories happen at the cross roads.

That’s where paths intersect, choices are offered, decisions made, and directions changed or forsaken.

Of course, the cloth of this metaphor can be cut to the shape of one’s personal belief – for those who believe there can only be one ultimate dramatic moment in a life that shapes everything that will come or has already passed, then you can have your climactic night when an action is completed and a purpose achieved at the cross roads of a choice. You only get one true cross road on the road through life. It makes things simple when you get to sell your soul only once, never have the chance to get it back or have another one grow inside you because life and the world introduces more seeds into the hole left by a vacated spirit.

But I find the Ages of Man visualization of life more meaningful, with people dealing with a number crossroad situations as they go through developmental stages on a journey through life. Perceptions and priorities change on that journey, through the physical and mental/emotional transformations our physical selves undergo, as well as the extraordinarily rapid changes occurring in the world around us. We live longer, so we get to see and experience more than previous generations. We change careers, partners, families, homes. We even assume multiple identities in virtual realities. We’re personally subjected to opportunities to experience a greater number and wider variety of tragedies, natural and man-made.

We, at least in the Western world, and perhaps people in a growing part of the rest of the world, have more choices, whether we make them or not. I think people simply face many more paths and a greater number of people all capable of generating opportunities for choice, and for drama and failure/redemption, than at any time in the past. And consequences come whatever we do or don’t do.

Many of us may choose to sedate ourselves by all available means as we pass through any number of these opportunities, but then we don’t make good characters capable of generating interesting stories. Which is fine. That’s real life.

But in the world of story, why can’t all those crossroad encounters become the most important moment of a character’s life for that point in their life? It certainly makes for a richer, deeper character and story, leaving open possibilities for the future that might linger for a reader.

And all these crossroads gives a writer the opportunity to follow a character or cast of characters over a period of time and a great deal of space, and a series of stories, with chances to lose and regain souls and loved ones, to discover new aspects of self both joyful and unpleasant.

Deals with the devil? Maybe some people draw comfort from the belief that there’s only one, and that in our travels through life, we won’t discover other things that we value and give meaning to our lives which another devil at a different crossroads might want to take from us. That’s also a choice.

Anyway, the point of all this is to throw out a “magic formula” – a way to generate a story idea. Characters, based on people you know or read about in newspapers, or simply imagine, at the crossroads. Just another way of saying a story is about the most important moment in that character’s life. Or a character in crisis. Or about choice.

I’m just taking a stab at finding the magic formula for writing. Others on Storytellersunplugged have come up with great techniques for generating stories. Collect them all. Use them all. Collect millions of dollars and lots of awards and the adoration of the reading public.

Then come back and tell me which one(s) really worked.

I’ll be here, waiting at the crossroads.

Related posts:

1. It’s magic
2. “EXCUSE ME, BUT I THINK THAT YOUR ‘MAGIC IDEA BOX’ IS LEAKING!”
3. Magic For Beginners
4. Magic and Young Writers
5. Voodoo Magic

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