Storytellersunplugged

By David Niall Wilson

“Quick note: I’m VERY sorry to be late posting this. This has been a contender for the worst day of 2006 and the year has hardly breathed it’s first breath. I have perservered. Here you go”

DNW

THE LAY LINES OF LIFE

Some people believe that the Earth is criss-crossed with hidden lines of power that run beneath the surface of soil and stone. They call these “Ley Lines,” and they believe that certain things are more likely, or possible, when they occur at points where these lines cross. I’ve run across this theory in texts on Ritual Magic, Native American spiritualism, Wicca, and dozens of other schools of thought. There are a lot of variations on the central them, but the crux of the matter, to make a point, is the crossing lines.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that I’ve come to believe that stories – the best stories, anyway – may come into being in the same fashion. Everything around us is potentially a part of some great epic or enigmatic poem; the world is a garden of imagination blossoms waiting to be plucked. The problem is that they don’t always fit. You can’t necessarily look at the first thing that comes along and press it into service to plot your next novel – it doesn’t work that way. You have to wait until the right elements cross.

It can happen at any point in any day. What you discover may or may not be germane to what you are currently working on, or the deadline looming over your head. The difference between the Ley Lines of fiction and those of the planet is a simple one. The lines in the planet are in place and stationary. They don’t grow, shift, or change. The Ley Lines of the mind shift constantly. They shoot off one way, then another, and there’s no good way to predict or control them; all you can do is follow.

Here’s an example from my own life. I drive to work pretty much the same way every day. I take the same roads, and half the time I find myself stuck in traffic between the same vehicles, because we are all caught in that commuter’s rut. I listen to audio books, take in Garrison Keillor and his “Writer’s Almanac” at 7:15 AM, fight to reach the draw bridge before it opens and prevents me from reaching work on time, and I watch the world.

most of those days are pretty much mirror images of one another, but not always. One morning, for instance, I had a simple chance encounter with a truck. The truck in question was a flat bed transporting the compacted remains of automobiles. I’ve seen trucks and squashed cars a million times, and I’m sure I would have thought nothing of it under normal circumstances. This time, though, I was trying to get the tape changed in the portable tape player I use to listen to audio books. The case slid off the seat and onto the floor, and I had to lean down, barely able to see over the dash, to get it. The truck hit its brakes suddenly, and for no apparent reason. I’m sure something ran in front of it, or I missed some other bit of traffic insanity, but at the time all I saw was the red flash of lights.

I hit my brakes, skidded to a halt about half an inch from the rear of that truck, and found myself gazing up into the wrecked, smashed cube of parts that had once been a Cadillac. The lines snapped into place. I saw things in that crushed heap, things I could ALMOST recognize. I thought about what might have been on the floor behind the seats and in the glove box. I thought about the rear view mirror and wondered what the last thing it had reflected might have been. My mind was off and running, and before my heart could even recover from the near collision, the lines in my head were weaving a cocoon around that idea, that set of images and thoughts, and attaching it firmly to my mind. In other words, I’m stuck with it until I excise it onto paper. Things like this happen to me every day. I try to tell people about them. Trish is very patient with me, but after a while even she gives me the “smile and wave, boys, smile and wave” expression of incomprehension. The lines only connect for a single moment. They don’t hang there in the air for me to point at and say, “see? Right there?”

What I bring from these moments are bits and pieces of insight, questions born of a moment’s crossed lines that must be answered, and so I write. I write, and more often than not what I write is so far removed from the initial inspiration that the crossed lines are obscured, but for the most part it gets them out of my head. After being distilled in my mind, re-arranged, and battered with “what ifs” the ideas take on lives of their own.

Imagine my horror when someone comes up to me and asks, “Where do you GET this stuff?” I always glance down then to make sure they aren’t standing on any lines.

DNW