I use Facebook to find things. True story. If I’ve looked and looked and gotten nowhere, I put up a post saying so. It’s amazing how many times someone’s suggestion of where it might be – or even the act of admitting I can’t find whatever it is – leads to it turning up shortly afterwards.
And now I can say that having told you all two blog updates ago that I had no idea what to write for the 4000-word story I needed to create had the same effect.
I genuinely had no idea what to write. I panicked over it for three days, wasting precious time. Everything I started stopped shortly afterwards. I didn’t have anything in my folder of ‘Stories rejected from Brush Tales’ that I wanted to expand, and all my usual avenues of inspiration seemed closed due to roadworks.
Then I asked for help. For ideas. For something to get me started. I have a very old dictionary that I found during a ‘scratching session’ while on holiday in Dongara, so I used that to take a photo of the definition of panic.
After I pressed Publish on my post, admitting I was stumped, I looked at the old book. Published in 1956, it’s looking a little worse for wear. The pages are yellow and fragile. The binding is worn. The gilded title has faded. And its really shabby because I pulled pages out of it while developing my Major Creative Work project in 2022. I had made a series of canvases spelling the word CREAtED and put a definition on each one. All the definitions related to the subject of that canvas, and all of them came from the same dictionary, which coincidentally was published in the same year that the anglicised lyrics of the song I chose to use in the background of the presentation were released in a hymn book in America.
I didn’t want to throw out the small, stubby, blue dictionary after I finished hacking into it because I thought maybe it might have another purpose somewhere on the track and because it holds memories of so many things, like our holiday wandering through WA towns between Perth and Cue and then coming home along the coast. Or, of finding something that actually interested me in an Op shop. It also reminds me of the joy of the many conversations with strangers in art stores and junk shops about the project I was creating. And … words. Because for me, it’s always about words.
I then wondered who could have left the dictionary in the shop, how long it might have been there, and what if someone other than me had found it. Before I knew it, I was deep into a process that features in the writing course I attend on Sunday afternoons (The Secrets of Storytelling, by Andrew Levett. https://www.thestorymentor.com.au/tsos). I can’t remember the real name, but I call it “The What If’s”. It’s about letting your imagination run with a series of questions and writing them down as you go. If you get to the end of that line of wondering, backtrack a little and head off in another direction until you get to the end of the story.
I published my blog post fairly late that Monday night. Well, late for me, who is usually in bed by 9:30 pm. But now my mind was inspired, and I was off and writing. By the time I went to bed just before midnight, I had seven hundred words – a much better number than zero. I then lay awake for hours, tense and overstimulated from firing up my brain in the evening but pleased that I had started.
In the morning, I wrote for a couple of hours before work and signed off with thirteen hundred words. As soon as I got home on Tuesday, I headed back to my dream world, and by bedtime, which was much earlier that night, I had three thousand words. I followed the same process the next day and had written thirty-five hundred words by the time I went to work. I took a draft copy with me and let a couple of people read it to see if I was on the right track of writing something interesting without too many loopholes or plot lines that weren’t going anywhere.
At this point, there were a few areas that I’d left highlighted to tell myself they needed more work. But I sent a copy to a friend or two anyway, saying it wasn’t quite finished. They got back to me promptly with a suggestion or two of errors I could fix. By Thursday night I had four thousand two hundred words and a completed first draft. I’d like to say ‘completed story’, but I’m learning there’s no such thing. The important thing was that I had something I could submit to the other participants in the Peter Cowan Writers Centre’s Short Storyists course.
Four thousand words. From nothing. From asking for help. From putting my hand on an ancient dictionary that has seen better days. From having the idea to take a photo to boost a post. I find it incredible that creativity and inspiration really can come from nothing. That entire new worlds can be created with just a ‘what if’.
I’m sorry I can’t share my story here. It’s still being critiqued by the others in my course. And, sadly, if I publish it here, I can never enter it in a story competition. The rules are very clear about ‘publication’ including Facebook posts and blog updates, so even though I’m not sure I’ll ever enter it in anything, I’d like to keep the option in case I ever change my mind.
Thank you, my wonderful readers, for being my sounding board. Thank you to those who shared their ideas in response to my appeal. Thank you to everyone who engages with me in the creative process. Look what you all helped me do!
A Glorious Mess 