The Story Journey

I’m starting to think that anything can be a story. My husband tells me about his job search after college. What a story! I am eating chicken surrounded by forty of the loudest teenagers on the planet. Story! It keeps raining and the pumpkin plant keeps blooming all the same. Story. Quarantined students are roaming campus, each cloaked in a blue baseball cap and mask. They’re impossible to identify from a distance. We wave and shout our greetings. We keep our distance. Story?

One-liners scream at me with frightening predictability–any moment, it feels, is fit to blossom out into some breathing text, if only I can coax the seed a bit. Like particles and antiparticles erupting from the void, or like errant thoughts, most of which die off but a few grow big, too big, bursting out of us–stories seem like that. That the potential for infinity of them is all around, and we are poking through and choosing one here or there, planting it in our minds and cultivating up a story.

Other times, it feels like nothing makes a story. Who hasn’t experienced this before? How am I supposed to tell it so that someone will want to read? Do I have the right to tell this story? Am I capable of doing it well? Has this been done before? What was so interesting about this idea anyway? This is the hard work part of the process, where our little chosen seed languishes, a few tentative leaves threaten withering. The story on the page isn’t nearly as fresh or bold as we imagined. We might just give up.

Then, when we push through, we see that this story is the only story. When the story has a life apart, when the characters chirp at you like spirits, when you wake up thinking it all through again, when on the rereads you get lost in it and have to backtrack. It’s hard to imagine at these moments another story at all, for this is what we were always born to tell, a channeling half of ourselves and half a larger truth, never so didactically, just gently, clearly, mysteriously out of us. Savor that.

You are a magician. You take the thought and magnify it, shade in details, cast it out into a ball that enters someone’s mind and plants its seeds there. It’s telepathy. It’s necromancy. It’s aphrodisiac. This story is a marvelously human kind of magic.