How to Find Great Stories and Listen Between the Lines
As writers, most of us are fairly addicted to that first spark of an idea, the kind that can occur at odd times and burble up, say, at first light, when you’re only half awake. It comes from beneath full consciousness so that you could swear it’s a nearly audible unknown voice telling you something you’d never thought of before.
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Later, after a good cup of coffee, that idea might take hold and wind up on the page, or fade away in the light. Those unexpected moments can lead to a new project or book or a new turn for your character, the one that’s still unfolding.
Some years ago, I agreed to write a big musical piece for an opera company. The only requirement they had was that they wanted me to incorporate into the work stories of people who were new to this country, in any way I saw fit. After I signed, I was so puzzled by this huge undefined thing I had agreed to write that I doubted those sparks would ever arrive.
Without a shape, an arc, a theme, or so much as a plan, speechless as to what I’d gotten myself into, the only thing I knew to do was to go find people to tell me their stories. I figured I’d record them, then transcribe everything so I would have original lines to work from. I hoped the way forward would then open up like the song about the bear who went over the mountain—after I collected a few stories, I’d see where to go next. That decision changed my writing life.
It didn’t happen all at once. I barreled into the first interview so deafened by my own point-of-view—American-born, white, female, gay—that I put their stories into my own context, and failed to ask what I needed to ask to establish or even understand theirs. That’s what point-of-view is, that’s what it establishes—an overarching context that tilts everything in the piece in more or less the same direction. I had worked so hard to learn point-of-view on the page, I had no idea that your own could deafen you, in your writing or in the world.
One day early in the project, I took a break and went into a nail salon run by a group of Vietnamese women and blithely asked a stylist working there to tell me her story. I thought it an uncomplicated question I had a benign right to ask. I didn’t hear the superiority in my request, the implication that “of course you’re not from here and I am.” Then I added, “I just like stories,” and couldn’t hear this as trivializing her experiences. The final blow: I said the mayor was interested in this work.
I didn’t yet know how suspicious, how careful, people in Vietnam had to become about interrogations and government officials after the communists took over, didn’t imagine she could have endured something like an armed official striding unannounced into her home who might, say, count rice bowls in her cabinet and then arrest them all. There are five bowls here and only four people are registered to live in this house. Who are you hiding?? The woman flinched, then muttered something to the stylist at the next station. Chatter in Vietnamese, loud and agitated, exploded in the shop. They could not get me out of there fast enough.
Context is everything. I didn’t yet know how to listen outside of my own.
Gradually, I learned. I learned as I watched the impact of each of my questions, as over 120 people told me their stories, in depth, over that year. They could talk for hours. Since I didn’t know life in their country or culture or mindset, and didn’t know what they had lost or what they sought, I had to build the world around their story by listening and sensing what to ask. Most important, I noted what they didn’t say—what they assumed, or avoided—and that was often my guide.
I learned to listen with my body, my heart, and my past all in play. In that terrifying state of empathy, questions burbled up unbidden that seemed to spark something in them, and opened up their world—inner and outer.
Check out Leah Lax’s Not From Here here:
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What I didn’t yet understand was that I was absorbing the varied voices of my society. I internalized something about the cadence and rhythm of speech and specific context that creates a unique character on the page. That is, I learned to write characters by listening to real people, and listening between the lines.
In fiction, we get to know our characters by creating their world and making sure they are a unique product of it. Once a character gains that uniqueness, they take on a life of their own. We begin to listen to them. Their actions will come from their nature, not ours.
Now, when I write, for fiction or nonfiction, before I dig deep into myself to find that flow of ideas and words and characters, before I even sit down in front of that blank page, I get quiet and tune in to the world and its voices with all of my senses. Then I feel more able to capture the world in writing, or create the world that I need to create, which will be different for each character. In that way, hopefully they won’t just come out like various reflections of me.
And if I’m writing about real people, well, by truly listening to them, then poring over their words and writing in the gaps in a way that clarifies all that I learned about their context, I just might find my way to their humanity. Maybe I will also find their intersection with my own, and discover a little more about my world. And myself.
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