Tuesday, March 29, 2011

No Boogers Here

OK, the last couple days have been challenging blogs.  I am not used to people seeing so much of me as the blogs about my latest adventures in Dateland and I don't like having a topic chosen for me, even though I can clearly write about anything.  Today's blog is going to be more about where the ideas grow.

I was at a party recently chatting up a woman I didn't know.  We were talking about writing and Women Writing for a Change.  I may have been waxing a little too much about a book I am writing.  This woman turned to me and asked "Where did you get that idea?"  What I heard was "Where did you get THAT idea?"  I am still not sure exactly how she said it.  But I appreciate both questions.  One is about process and growing ideas uttered perhaps with an I-could-never-do-that awe.  The other is clearly the inner critic popping up its head to tell me, yet again, that this is crazy, that I am crazy for doing it.  WHACK-A-MOLE critic time.  That entity is not allowed to ask that question any more and they know it.

But it got me to thinking about where DO the ideas come from.  It may not seem like it, but every piece of writing comes out of my personal experience.  Weird huh?  Just like Jung's dream interpretation, it seems the writing is also all about me.  Perhaps it is a piece inspired by the woman struggling with the tantrum-y toddler in Kroger.  Sometimes they are real descriptions of things going on in my life.  Some will dare to dig below the full-of-yucks surface and find out why things happened that way (the scientist part of me LOVES this kind, the emotional side not so much as these pieces tend to kick up a lot of shit).  Some are just born onto the page - by which I mean that the idea, words, everything, just arrive in my brain like it's Grand Central.  I love this last kind because it requires almost no editing.

My favorites though are the ones that live in my head for a while collecting bits of string, dust bunnies, old left over story bits and just simmering.  The Beauty and the Beast tale is in the simmering stage, while the book moved from there to the writing stage last fall.  Nominally the book is about some of my ancestors living in pre-historic Northern Europe.  Zzzzzzzzz......Oh, I know it sounds like history class, but this is a story and one I hope will explain why my brother Jim looks like Black Irish, why some of my family is drawn to the Old Religion, our intimate connection to the land and maybe a few other quirky family skeletons.

It all started when my cousin Dan posted a newsletter about his genealogical research into my dad/his mom's family.  He has traced them back to mid-1400's Germany, living in the same area today as then.  Pondering that, the scientist popped up and asked a simple question "Where is that farm?  I bet we could find that on Google Earth."  Two minutes later as I am circling the virtual farm, a thousand more questions tumble from the answer to that one.  And that is how it starts.  Eventually characters start swimming in the primordial stew pot back there and when they are ready to tell me their story, they simply dump themselves out and start moving around.  I just describe what I see.

......and that is where stories come from.

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