On being a story vulture

Where do the seeds for story ideas come from?

It would be lovely to say I dream them, or they come from some sort of divine inspiration. The truth is (and I try to be truthful, even in the midst of writing fiction which is, after all, lies) the seed for Wind Tails (Far from Home in the U.S.) first germinated in a bar.

It was my birthday, and a full moon, and several friends and I had been out cross-country night skiing in the mountains where I live. Our favorite bar has a fireplace and a cozy atmosphere, and it was just the thing to warm toes, never mind imaginations. I’m not sure how the conversation came around to hitchhiking tales, but somehow it did, and everyone had one.

Stephanie talked about the hitchhiker she loaned money to one New Year’s Eve in Germany, with a plan to meet on the same night, a year later, in an Irish pub. She showed up, he didn’t, but the nice thing about fiction is you can make a story end any way you want. Perhaps it was the mention of an Irish pub, or perhaps it was just another hitchhiker story in a night of tales of the road, but it was Ross’s story that came next, and to which I really owe everything. Ross had been sitting in a pub with a mug of Guinness in hand when a traveler collapsed onto the bar stool beside him. His only rule of the road, this fellow told my friend, was to hitchhike in the direction of the wind. He was relieved to be sitting there at last, he said. Because the wind kept changing, he’d been circling Dublin for three days.

What a notion, to let the wind take you! What freedom! Unless you find yourself going in circles, and we’ve all been there in life. And of course, sooner or later decisions must be made, because, as the Vietnam vet Buddy tells Pink, freedom isn’t ever really free. Ultimately, we all have to face those things that bind us to the earth: our loved ones, our pasts, the choices we make.

Most of the stories told that night, as well as the stories related to me subsequently—like Helen’s story about the person who collected both hitchhikers and their postcards—found their way into the manuscript. I’m quite the story vulture, and I keep a notebook of anecdotes people relate to me, after first asking: “can I have that?” They almost always say yes. Evelyn’s weakness for stealing flowers, Eunice’s story, the distribution of fancy desserts to street people, and the story of Melissa when she opened the windows to let out the spirits of the dead, were all collected this way.

Fiction is really truth with lies, because anything we make up has to, by necessity, come from somewhere. So while no characters in Far from Home, or their stories, are based on real people or events, all of them pull something from personal encounter or experience. You don’t need to be an expert in something to write about it, either: if you’re a living, breathing human being with empathy, it’s not hard to put yourself in the shoes of a water witcher, a business tycoon on the lam, or an octogenarian with an attitude. It was great fun to research things I knew nothing about, sitting at some coffee shop while the local dowser opened up, or a truck driver waxed on.

There is plenty of my childhood in anything I write, all of it a mixture of truth with fabrication so that it’s impossible to know what is, and what isn’t—sometimes even for me, once the novel gets into my bones. Memories take on a different glow when you hand them to a character and let them run with it. Embellishments happen. Endings change.

That said, my siblings take pleasure in picking out the familyisms—things from our childhood that we all remember—that make their way into my novels. Perhaps it’s a turn of phrase, or the long-dead family dog resurrected. Chocolate marshmallow cookies like the ones Howie loved will always be derflops in our family, thanks to a kid in an Oregon campground around 1952 who was sent by his mother over to my parents’ campsite with a welcome gift of cookies. He probably said “deer-flops,” because in truth they look a little like that; my mother heard “derflops,” and so derflops they became.

I really did have an imaginary friend named Linda, and a real friend who died at six years old, and left me her Easy Bake Oven. When I do write about real things, it’s important to me that these memories are treated with reverence, and of course, humanity. Because we’ve all lost people we love, I know that a point of connection will be there for the reader, and in that way memory becomes story becomes the touch of one heart to another.

Points of connection, points of departure, finding direction: these are the stuff of human experience, yearnings that find their way easily into almost any story. And so I often think I’m writing some sort of revelation, only to find it’s a root of a universal theme: love, loss, joy, sadness, challenge, triumph.

And therein lies the metaphor: in the root of a theme or the seed of an idea, and from these miracles grow the story, a mountaintop pine that moves and dances in the wind.