Storytelling from My Angle
(Part 2)


How I Tell My Story

So, I tell stories... How do I do it, approach the mechanics of writing the stories? I'm the type of person who likes to keep things simple. I've managed to condense my writing process down into four steps:

1) I just do it... (Nike knows what I need to be a writer.)

I believe if I am a writer, I need to write whether it's read or not. Writing is something that needs to come out of me before I can think about who is going to read it. Yes, many times I do purposefully write for an audience, imagining my ideal reader. But, for me, the writing process itself is often one of forthtelling – taking my thoughts and ideas and letting them come out of me and onto a page. Who reads it is secondary. I think some of the best writings are journals and memoirs, those stories that just had to come out and may not have come out with the primary purpose of being read as much as the purpose of being expressed. So I just write, and write, and write, not worrying too much about how it looks or how it will look, but just getting my thoughts and ideas into the printed word – just doing it. I try to write frequently, as time allows, sometimes setting writing goals. (This spring I committed to write something, anything – a few sentences, a few paragraphs – every day of Lent.)

2) I just do it...again...and again...and again... (Yep, Nike still knows how I need to write.)

I struggled with writing coherently in my freshman year of college until the professor teaching my composition class told me that if I rewrote everything at least three times I couldn't help but write well. Of course, in the pre-computer days, rewriting was a lot of work. I'm someone who is old enough to think erasable bond was a godsend, that switching balls on the IBM Selectric to change a font was amazing. Cutting, pasting, deleting, playing around with punctuation, fonts, italics – all are heaven for me now.   I confess that I've been waiting most of my writing life for a word processor, then a computer, and finally, a laptop. Once in possession of a laptop, I had exhausted all my excuses for not writing regularly and started writing in earnest. And rewriting...and rewriting...and rewriting. Eventually, the ideas that were initially put into words in rapid, haphazard fashion start to take on a coherence and form that's downright readable after the third rewrite.

3) When in doubt, I read...

Reading can be a great motivator for writing. I read a wide variety of printed media – novels, biographies, non-fiction, magazines, other blogs. The more I read, the more I want to write, as long as I don't let the really talented writers discourage me by comparison! Though I strive to have my own style, there are authors whose writing styles make me sit up and take notice. Since the writing I do in “The Angle” is non-fiction, there are three writers that have influenced this part of my writing. Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz; A Million Miles in a Thousand Years; “Storyline” blog) has a way of weaving words and spiritual themes into thought-provoking, sometimes controversial, essays. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but I really love how he says it. Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything, many travel books) writes well-researched books that are very informative in a style that varies from being mildly humorous to drive-off-the road hysterical. (I confess that humor is a valued commodity in our family. My son and my husband put a high value on being funny. I try to hold my own...) Lastly, “The Angle” wouldn't be “The Angle” (“...eclectic ramblings from faith to fishing...”) without the influence of John Gierach (Standing in a River Waving a Stick, Another Lousy Day in Paradise). He's described as an author and freelance writer, though having read most of his collections of essays, I'm convinced he is just another person addicted to fly fishing who is fortunate enough to write brilliantly about what he loves in a way that supports his habit. Since I don't ice fish, my winter fishing season consists of reading John's books.

4) I experiment. I try not to fear leaving my comfort zone.

I'm still discovering who I am in this writing process. I sometimes feel prompted to try things that don't come naturally to me or are not in my usual writing style. Last May, I challenged myself to do a seven consecutive day instructional series on square foot gardening. I just did a short series on dropping everything to read. I've done the occasional recipe and one (sort of) movie review. I've a document on my computer (where I'm writing this at the moment) entitled “Blog Closet Ongoing” that contains scraps of writings that will probably never make it onto “The Angle”. They are just exercises in flexing those parts of my writing muscles yet undeveloped. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller talks about his experience of writing a novel, how stories are only partly told by writers, that the characters have a tendency to do what they want, not necessarily obeying the writer. He said he would sit down at the keyboard, intending for a character to go to Kansas, only to find his character on a beach in Mexico, sipping a margarita. I was intrigued by that crazy concept of uncontrollable characters, so I started a novel as an exercise in a different type of writing. I doubt it will ever be seen by anyone other than myself, but 180 pages into it, I'm a better writer, I believe, for the exercise of chasing after a family of characters that surprise me with their story lines and cause me to wonder what they will do next. I don't work on the novel consistently, but I come back to it between other projects to exercise my fiction muscles, check to see what my characters are up to and write them back into some semblance of order.

* * *

So there it is, everything I've learned about writing up to this point in my writing life. I'm still very much a newbie, especially in regards to having others read what I have written. Writing “The Angle” still feels a little surreal at times, a very extroverted activity for this introvert. I always feel a little weird just after I've clicked the “publish” button, that scary excited feeling of risking-taking, with something deep inside of me saying “What have I just done?” And then I let it go, and go on to the next writing project. Excuse me now while I go back to writing my novel. One of my secondary characters has gone rogue again...

“You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'

Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

Only then will you understand what happened and why.

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories