Story funnels

In a previous post, I wrote about the shift I experienced from understanding creativity as something human beings do to something we are. Once I’d started writing fiction, I began to discover whole other layers around what stories are and how they come into being. A few weeks back, I was talking about fiction writing with a friend—hey, Trevor!—and it gave me reason to articulate something I had, until that point, only experienced. Here’s my second attempt at wrapping words around it.

I used to think writing fiction was something that happened through the intellect, that stories were actively ‘thought’ into existence. Instead, over the last few years, I have come to realise that although the intellect does have a role to play, particularly in the editing stage, the creativity side of writing—the part where we’re bringing something from the formless to form—mostly comes from a place beyond the intellect.

It feels much more as if the story already exists ‘out there’ in a formless place and that something in me is tuning in to that, bringing the words to the page. This flow of story feels worlds away from trying to wrestle a story into being. It’s much gentler, for example. The key difference is that writing the story is less ‘on me’ and more as if I’m acting as a ‘story funnel’. It’s this, I think, that writers are referring to when they talk about how stories want to go in certain directions or how characters behave in ways they weren’t expecting. Perhaps this all sounds odd, a little like magic. In fact, magic is exactly how it does feel in the sense of a transformation from formless to form, an alchemy of sorts.

The ‘story funnel’ is not to downplay the importance of commitment and resilience and a whole heap of other human qualities. Writing a book requires consistency, for instance. The story may be ‘out there’ somewhere in a formless realm, but it will only come into being if the writer consistently shows up. My experience over the last few years is that it’s also easy to slip out of the story funnel and try to think up the next part of the story, which never goes well (a big chunk of one of my books was written this way and then rewritten). I have a suspicion that the more experienced a writer is, the more easily they can spot themselves falling into ‘thinking mode’ (although this is probably more of a continuum than an absolute). Experience, too, is where writing craft comes in. Stories may have an energy of their own but the writer can bring that story energy to the page in more or less elegant ways.

As with the rest of life, I have come to glimpse that writing is a dance between our intellect and something that goes beyond intellectual understanding. Perhaps this is one of the reasons it holds such fascination for so many people.