Remember the story

A break from the coalface

Last weekend I spent a day relaxing, and for a 61 year old bloke with sense of humour issues, I did so in a slightly odd way.

In the morning, I messed about folding pieces of paper together to make a journal, but not the sort of journal you write, the sort you put together with string, paint, and glue, like you would at junior school. After an eco-friendly naturally organic tree-hugging lunch, I spent an hour doing yoga, something I have never done before. Thankfully, nobody had a camera, because there are people who would pay good money to see me doing yoga. The day ended with a sound bath, utterly relaxing.

So that was all a bit out of character, except of course it isn’t, because I have been a great believer in the usefulness of meditation for years, and when you think about it, this was just an extended meditation, with some mild torture thrown in, and a very nice lunch.

That’s all very lovely, I imagine you saying, so what’s your point?

My point is that one prompt for putting together this journal was making a cairn of words. For those not familiar with cairns, they are piles of stones found in places such as the tops of hills, viewpoints, places where people feel inspired to pile stones, then more people feel inspired to add their own stone as they pass.

Here you go.

That is a cairn. A very fancy one. Usually, they are just a heap of stones.

So my cairn of words had to be about words of course, because words are what I do. Without any particular thought or planning, I came up with this:

I suppose what was going through my head was how stories come together when we writers set to work, or rather, how they should come together. You start with a story in your head. We can turn sounds into letters to make words, to make sentences, and paragraphs which form books which should tell our story. Okay, I should have stuck chapters in there too, but I was chilled out, playing with scissors and PVA glue on a table covered in scraps of paper. If it makes you happy, just imagine chapters are there in some sort of parallel universe or something.

The message I was telling myself here, or so I like to imagine, is that we writers should always remember that what we are doing is to take a story from our imagination and tell it to our readers by crafting words together. I think that basic principle can sometimes be lost now that we are bombarded with advice about structures, story arcs, character arcs, writing to market, writing to genre, and all the other formulas we must embrace or die.

All that great advice is wonderful I’m sure, but if it gets in the way of you telling your story, you would be better off relaxing with some paper and glue, maybe a bit of yoga, then finish with some musical relaxation. Put all that advice to one side, and when properly in the mood, just get on and tell your story the way you think you should tell it. Words and advice are no use to anybody if the story gets lost along the way.

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