Mary Flannery O’Connor said at one point that she didn’t know the ending of her short story, “Good Country People” until about twelve lines before she wrote it.\u00a0 This is a learned secret from the circle of great writers, and its one that many of us embrace.<\/p>\n
Stephen King, too, utilizes this method of telling a story, but his description is much more amusing.\u00a0 This is paraphrasing, I’m sure, but, imagine you are in\u00a0a desert, and you come across a buried fossil of a time long ago – something amazing, it has to be!\u00a0 You know that it is delicate.\u00a0 You know that it has to be treated with great care and responsibility.\u00a0 If you were digging up this fossil, you wouldn’t use a shovel.\u00a0 A cautious, passionate archaeologist would use a toothbrush to make sure even the most intimate detail was not lost.\u00a0 Such is the case with writing, in the mind of Stephen King.\u00a0 You are the archaeologist, and the fossil is whatever story you’re trying to tell.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Now, this goes beyond the idea of caution and level of detail.\u00a0 In fact, I dare say it may reverse that idea of caution and detail.\u00a0 The concept of the writer is one who writes.\u00a0 They craft a story from scratch, in the minds of many.\u00a0 This couldn’t be farther from the truth.\u00a0 Any great storyteller knows this.\u00a0 The story has always been there, and we are merely the translators.\u00a0 That fossil in the desert was always there, ready to be discovered, and we are the ones who must learn its intricate mysteries.<\/p>\n
Me, I’m a bit beyond the archaeologist up there.\u00a0 I’m not saying this is better or worse – it’s just an observation.\u00a0 You see, I’m a bit of a historian too.\u00a0 When I develop my stories, I tell them twice.\u00a0 Once to myself, and once to the reader.\u00a0 But here’s the kicker.\u00a0 I’m in that “reader” bucket too.\u00a0 Whenever I’m writing, I’m writing as the archaeologist.\u00a0 Even if I have the story told to myself in my head.\u00a0 I write to surprise myself, and I write subconsciously more often than not.\u00a0 If you have managed to read either of my first two books, and you’ve noticed something that deliciously came full circle, I<\/em> didn’t do that.\u00a0 But my crazy mind did.\u00a0 I may have applied a little bit of finesse to intertwine the bits of storyline that was frayed, but something beyond what I purposely seek out helped to do that.\u00a0 In a way, I’m reading my story for the first time when I finally put it down to paper.<\/p>\n This was all a very long-winded point to make to say that I just had one of those little moments of inspiration.\u00a0 Best of all, it facilitates a greater storyline in the future, and one that hadn’t quite found its flesh yet.\u00a0 Like O’Connor, I hadn’t known it was there until just before I reached that pivotal moment.\u00a0 But it was there – it always was.<\/p>\n What have been some of your “aha moments”?<\/p>\n