Discovering The Mysteries of Life

Since I started writing more years ago than I care to remember, my stories have developed quite dramatically. The part that has perhaps changed the most in that time is my fictional stories. However, let me start at the beginning of my writer's journey before I go too deep into the present.

Going all the way back to when I first started out writing, and teaching, seriously, almost forty years ago, the one thing I always insisted upon was making a plan. I felt it was very important to have a roadmap, not least of all because if you found yourself going off at a tangent halfway through, you could always go back to that map and get back on track.

I also felt that making a plan made for a more efficient writing process. If you plan your journey ahead, then all you have to do is hit your markers along the route without getting sidetracked in the first place.

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These days I almost never make a plan, which may explain why commercial success has eluded me so far, or maybe not. The important thing is not feeling bound to the restrictions of a fixed plan, I find that I enjoy the writing process far more than I ever did before.

These days I treat every piece of fiction writing as a voyage of discovery. And just as I like to travel without a fixed route, I simply hit the road and see where it takes me. What I have learned about using that process is that the writing, and ergo the reading, becomes a journey of discovery and pleasant surprises. Also, the writing flows more spontaneously and fluidly to the point that it feels like the story is writing or creating itself.

Once I have started the very first chapter, there is usually enough in that part of it to get me through the next chapter, and so on and so forth, a chapter at a time, until the story is brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

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Another little trick I came up with by chance is what I call writing to an image. In later years, when I continued on this journey, I would write a story and then trawl through Unsplash for a suitable image to go with it.

One day, I did it the other way around. I came up with the story in my head, about some chance meetings in a park on my birthday. Before I wrote a single word I went looking for an image with excellent descriptive qualities, and then having made my choice, I wrote to the image. So the whole story is now based around that particular image. In fact, the story I ended up with came out of the image. From that point on the story just flowed vividly from the image through my mind onto the page.

Another story that came completely out of an image was Every Picture Tells A Story (link below). With this one, I didn't have a single word of any story. What I did have was a prompt for a challenge...

Then I remembered recently coming across a Hopper painting I loved and as soon as I checked it out, I just knew it had great potential to give me a good story that met the brief. And so again, the story came out of the image.

The next story was prompted by a Vocal Media challenge, The Next Great American Novel. Here I want to move away from image-inspired stories, to something deeper.

This was a great deal more than a simple single image or sentence prompt. This was a generic prompt. And, as a lifelong avid reader and graduate of American Literature, I felt more than up to the challenge to come up with something.

When I read the name of the challenge, I immediately came up with what is probably the most obvious, but no less valid, theme and more than worthwhile exploring, The Great American Dream.

My first marks on the page, or screen, were in describing the location, a dream-like place in the Caribbean, a place where Billionaires like to reside. And if the American dream is anything it is the story of somebody coming from being an insignificant nobody to a wealth-bestowed significant somebody. That was the beginning that I set off exploring.

I have to say this has been my most ambitious piece of writing to date. To set oneself up as an equal to all the great American writers, from Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Steven Crane, and F.Scott Fitzgerald through to others such as J.D. Salinger, Steven King, Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, John Grisham, Dan Brown...ad infinitum, that is quite some mountain to attempt to climb. We shall see, we shall see.

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If you get the opportunity to read any of my fictional stories, then you will detect an element of mystery in all of them. The mystery of course is no happy accident, it is all purely intentional. That's because it is the mystery of life in the real world I have passed through that informs the fiction that I write. It is the mystery of it all that piques my interest, as a human being as well as a writer, and hopefully, it piques yours too.

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In summary:

Ditch the plan, improvise instead.

Choose an image first, then write.

keep it all mysterious.