I have heard that the novelist (and by extension any narrative writer or even any artist) has a responsibility to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. It seems vague, but it’s also a pretty exciting concept once you think about it and how you might use it in your own life. It’s downright metaphysical.
All the best writers do it, of course. Kafka, Bradbury, Oates, Le Guin, Atwood. We’ve all sat at the feet of these greats, amazed at how creepy the familiar can become, how reasonable the extension of where we are now to the worlds these authors create seems. And it doesn’t have to be all dystopian or even fantastical. The Manchurian Candidate was a book before it was a movie and while it played on fears of the era, it also takes the trappings of the familiar and moves them just far enough to make them scary.
What’s the point? Even if you don’t write books like this, consider the possibilities the familiar affords your work and push against cliché by really examining the common. As I was driving home from dropping off the kids, I watched some workers laboring on a lifted house, I saw two older women walking briskly and talking between swigs off the water bottle, I saw a mother of a small child stop and catch her breath under a redwood near a park. It is easy for us to assume we know the stories behind these folks, their lives, but the cure for cliché is attention.
So next time you’re looking for a story beginning, just watch the people around you. Really pay attention. Notice the details, make a list of them and when you’ve saturated yourself with the specifics of that person, ask yourself, “What if one of these details were different?” And your story will be born, with a specific and compelling character from the start.
1. What if those two older women walking briskly were passing a joint between them?
2. What if that mother under the redwood had a dog in her stroller instead of a baby?
3. What if the construction workers were not building a new foundation for an old house but instead were building a bunker?
What will your attention bring you today?
Angie Powers has an M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, where she won the Amanda Davis Thesis Award for her novel, The Blessed. She also has a Certificate in Screenwriting from the Professional Programs at UCLA. She is the co-director and co-writer of the short Little Mutinies (distributed by Frameline and an official selection of the Palm Springs International Short Fest) and was a quarter-finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship and at Blue Cat Screenplay Competition for the full-length screenplay of Little Mutinies. She’s twice made it into the second round of consideration for Sundance Labs and is a Cinestory semi-finalist this year. She also wrote and directed the short Hot Date, which premiered at Frameline. She is currently finishing a new novel and a short film.