Where do stories come from?
Wednesday July 28, 2010
Storks bring them, of course. Everybody knows that. Or they appear under gooseberry bushes along with the early morning dew. There is a kind of coy mystique amongst writers about the question of where stories come from. When you ask them, they tend to go all shy, the way that conservative parents do when their offspring ask awkward questions; and they tend to smile coyly and nod to each other with a “not in front of the children” look.
All of this supports the idea of writers as solitary creators who have a hotline to another world of deeper, greater significance – a world to which other mere mortals have no access. But for me the answer to the question of where stories come from is rather more prosaic. They come from other stories, of course. This is the first thing (and the reason that writers need to read, and to immerse themselves in the sea of stories). They come from the world, and our interaction with the world – a kind of swirling about of disparate elements. They come from chance encounters between these various elements. And they come from the fact that we have the kinds of minds that cannot help but construct stories.
It is this that I’m interested in exploring with this current project. The idea is to take the Yijing or Book of Changes – a book which has been taken to be everything from a divinatory manual to a book of philosophy, to a hotline to esoteric wisdom, to a load of old cobblers – and to use it as a machine for making stories. The Yijing is a book of changes, but it is also a book of chance: creativity, I think, comes both from having structure and also having a degree indeterminacy or uncertainty. In terms of the Yijing, uncertainty is almost everywhere: in in the process of consultation which leads to an essentially random result, in the allusive and indirect nature of the text that always requires interpretation, in the layer upon layer of commentary and so on. I am, alas, not one of those who thinks that there is some kind of mystical or otherworldly power in this particular book that reveals the nature of things. There are, of course, structures and patterns, and the patterning of the book is one of the things that makes it potentially generative of new ideas and stories; and perhaps there are nice Darwinian mechanisms by means of which those versions of the book that are more generative of ideas and thoughts have managed to replicate whilst those various of the book that are interact less fruitfully with the human mind have tended not to be copied. But whether tossing coins or using yarrow stalks, I can see no reason to see the result as anything but mathematically random.
And yet, my hunch is that it is perhaps it is precisely this play of randomness that makes the book so successful, and that allows it to generate new stories and new possibilities. So this novel I’m working on is, in a sense, an exercise in method. I’m seeing how the book, the structure of the book, the play of randomness, and the various chance conditions of my everyday life conspire to generate new stories. Not from some deep and esoteric source, but from the shuffling and recombination of various elements and experiences here in the world. It’s pretty mechanical, in a sense; but in the way that complex, squidgy, human-world systems are mechanical. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that, in my everyday functioning, I’m a fairly mechanistic kind of guy. Give me cake, I become affable. Tell me you don’t like my stories, I feel glum.
Anyway, this – in rough outline – is the kind of thing that I’m preoccupied with between hurtling down mountainsides in toboggans, hanging out in various temples and parks, treading the hot and sweaty streets of a succession of smoggy Chinese cities, hurtling here and there by train, and accidentally provoking taxi drivers to rage over the situation in Korea. I can’t say I know precisely what kind of a book all of this is going to turn into (an unpublishable one, the hard-hearted might mutter, but this is an inherently chancy exercise I’m engaged in, so it is a risk I am prepared to take); but so far the process is intriguing.
The most fun you can have for twenty kuai In the Mao memorabilia store, and some ancient poems.
#1 · pramila
Thursday July 29, 2010
‘‘where do stories come from’‘I asked the internet i-ching and it said:
The present is embodied in Hexagram 5 – Hsu (Waiting): With sincerity, there will be brilliant success. With firmness there will be good fortune, and it will be advantageous to cross the great stream. The first (bottommost) line, undivided, shows its subject waiting in the distant border. It will be well for him constantly to maintain the purpose thus shown, in which case there will be no error. The second line, undivided, shows its subject waiting on the sand of the mountain stream. He will suffer the small injury of being spoken against, but in the end there will be good fortune. The situation is shifting, and Yin (the passive feminine force) is gaining ground. The future is embodied in Hexagram 39 – Chien (Obstruction): Advantage will be found in the southwest, and the contrary in the northeast. It will be advantageous to meet with the great man. With firmness and correctness, there will be good fortune. The things most apparent, those above and in front, are embodied by the upper trigram K’an (Water), which represents danger and the unknown. The things least apparent, those below and behind, are embodied by the lower trigram Chi’en (Heaven), which is transforming into Ken (Mountain). As part of this process, strength and creativity are giving way to stillness and obstruction.’‘hmmmm…..
#2 · kathz
Thursday July 29, 2010
Keep writing! I want to buy the book – but it must be a real and well-designed book that I can touch, not an e-thingy.