How Does a Writer Begin to Tell a Story?
Agnès Madrigal
Each story is unique and, as such, each story begins in its own way. Some stories want to be lured from the ether from which they come; others reveal themselves boldly and unexpectedly. It is the role of the writer to be watchful, vigilant, whether she is looking for a story at a particular moment, or not. The story tends not to be that concerned about the writer’s convenience.
When I am actively seeking a story, I write. I write in my journal; I write about anything. The act of writing is, in these instances, an act of conjuring. The words I write might turn into a story or they might not. They might swirl around until an idea, not even formed in the words, appears. At other times, the diarist’s passages might metamorphose into something else—because I am a fiction writer, the reflective details of my days are only relevant when they enable another story to be revealed, one that is not my own, even if it feeds on sentences that describe events in my personal life.
Where do stories come from? We tend to look to the skies, but stories come from everywhere. Photograph by Madrigalit
Sometimes a story alights when I am not looking for it. Sometimes it is a sentence that runs through my head so rhythmically that it begs to be repeated—so I repeat it until it births a second sentence, and perhaps another, and then I begin to write these sentences down, realizing that they are the first links in a chain that will become a lengthier narrative. Once, it was a voice that I could hear, a strange and incomprehensible voice that I waited, listened to, and eventually began to describe, sketching out in language the protagonist of the novel I went on to write. Another time, sitting on a friend’s couch late one night, after she had gone to bed, just the brass tacks of a narrative appeared, with absolutely nothing magical in the appearance or intonation—still this led to a detailed work of many chapters.
“Sometimes a story alights when I am not looking for it. Sometimes it is a sentence that runs through my head so rhythmically that it begs to be repeated—so I repeat it until it births a second sentence, and perhaps another, and then I begin to write these sentences down, realizing that they are the first links in a chain that will become a lengthier narrative.”
—Agnès Madrigal
Most recently, I was sitting in a café, not writing exactly, but my small red notebook was open and I was jotting down thoughts in ink, mostly planning the next movements of my afternoon. I was one of a few patrons in the side room of the café, which was quite charming with decorations from the early twentieth century. At one point, a man entered the room. He wore a cheap fedora hat and his medium-length hair was tied in a loose ponytail. But these details did not pull him into my story. Instead, it was his gaze, his interest in the pretty room as he looked about it that struck the writer—that and the fact that he looked so much like someone I knew that I nearly reached out to say hello before realizing he was not the same man I had once known and, for that matter, had even loved. At that moment, this random stranger alchemized into a character as, at the same moment, a story began, first in the mind and then, shortly thereafter, on the cream-colored paper before me.
A man entered this café and, in the same moment, he entered a story. Who was he? Perhaps somewhere he has a photograph of the same room, with the author seated in the corner. Or maybe he is writing a story, too, of the woman in the café. Photograph by Madrigalit
So it can be an idea, a sentence, a voice, or even a person that draws a story from the recesses of the mind into the waking world, into the world of paper and ink, and then back again, into the imagination of the writer, delicately weaving thought and word, real and ethereal, until there is a complete story, maybe even an entire book. And then those words transform again, into the readers’ own ideas and visions, in what is one of the loveliest processes I can think of. A story, even written down, is never an entirely static thing.