The Nature of Story

Movies are stories.  Of course, many movies are based on the work of writers in the form of novels or, sometimes, short stories.  Borrowing the plot, a director and screenwriter take over and retell the story visually.  Often the original written form is better.

Serial television shows are the same.  Since writers of television programs can’t know season-by-season whether their program will be renewed, it has to be, almost by definition, open-ended.  When a new season begins a character may have shifted or become someone else, and we, the viewers must play along.

My current television story is Sleepy Hollow.  It is very different, of course, than the tale written by Washington Irving.  By the end of season one, even, it was clear that the writers had changed their minds as to who some of the characters were.  Henry Parrish was not originally the horseman of war.

I have no way of knowing that, but as a writer I can sense it.  As I sit down to write out a story, I seldom have an outline.  Some successful writers (among which I am not) write this way.  They “make it up as they go along.”  When they’re done, the editing comes.

Recently I returned to a story rejected by a journal.  Re-reading, I could see that I’d set up an obvious direction for the action to go, and had dropped it in the flow of convoluted thoughts that are my mind.  I had shifted the protagonist from what it clearly should have been to something else.  Something far less satisfying.

Writers rely on their friends to point such things out.  I have few friends, and even fewer who write.  Those who do are reluctant to talk about their craft.  Some who’ve read my work, simply get too busy to get back to me.  They can never know how much it hurts.

Some know my true name and yet they never visit my pseudonymous blog.  They never comment on my efforts.

Writing can be a lonely business, filled with self-doubt and remorse.  I peer deep into the joys and horrors of life, and I feel them tingling so profoundly that I must call that hidden place a soul.  I try to express it in words, knowing that few will ever be read.  The story, however, is authentic.

Perhaps a screenwriter is what I’m meant to be.  Maybe that’s what all of us who struggle to find readers already are.