Where Do Stories Come From?

Photo by Sumaid pal Singh Bakshi on Unsplash

Believe it or not, after fifty years as a fiction writer, I’ve been asking myself that question lately.  Where, indeed, do stories come from?  And that question is immediately followed by another, “Where do I find my next one?”

I’ve gone back through the novels I’ve published in the past.  The true-to-life ones like On My Honor.  The lyrical ones like Little Dog, Lost and Little Cat’s Luck.  The early readers like Turtle Dreams.  The deeply researched like Land of the Buffalo Bones and Runt.  And I find myself asking, “How did I do it?”

Since my last novel, Sunshine, I’ve been concentrating on scientifically based picture books. Two of them are out, The Stuff of Stars and We, the Curious Ones, and three more are in the pipeline.  It’s been a thrilling new genre to explore, one that gives me the opportunity to write factually, lyrically, even spiritually.  All in the same text. I’ve loved the stretch of it.  The deep dive of the research.  Even the intense hard work of sorting concepts so new to me I have to struggle to grasp them myself. 

And immersed in that process, I seem to have floated away from fiction.

I’ve even floated away from reading fiction.  I pick up novels and put them down again.  I can see what the writers are doing, see that they are doing it well, and too often I don’t care, which turns me back to nonfiction.  (What do people do with their lives who don’t read?)  I’ve been exploring death and dying—certainly appropriate at 85, Buddhism, physics, and consciousness itself.  It’s an exploration that feeds me profoundly.

And yet . . . I still can’t imagine my life without story at its core, story to read, story to write.  I used to tell my students, “Life is just one damn thing after another.  Story selects to create meaning.”  It’s a meaning that rarely needs to be spoken because story imprints it on the heart.  We live the meaning and are changed by what we have lived.

It’s that change I miss.  New ideas engage the mind.  Thrill it even.  Story, the best story, enlarges the heart.  And surely my heart hasn’t lost the capacity to be enlarged.

Stories are about struggle.  Always.  About struggle and redemption.  Perhaps it’s the struggle that no longer compels me.  My days now are more about acceptance, more about learning to live and to love as I am. 

Yet a voice whispers inside me.  “One more novel,” it says.  “Surely, you have one more novel in you.”

It’s not that I think the world out there needs another Marion-Dane-Bauer novel.  I’m certain it doesn’t, in fact.  And I’m clear that if I write and publish another, it will be well written because I’m good at my craft and it will be emotionally impactful because I feel my work deeply, and it will probably be commended for both.  But it will change nothing. 

Except this writer, perhaps. 

I’m clear, too, that this new world needs new voices.  New stories.  Stories that are not mine to tell.  Stories I couldn’t tell if I wanted to.  And that is just the world moving on . . . as it always does.  As it must.  I’ve spun my novels out of my deepest, most hidden self for half a century, and they have been quietly received.  That spinning, that reception has been one of the most profound privileges of my life.

Still, I would love to create another.  Just one more.

I know the world doesn’t need it . . . but I do.