What Makes a Story?

The Deep End #11

What makes a story?

It’s a question most writers face when they are trying to come up with their latest bit of slop to sell to the consuming public. A story could be a lot of things, and anything could be turned into one story.

An incident between you and a strange woman at Target could be twisted into a tale your grandkids are repeating to their kin in a hundred years.

The thing that happened to you at work after someone accidentally left an unsettling stain on their ergonomic chair.

A memory of you as a kid or teenager that randomly plays back in your brain.

Reflections on a better time, or a hopeful dream for the future.

Life advice columns.

Sometimes they’re words that popped into your brain seemingly out of nowhere, that can only be explained by divine intervention.

I’m currently in the process of writing my fourth and fifth books.

Book One was a prove it type deal, blending the strange and the paranormal with some wit tied together by a narrator hoping to find himself in a sea of uncertainty.

Book Two is a wacky adventure tale with elements of time travel, historical fiction, all being brought to a head by a seemingly deadly love triangle.

Book Three (which as of this article is being read by a literary agent) is a middle-grade paranormal mystery book that could be the first in an anthology series.

Now here I am, writing Book Five in the wee hours of the morning (before 6am), and Book Four after a long day of work.

Book Four is set to be the second installment of the middle-grade paranormal mystery series. It’s lighthearted, with a group of kids off in the woods on an adventure. There’s a concrete beginning, middle, and an ending. It was already shaped out under the guidelines I created to help me pen the series. In other words, I know how the story is supposed to go. Pretty much down to all the events mounting to the epic climax.

Book Five, which follows the writing guidelines of Book Two, is being written without a single ounce of a plan. I have one element that I plan on incorporating, but so far pen has been put to paper with nothing being done in terms of planning on what to write that morning. I’m simply pulling the antenna from out of my brain and hoping to latch onto whatever beacon fate sends into me and out of my fingers to create this story.

Book Two easily followed this method. It was a zany and downright ridiculous premise that was fun to write and had endless possibilities to help fill the page.

Book Five is anything but this. It’s the closest thing to real that I have ever written. No paranormal elements, no adventures, no time travel. Just a guy telling his story in the most real way I could write it. Written solely from my past experiences, it’s a story only I could tell, and because of this, I’m worried about how I can possibly fill the pages of it. Why? Because there really isn’t much of a story to tell.

People like reading about adventures, and love triangles, and ghosts. But what happens when I write an entire book about something a real person is experiencing just as I type away at this article? Am I wasting my time, or will someone find it interesting? What makes a story interesting to you? Is it the thrill of adventure that could never happen in your regular day-to-day life?

Can the mundane reality of life fit into a story, causing the reader to reflect on their own life in a way they never would otherwise? The story in question could be seemingly uneventful—an amalgamation of events in a specific time frame in someone’s life.

You have a story to tell right now. Even if you think you don’t. Every few months is another book. Small things happen. They may seem uneventful, but they still happen. The little things that change you from January 1st to March 31st. You changed in those three months, even though you may not think you have. In it is a story to tell. Hopefully mine is worth reading.