By Laura Nicoara • So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence [sic], a little independence there…
CRAFT: The way you move between backstory and the present moment is seamless, showing the reader how much the characters live in the past in their minds. Did you run into balance issues as you were writing, wanting to stay…
Doppelganger In his dreams the people of the city are ghosts. The writer is walking down a crowded sidewalk, but the pedestrians around him are made of mist or smudges of light or dust. They speak in the…
CRAFT: In the Acknowledgments, you indicate that Late Air, your debut novel, grew out of a short story. Can you talk a little bit about that process? How did you know that this short story would be able to be…
Here’s a quick look at some of the great fiction out this November. Happy pub day to all! What a great month for us readers… Laura Adamczyk, Hardly Children: Stories “In Hardly Children, characters make bad but not irredeemable choices,…
Fire When I was eight years old, I watched a fire leap over the forest in glowing arcs and the men in my family battle it away. The fire had taken out farms on the panhandle for a…
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • David Gates doesn’t recommend flashbacks to new writers when he’s teaching fiction. When line editing a student’s piece, he cuts pretty much every flashback he sees. I know because he cut plenty of mine when…
By Amelia Brown • Daisy Johnson is quite obviously inspired by folklore in her debut collection of stories, Fen—her pages are home to sentient objects, immortal monsters, and animal transformations galore. In fact, Johnson’s stories pledge their allegiance to two narrative…
Here’s a quick look at some of the great fiction out this week. Happy pub day to all! Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black “This book is dark and captivating and essential. This book is a call to arms and…
O was twenty-nine when he died, and now he lives in my head. He says it’s like swimming. He can’t breathe. “You don’t have to,” I say. “You’re dead.” But he just sighs. At first, there was a lot of…
Where Stories Come From: Dreams, Notebooks and Fear.
I want to write about where stories come from. Or, at least, where the bits that make up stories can come from. As writers we’re constantly faced with a blank page. Filling it is the thing.
This story originated in a dream. A good friend of mine died, and for a while I dreamt about him a lot. One morning I woke from a dream and wrote a 3000-word story which told exactly the dream-as-dreamt. It didn’t make for great reading. But the first line, the first thing I wrote down in my notebook on waking, was “O died, and now he lives in my head.” Dreams are useful as a source of inspiration, and I’m sure this will not come as news to you. But I’d steer clear of using them in their entirety. Like life, they usually make little sense.
This brings me to notebooks. Most of this story comes from mine. I jotted down “helmet cam” after a conversation with a mate who’d suffered a bad cycling injury. “Heat turns you into someone different,” was overheard in a conversation. I saw a television news item about a village built on a rubbish tip, and I jotted it down. “Illuminated jigsaw pieces” and “something in his blood stopped working” were phrases I wrote in my notebook after a plane journey and while thinking about my father respectively. “Look like a prick in photos,” was also in the notebook. It’s from cringing at photographs of myself.
As I was writing this story, I had my notebook to hand. I tend to write in fragments, so when I want to know where a story needs to go, I flick through the notebook and a phrase will select itself for me to use. In this way, the story is built up.
When I started the story, all I had was the first line and the idea of writing about grief. I built it up by listening to the characters speak in my head (they really do this, don’t they?) and using my notebooks for building blocks when I was stuck. When the deceased character in the story said the line (in my head) “You’re like a snare drum,” I almost deleted it as too clichéd, but on the back of it followed immediately the “you need someone to hit you” line.
That was when I knew I really had a story.
It concerned me. A man writing in the voice of a bereaved woman, one who has suffered (at least once) physical violence at the hands of a partner. But I believe we should write wherever our words take us, and the authenticity of the story can be judged on the story itself. I hope it works. I believe it does. And the fact that it frightened me to write this story, and that every time I read it back it frightens me anew, means that it is absolutely the story I needed to write.
JASON JACKSON’s prize-winning writing has been published extensively online and in print. So far in 2018 Jason has won the Writers Bureau competition, come second (for the second year running) in the Exeter Short Story competition, been runner-up in the Frome Short Story competition and had work short-listed at the Leicester Writes competition. His work has also appeared this year at New Flash Fiction Review and Fictive Dream. In 2017 he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jason regularly performs his fiction around the south-west of the UK. He tweets @jj_fiction
