Death to the refrigerator

I went looking for a book on writing short stories today. A nice stack of paper to hold in my and which in turn would hold my hand. I “went to the refridgerator” as one of my favorite journalism professor used to put it.

He was refering to the lengths writers will got to to avoid writing. In the throes of writing, he would suddenly find himself at the refridgerator, for the tenth time in a single hour, not writing at all. He acknowledged gaining a bit of weight in this manner. In my case, I found myself searching for my tenth book on writing short stories.

I don’t need another one. My book shelves are bloated. Instead, I need to work out the practical side of writing on my own. I find a system that works for me. So here I am. I didn’t buy the book.

Where to start? Meaning.

The story has to covey a meaning. It has to say something about how the world works and what its like to be here. Maybe its a logical epiphany. Oh my God, Jack avoid intimacy with women because his mother neglected him. Or maybe is an emotion, a feeling that can’t be expressed explicity, but is coveyed through the details of the story accumulating to put the reader on the top of Mt. Everest, in the horror of a battle field, the embrace of a long lost love.

Princeton held a science writing seminar this week, and on the poster for the event was a graphic depicting a bunch of scientific formulas (chemistry, mathematics, physics) falling into a funnel of the sort used to put oil in a car engine. Out the small end of the funnel came a single sentence written in clear English. A core meaning, distilled down from many things.

Writing a fiction story is just the opposite. The idea is grown into many details and thus the story gains life. The reader’s experience works the other way around. She absorbs all the details as she reads and from them comes to understand, logically or emotionally or both, the core meaning of the story.

Settling on that core meaning takes time, and, if it wasn’t nailed down exactly to begin with, lots of rewrites. So it seems like that’s a pretty good place to start thinking about how one writes stories. How to decide what to write about. How to distill it down so it can be blown back into life. What are the steps taken to build the story from that core meaning.

(On a side note: My friend Gadi has pointed out, or at least implied, that this blog might be an electronic version of buying too many books on writing or compulsive visits the refridgerator. I only would point out that this blog costs next to nothing to run and contains no calories.)