You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Anne Wright

You can tie your imagination up in a chair and slap it silly but it still won’t give up a story that doesn’t want to be told. That story isn’t ready to come out yet. The pieces aren’t in place, and even if your imagination could spit it out of its tight little mouth, who could make sense of upside down words and backward scenes and characters simple as a comic strip?

You know this, as you whittle a sharp point back on your pencil and brush away the crumbs of your soft pink eraser. Sometimes that story has been told so often that you can’t choke out another version no matter how you force your tired imagination to run up and down the canyons, hiding from Indians behind the cliffs; no mater how often you dangle it out of an airplane, threatening to drop it from thousands of miles into an ocean full of the cut up typewriter paper from your discarded ideas.

You just can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told. Start over. Stop obsessing about a new angle. Stop looking for ideas in overheard conversations in the doctor’s office, listening to old women talk about their sons who went wrong, took drugs, robbed banks, married fallen women. Stop digging around in old family photos, looking into faces of your ancestors and wondering why they look so grim in their homespun shirts and scuffed shoes. Let it go. Drop it down the well and hear it hammer against the hard dry dirt a hundred feet below. It doesn’t want to be told.