Stories are like cats.
Listen to me now, before you protest. I’m speaking from the pov of a gateway writer, one of those people who have an open door somewhere at the back of their brains, through which at the least convenient moment, a story or a character intrudes. I am aware that this is not the only way to birth stories, and that those of you who plan the story in advance, with excruciating care, and plot every step consciously, considering whether your character should be blond, brunette, or have just a soupcon of red to her tresses think that our lot is a bit mad. It’s okay, we think you’re a bit sad. And we often stare at you, with your spreadsheets and your graph paper and wonder why you bother at all. I mean, if there is not something pushing and demanding you do it now, why do it.
I think that’s an uncrossable gulf. And I say this as someone who has been both a plotter and a pantser and is now some undefinable blend of the two. But every time, unless it was under contract, and because children needed shoes (or college fees) I wrote because the story was there in my head. It was reaching it, removing everything that wasn’t story (like the sculptor with the block of marble) and making it readable by others that was a problem. But I knew the story was there, and I could sense it and its shape and its people. Getting there sometimes involved graphs and charts and …. no, not spreadsheets. I LOATHE spreadsheets. (Which makes writing a series with younger son interesting, since his wife would have had a run for the money, if he could JUST have married his spreadsheets. And yes, for those who are catching up now, my younger son married Mike Williamson’s older daughter weekend before last, in Portugal so my parents could attend. They were childhood sweethearts and it’s only surprising to anyone who knew them from Liberty con that it took them this long. This also must serve as my excuse to be absent from here for two weeks. And I came back sick as a dog, which must excuse the hallucinatory nature of this post.)
But for those of us who do feel the story, there, pushing, however it presents: as character or feel, as setting or idea, or sometimes (I swear I’m not making this up) a swirl of colors and wistfulness, stories are like cats.
Note that I write this on a day after the day — remember we’re very ill, some kind of foreign crud that has me flattened more than I’ve been these last ten years — when the cats broke into and ate he fortune cookies that came with the Chinese takeout that’s our go to when sick. (For some reason being sick necessitates fried rice.) Then the same charming critters — well, Indy — managed to take apart the ceramic fountain, purchased because too heavy to easily move/take apart. Twice. Then this morning they broke into our bedroom, by turning the round knob. I came downstairs to find they’d dragged my clothes out of the dirty clothes basket and four feet away on the floor where they…. well, it looked like someone poured a bucket of cat pee on them, okay? And then while I was having breakfast, Indy and Muse took turns dive bombing the water fountain.
But then Circe kitten came, when I sat down to write this, and curled up on my lap prettily and looked at me with sweetly trusting, adoring eyes. (Yes, I did assure her she’ll be the last one turned into a hat and a pair of mittens.)
Stories are like that. They will jump on you and wake you, and demand attention right now. They will drag you from the comfort of your planned life, to come and tend to them with loud cries, and sharp claws. They will make you read all sorts of absurd things, because they must be fed. They will send you chasing through unsavory locales, because you know the story is hiding around the next turn.
They will hang around until you give in. They will spawn more stories once you let them in. Just sneak into the back brain and have a litter, so your little book is now six books and when are you going to find time for them all?
And heaven help you if you feed the stray ones hanging around. This leads to episodes of “Oh, John Ringo, No!” and such, where a writer embarrassingly says things like “I really don’t write this, but it wouldn’t leave me alone.”
But only you sit down and make a pretty lap, in front of the fire, and say “Come and sit on me now” and watch them all be too busy to bother you. Oh, no. They must groom their plot. They must curl up around their characters. They have some urgent business with some other writer across the room right now. Why would they want you?
And yet, there is a way. For all the trouble stories — and cats– are, there are moments when everything comes together just right, and they curl up on you and purr, and everything is lit with a magical glow, and the storytelling comes together just right.
I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Mad Genius Club 
26 responses to “The Stories And the Campfire”
If my writing is like cats, they either are determined to tease then claw my face off, are the big one with mange that find a body part to lie on uncomfortably for me and won’t leave because if I try to move they will open up a major blood vessel, or these beautiful things that I can look at but never, ever touch.
And I’m having my own “Oh John Ringo NO!” writing moment right now. Far too much sex and rope and restraints and latex and leather and lesbians and the occasional good decision.
And explosions, can’t forget those.
But I agree, wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Might trade them for better cats…maybe a Maine Coon or something.
A Maine Coon will not be a ‘better cat’. He will merely find new and exciting ways to annoy you.
Like curling up in the sink, opening all the faucets and clogging the drain…
Jokes on you, maybe new and exciting ways to be annoyed are what I want! 😀
Hey, if you want to tempt the cats, that’s on you. Flooding a sink is not the weirdest thing I’ve seen a cat do…
Want to have Indy for a week?
If our German Shepard wasn’t a cat killer, maybe.
Sounds like some of Alma’s characters offering their Familiars….. 😏😸
Indy is roughly half maine coon and half siamese,w ith an unfathomable bit of stray thrown in. That’s Indy.
That… that explains so much…
(Growing up, we had an orange tabby who was half Siamese. He was an… eccentric fellow. Not very smart, but just very eccentric.)
Indy is smart AND eccentric.
I’m half tempted to wonder if some of Leslie Fish’s “bred for intelligence” cats got loose…..
Considering those are considered two of the smartest cat breeds, much is explained.
Pieces of a supernatural harem series keep popping up in my head. Strangely, though, they are NOT the sex scenes. Probably for the best – I can tell them that I’m obviously not ready to write them yet.
…that’s Tuesday through Friday for me. Different harems, different techniques (the shipgirl harem has been interesting…).
What’s your secret to repelling plot bunnies Saturday through Monday? Desperate minds would like to know…
We have different plot bunnies come in for that shift. Less kink and erotica, more explosions and fire.
I love the art banner!
I can’t vouch for your younger son’s spreadsheets, but most of mine predated my switch to notebooks as a method of making sure what I knew about a given story didn’t fall out of my head by the time I got a chance to write it down.
I’ve been ending up pantsing a lot of scenes – and am slowly learning how to rope them into some kind of coherent form with formal plotting documents. Being an only slightly reformed programmer, they all are hyperlinked together.
Which, of course, means I have about three dozen documents open when I really get to work (not often enough).
These are not recommendations, just stuff that’s worked for me that I offer in the hopes you or others find them useful:
What I did on some of my early writings was to write up a couple thousand words summarizing the plot as I understood it in red text, and then copy/paste any scenes I wrote elsewhere into that document, replacing the red text for that part with the copy-pasted bit.
More recently I use the software Scrivener. It can be a pain in the backside, but it’s nice for keeping different bits of story and background notes in one place, and it will output stuff in the Manuscript area of the file as a single document, once you have the pieces organized to your satisfaction. There’s a 30-day free trial, and I think the company participates in Black Friday/Cyber Monday like everyone else.
More expensive than software, but handy if you’re trying to look at a master document and a bunch of other documents at once, is a dual monitor setup, but if you’ve been a programmer possibly you already have that.
Yep. If I had the desk room, I’d put up the four that my video card would support.
I pretty much do things the way I do because I think in HTML half the time still.
So (when it is organized), I have a series synopsis. Which links to novel synopses. Which links to chapter synopses. Which link to characters, scene summaries, and manuscripts. With reversed links between all of them.
I get a lot of documents up mostly because the brain wanders all over the place – to a different scene, a different chapter, a different novel, or even a different series (or a short). Sigh…
Oh, the manuscript can be turned into a Kindle with just a couple of clicks, thanks to a rather marathonish session of digging into the Word object model. Produces the manifest, contents, and HTML files, then runs the Kindle compiler over it.
Oh, there is also a link in the novel/short synopsis to the cover file – although virtually all of those are placeholders at the moment.
Cool! You’re a lot more organized than I was at that stage of writing.
You may want to check out Obsidian. Hyperlinks, tags, folders, search, templates, graphs, backlinks, the works. Also the only note software I’ve tried that felt good to type in. I haven’t looked at the export options, but the files are all Markdown, which shouldn’t be hard to convert to HTML.
Pass. I just got my card that lets me pay for illegal immigrants transgender treatments the other day (otherwise known as “Medicare”).
With my current system, I’m past the “If I just spend a couple months tweaking THIS bit of it, I’ll save five whole minutes a day going forward.”
A whole new piece of software to get annoyed at and want to fix just is not on my list.
How do I write?
Well, I’m working with Scribner for a new LitRPG story idea, but before then…lots of Word and/or Google Docs for things like individual chapters, a “cut” file for things that I might not use but I wrote and want to keep, the character sheets, a rough plot outline, etc, etc, etc…
(Scribner is working out pretty good. I might transfer what I’ve done in A Roman Solist over to it at this rate.)
I would love to have enough money to upgrade to a three or four monitor setup, but that’s at least $1500 (new video card at minimum, already upgraded the power supply on my computer, three monitors and a stand to handle them all…), and a lot of landscape in my office.
The biggest thing is that I need to find a workspace that is comfortable and that’s hard when Dad cranks up the TV on MSNBC or The View or any number of TV shows in the family room where the TV is literally at eye level for me. Thinking about setting up a screen of some kind, or a folding divider.
Right now, if stories were cats, all of mine are in the pissing on my clothes phase, when they aren’t ignoring me entirely. I’m starting to think I would be better off with metaphorical pet rocks, whatever their equivalent is in this analogy. Perhaps I should see if the Chinese restaurant needs anyone to write them some new fortune cookies.
Periods like this happen. They always end. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but they do. Hang in there.