Storystorm

This week's Storystorm is brought to you by Victoria CampbellLately, I have been struggling. When I sit down to write, words don't come or, if they do, they never seem to be the right ones. My characters are flickering shadows and I don't feel their burn or struggle or desire. If they have hearts, I have never felt a beat.In dark bars, I sit with my peers and peel labels from beers and talk and talk and talk about stories that are prescribed like medicine. Jesus' Son will reinvigorate a sluggish pulse. Hemingway to cure gun shy dialogue. It is even rumored that Amy Hempel's words can mend a broken heart. Stories that keep us up at night, stories that we admire, stories that escape us. Stories I cannot begin to write.Over spring break, I took a step away from these stories. I travelled to my parents' house on a cold New England island and walked the shoreline and smelled salt and spent nights in my childhood bed. On a day when snow turned the world white, I discovered the remains of my childhood library at the bottom of a guest room closet. Underneath discarded shoes and slippers were the stories that had kept me up long after bedtime.The covers were worn and cracked, page edges yellow and wilting. I sifted through stacks, picking out the Redwall series, CS Lewis, Philip Pullman. I started with The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, the first in a series of books focused on Arthurian legend. I remembered the story in a way that surprised me, delighted in finding long-forgotten characters in action on the page, and once again visiting the imagined terrain of a green, wet Wales. As I moved through the series, I began to understand what it was about these books that had entranced me so much as a young girl.It wasn't the intrigue of the plot. It wasn't the dialogue or the organization or the flow. It wasn't the diction. It was the characters. It was the way they came to life, living in my mind as well as on the page. I felt for these fictional beings, thought about them long after a finished chapter. I wondered about the rest of their lives, how they would move forward, if they would ever come home.I spent the rest of the trip in bed with these stories, letting their magic wash over me. Upon returning to New Hampshire, I felt, once again, the desire to write, the urge to pin a down a character's essence, to force my reader to laugh and cry and sigh along with my characters. It was in those stories intended for the open minds of children that I was gently reminded of my own love for writing, for the power a single character can possess, for empathy that can bring a reader to tears. These are the stories I want to write, ones that move and breathe and last.