WRITING FROM LIFE--YOURS AND OTHERS

“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty

What real life stories inspire you? I find that certain family stories, news articles, or overheard conversations lodge in my mind like small rough pebbles and refuse to dissipate until I've turned them over and over, examined and embellished them. Finally they emerge as short story, play, or inspiration for part of a novel.

Family stories especially intrigue me. My parents often related incidents about people from their past, ancestors who came from Germany and Poland, who had worked the land or worked in the mines, women who raised broods of twelve on a hardscrabble farm, marriages arranged, three brothers who married three sisters from the neighboring farm, daughters who eloped, suicides, feuds, love stories.

By the time a grain of sand becomes a pearl (at least a gem of some sort) it no longer is  recognizable as having come from its original source; the vague figures having been fleshed out as full dimensional human beings. Still, upon reading one of my published stories, a sibling or cousin occasionally says, "That story reminds me of one Grandpa used to tell about his Great Aunt Martha."

Perhaps a news story grabs my attention because of its poignancy or some element of irony or its essential human drama. Sometimes I research it to understand the elements that coalesced or the background of the drama. More often, though, it simply provides a springboard for the imagination.
The writer, someone said, is essentially a cannibal who would "rather eat a heart than a ham bone,"
WRITE ON!