About Storywriting

At Sea

Will I get in trouble for saying this? Will I get in even more trouble for doing it?

Coming up with the actual story—you know, the this happened and then that happened and that led to this other thing—is sometimes difficult. Sometimes we find ourselves bobbing up and down on the deep blue sea. We’ve got a character and a situation, maybe we’re enamored of the setting, and we know what we want to do with point of view, but something is wrong. We are suddenly rudderless. We listen for our characters to tell us what they want to do, but—put bluntly—they ain’t talkin’.

So what to do?

Well, there’s probably nothing we can do about the stories we’ve started that haven’t gone anywhere. We simply have to put them aside until they call out to us that maybe, just maybe, they’ve thought of something we can do with them.

But sometimes, when none of our other ways of coming up with stories that work pan out, we can look to the masters. Yes, I’m suggesting that we steal their storylines. There’s plenty of precedent for doing this. Chaucer freely borrowed from Boccaccio to write “The Clerk’s Tale.” O’Henry borrowed from Maupassant, as did Henry James. The list is long and includes Shakespeare as a “borrower.”

I did the same in writing a short story called “The Assistant Professor,” but I highly doubt that anyone would know that “the story” is lifted from Chekhov’s “The Student.” My story “A Maxfield Parrish Sky” started by following Maupassant’s “Moonlight.” Two stories I’ve posted on this Substack are fictionalized from true love stories. 

I’m perfectly comfortable doing this. There is a universality to pride and class differences leading us to misunderstanding one another—“The Student.” Likewise, our bigotry challenged by our love and concern for a family member really does sometimes result in waking us up—“Moonlight.” These are stories told in a thousand very different ways in a thousand eras. It seems perfectly natural to imagine how and to whom a story from nineteenth century Russia might happen in twenty-first century America. Ditto for a French story of the same century.

In Chekhov’s “The Student,” the protagonist is on his way home, thinking deep thoughts, full of himself, and comes upon a knot of simple uneducated women. He pontificates and misreads their reaction to him and leaves even more full of pride. It’s a small step to making this character into a newly minted Ph.D. on his way to his first tenure track position. He pulls over to a roadside junk/antique sale and interacts with an obviously hardscrabble family. Unsurprisingly, he misreads their signals and drives away sure he’s been a hit and will later benefit professionally from the “friendship” he thinks he’s made. As in the Chekhov story, readers can see that he actually knows nothing about their lives. His epiphany is false.

It is no crime to see the universality in the master’s story and then translate it to your own time.

Please feel free to comment.