Mslexia

From the Mslexia Workshops Collection

Short Story Competition Workshop 1 - Stealing Stories

Devised by SARAH SALWAY

Where do we get our ideas from? One myth is that ideas come to artists magically, floating in from our unconscious, our dreams; or that we are somehow born with a treasure chest of ideas to sift through. Maybe a more honest answer is that we gather many of our story ideas from other people: friends, family, people we work with, newspapers, snatches of conversation we overhear, myths, textbooks… However it still takes a brave writer to admit this in public and to declare, like TS Eliot, that 'Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal'.

It's the difference between borrowing and stealing that is the crux here. To borrow something is to expect to give it back intact; but if you steal it, then you need to find some way of making it your own.

A good writing process is such that we will work (and work) on the original story, putting so much of ourselves into it, until, in the final draft, the original owners probably won't recognise it.

In fact, the motivation behind my literary thefts has never been to deprive someone of what they own, but to use it as a starting point to understand – through writing - what it is about their stories that has captured my imagination so strongly. Often it is an aspect of the narrative – an emotion, an understanding, a voice - that the original teller has missed out completely, and as long as I write into it using my own truths, the story I eventually write will be unique to me.

For this series of workshops I've taken three categories of stories that can be used in this way: stranger's stories you overhear or are told, family stories that often happened long before you were born, and newspaper stories.

WORKSHOP ONE: STORies ABOUT STRANGERS

One of my stories, 'Painting the family pet', came from a conversation with a friend about an artist she knew who knocked on people's doors, offering to paint their pets. This artist became so tired of people saying they had no pets that, one day, she offered to paint their furniture instead. Later, I couldn't stop thinking about why someone would want to have their furniture painted. I had an image of an artist setting up her easel in front of a piece of household furniture, having to take it just as seriously as any human portrait. Then a story came to me about a woman who is so obsessed with food that she commissions a portrait of her fridge...

'There were about four or five writers in the room, and after the guy finished telling the story, someone said, “Well, who's going to write it?”’

My final story was written from the point of view of the fridge's owner, but the original anecdote allowed me to think about the artist's motivations too. Both women wanted something from one another.

In a Paris Review interview, Raymond Carver explains the inspiration for his story, 'Why Don't You Dance?' like this: ‘We were all sitting around drinking and someone told a story about a barmaid named Linda who got drunk with her boyfriend one night and decided to move all of her bedroom furnishings into the backyard… There were about four or five writers in the room, and after the guy finished telling the story, someone said, “Well, who's going to write it?”’

It took Carver more than four years to write his version, in which a newly separated man puts his possessions on his front lawn and a young couple end up dancing amongst the objects – a facsimile of the happiness the owner once hoped his things would bring.
What makes 'Why Don't You Dance?' Carver's is that, although the idea came from the drunken anecdote, he infuses the story with what he describes as his main theme: ‘Lives [my characters] become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They'd like to set things right, but they can't. And usually they do know it, I think, and after that they just do the best they can.’

He needed to get it written out into some sort of meaning for himself.

'Why Don't You Dance?' is full of fictional details that separate it from the original story of the drunken barmaid. Carver raises the stakes by changing the protagonist to a man in crisis. The device of the observing couple highlights how other people can't help him. His pain won't go away just because he's exposed it in his yard along with his furniture. In Carver’s story, the girl in the couple can't shake off her reaction to what happened that night.

‘Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy give it to us, and all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?” She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.’

It’s possible to believe that the image of an anonymous barmaid's possessions out on the lawn caused the same reaction in Carver. He needed to get it written out into some sort of meaning for himself.

EXERCISE: FIND THE THEME

- Take a story you have overheard or been told, and strip it back to the bare events, e.g. Artist can't sell paintings, goes door to door, pet portraits, no-one has pets, paints furniture instead.

- Now think what it is about this story that interests you. Not what is generally interesting, but what interests you. This will be your theme. In my case, it was what happens when inanimate objects replace a living breathing love. Another writer might riff about wild animals in suburbia, or how much luck is involved in being discovered as an artist. You could brainstorm several themes, then pick one and rewrite the story, following your theme.

- Try extending the narrative further than your original list of events. What happened next? Who else is in the story? Start with an image that sums up your theme, such as the man watching the young couple dancing amongst his objects in Carver's story. In my story, 'Painting The Family Pet', the story begins with two desperate women on either side of a front door, each wanting to be where the other is.

SARAH SALWAY is the author of three novels, and a collection of short stories, Leading the Dance (Speechbubble Books). The current Canterbury Laureate, her first poetry collection, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book, was published by Pindrop Press in March 2012 (www.pindroppress.com)

Download a pdf of this workshop
WORKSHOP TWO: FAMILY STORIES
WORKSHOP THREE: NEWSPAPER STORIES

These workshops have been edited from Sarah Salway's original essay in Short Circuit: a guide to the art of the short story edited by Vanessa Gebbie (Salt, 2009) especially for the 2012 Mslexia Women's Short Story Competition, judged by Tessa Hadley. Find out more