In Gestation
By FARHA GUERRERO
I received these questions from a fellow writer in response to my morning's blog post titled The Enduring Imaginative Life.
He writes:
“Interesting. So, for you, does the story emerge fully formed, from beginning to end? Or is it more of a sketch, an idea that then develops through the act of writing? Are you ever surprised yourself? Does the story ever take an unexpected turn?”
I see many possibilities in answering this.
The stories that reside in my head often do emerge fully formed, after many 'drafts' that I rework in my mind.
But the act of writing, which I want to make distinct from a story's inception, lends itself to several possibilities.
Once I dip my pen into the ink bottle and bring it to the page, my stories can take on a different life, but not to any extreme. They rarely veer from their original ideas or essence.
There is, however, always in the act of writing, the possibility of surprise. And this is neither predictable nor imagined.
The writing process itself could bring on a new scene between characters, for example, or a sensory detail that will only come to me during the act of writing.
Franz Kafka, writing about the creation of his short story The Judgment, observed in his diary on September 23, 1912:
“I wrote this story, The Judgment, in a single sitting, during the night of September 22–23, from ten in the evening until six in the morning. My legs had become so stiff from sitting that I could scarcely pull them out from under the desk.
The terrible exertion and joy, how the story developed before me, as though I were moving forward through water. Several times that night I carried my own weight upon my back.
How everything can be said, how a great fire is prepared for everything, even the strangest ideas, in which they perish and rise again.
[...]
Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening of the body and soul.”
This is a very bold statement by Kafka.
I have to wonder about the terrible exertion and joy that he describes, and whether or not that is something I've ever experienced.
I would say, yes, certainly both. Fiction, I find extraordinarily challenging, especially in shorter prose. And joy, absolutely, is something I experience when seeing a story come to fruition.
But the question remains: will one of my stories one day take an unexpected turn? Will I see the story develop right before me in the act of writing, from beginning to end?
That is certainly worth thinking about.
To date, I have experienced this little. It's hard to know why. And this is where I think each writer has, or develops, a unique creative process.
I, like Kafka, write very short fiction.
But short fiction can be a snapshot of time constrained within its brevity. I sometimes liken the form to a photograph.
The photographer, as Susan Sontag writes, frames the reality of the world that they portray. Well, a short-story writer does that as well.
What is beyond the edges of the photograph, as Cortázar explains in a literature lecture he delivered at Berkeley in 1980, can reveal, at least to the reader, more possibilities.
But what of the possibilities that reveal themselves to the writer?
Kafka returned to The Judgment in his diary on February 11, 1913:
“While correcting The Judgment, I am writing down all the relationships that have become clear to me in the story, insofar as I can recall them now. This is necessary, because the story emerged from me like a real birth, covered in dirt and mucus, and only I have the hand capable of reaching through to the body, and the desire to do so.”
The birth analogy here is interesting.
If the gestation period is about residing in drafts, is that in the mind or on the page?
Whether this gestation period is internal or external may not be the question.
The birth, I guess, matters here. But I also think that the gestation of a piece, even if it never reaches the page, is worth considering as an act of literary formation.