Steven Koch’s wisdom for writers is the same wisdom for all of us—honoring our natural dis-ease when we feel uncertain. It’s normal, part of all creative endeavors, all relationships. Life itself.
The secret fear of fiction writers is that they are deficient, deficient in the ability to make up a story. Koch says, “The mere word story immobilized [writers] as headlights immobilize the deer. The dreaded monosyllables plot worked on them like Kryptonite: Flash it before them, and they would slump down helpless.”
Stories, Stephen Koch says, are not made up out of thin air. The word invent comes from the Latin root, “to discover.” Writers don’t invent or make up stories out of thin air, they find them, discover them, uncover them—in the real world, or in their imaginations.
The search for the story is usually long, slow, delicate, and often is rewarded only in the last moments of work.
The story is found in the preverbal world within. It can take a long time for the preverbal to be translated into a verbal story.
Our story panic is based upon not recognizing “that storytelling—all storytelling—begins in precisely this speechlessness.”
This is the essential state of “Not knowing.”
Learning to tolerate, even enjoy, uncertainty is a gift to ourselves and others.
Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 57-59.
