Digging Through the Button Jar

“Don’t worry,” she said, peering through the glass.  “If you die, we’ll just get new ones.”

I was there when my friend said this.  It was a cold comment, worthy of a femme fatale from one of my stories.  But I wasn’t concerned; I only laughed.  Because I am just as cold-hearted?  No, because my friend was talking to fish, and as cute as they are, it’s hard to love fish.  Besides, she bought them on a whim for less than a dollar each.

Context is everything.  This rings especially true for a writer.  As a writing project I’ve assigned myself, I’m going through all my old journals (I’m currently on volume fourteen) to see if any of the ideas inside inspire me.  And I am finding a great deal of inspiration.  These journals are riddled with half-ideas—newspaper headlines, quotes that caught my eye or my ear, pictures that intrigue me, recorded dreams.  But they’re only half-ideas because I don’t know where they fit yet.  A line of dialogue doesn’t mean anything unless you know who said it and why; a character doesn’t matter until you know where they come from and why they are the way they are.  Indeed, the reason I am a writer is I have a need to know the whole story.

My journals are like button jars.  The only reason to have a button jar is so that someday, when you need a replacement for that one lost button, you might find something that fits.  But until you do have the need, that empty space, those buttons are just decoration.  I have a wonderful character, Genevieve, that very villainess I mentioned a moment ago.  Her mother killed her fiancé, because she thought that he made Genevieve weak.  In retaliation, Genevieve killed her mother, but she continues to follow her mother’s belief that women define their own moral code and wield power through control over men.  All this is fascinating, but a stagnant picture of a person is only interesting to me for a short time.  (Maybe that’s why I was always so quick to get bored in museums.)  To hold my interest, the character needs to move, grow, change, evolve or devolve.  What happens to Genevieve?  How does she use her ill-gotten power—for good or for evil?  Does she ever meet a man she can’t control?  Who would he turn out to be?  All of these questions remain unanswered, and as long as they do, Genevieve is just a black and white button in a jar.

I write stories so that I can find out the whole.  Characters, ideas, lines and phrases—all these things only matter to me when a story gives them their true place.  That is when they come alive.