Keys...

When I'm writing a fiction piece I am often looking for that click moment. When the right key hits the right lock and everything opens up. 

Yesterday I posted an older story of mine on my main page. I can remember writing it. The end scene had actually been in my head for a long time. I could see the car, I knew what she was going to say when she got to the door. I had all of that. But what I didn't have was a story. 

I was washing dishes when the scene with the woman in the car became a story about a great grandmother and her great granddaughter. Though, in actuality I wasn't sure right at that point how they were related. I had tried on the idea of a retirement home and caretaker, but that didn't really click. It sort of fit, I might have been able to wiggle it around enough to unlock, but there wasn't that moment of  CLICK!

A lot of you (2 out of my 3 readers) have been reading this blog for long enough that you've seen me post bits and scenes that weren't really stories. Things that never had that moment where they clicked in someplace else. That's always frustrating to me. And normally when I go ahead and posts those bits and bobs it's because it's been days, or weeks, or months, that that one piece has been bumping around in my head trying to find the right key and lock. 

As I've mentioned, I'm writing a fiction piece for the blog every week and sending another fiction piece to Dana every other week. Right now she's getting a ton of those scenes. Just pieces of conversations that characters are having in my head. And the majority of them are from the same two "people" and even with a small handful of these scenes written I still haven't had that CLICK moment. The one that ties it all together as a story. I thought I had one at the beginning, I thought I had an endpoint I was aiming toward but then when I started writing that wasn't it. It was a false click. 

And that happens too. Where I think I'm writing one story and halfway through I realize that nope, that's not it at all. If I'm lucky a better one shapes up, but sometimes it just doesn't. It just becomes what it is and that's the way it goes. (How's that for a sentence that has a lot of words but doesn't really say anything?)

What I really love is when I have an ending line to a story. A very ME story. One that you are pretty sure you know what's going on right until you hit that line. Then it changes everything. My hope is that as soon as you hit that line and think...mother fucker...you go back and read the whole piece again to see how it was really there all along. That's my favorite type of story. The one that starts with a CLICK in my head, the click of the lock opening but I have to find the rest of it. 

And even that doesn't always happen. I sometimes have an ending line that I think would make a great BOOM! moment in a story but I can't work the story around to get there. It's either way too obvious what is happening or there is no subtle way to work all the details. So I have an open lock just sitting there. Those I can't even post as a get it out of my head moment because "And it was a seahorse all along" doesn't make any sort of sense without a full story. 

Now, the whole reason you are getting this post today is because I was dreaming last night and the me in my dreams kept telling everyone about this click theory. This moment of keys and locks and how that's when you know you are on the right track. And when I woke up from that dream I thought, yep, that's exactly it. That's what it feels like. That's what it is. And I fell back asleep only to have her pop back up in another dream talking about those keys and locks again. 

So today I'm writing about it, because apparently, this is the bit and bob that is going to bang around in my head until I get it out. 

Hopefully tonight she shuts up about it. We've all got it, Dream Denise, it's a key and a lock and it has to fit together to make a story. Now, if you don't HAVE an actual story to click into just shhhh and let me sleep peacefully.