Where stories come from is a mystery. Some arise from experience, some from the imagination, and some from a combination. Even if I have a beginning—a character in a place—I never know where a story will go. A few odd stories start from almost nowhere, like this one, “Longing.”
Once I was doing a jigsaw puzzle of van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” and, in the midst of my suffering, I said to myself, “I can write a story about this.” I wrote “Puzzle” about a Pfizer retiree in New Jersey, at a loss for what to do, who goes to a neighbor’s house to see whether he can help after the neighbor’s wife’s died. The neighbor’s getting rid of the wife’s possessions, and, after a bourbon at eleven in the morning, the protagonist takes home several of her puzzles. You see what I’m saying. I created a circumstance so the retiree can make the puzzle.
“Longing” was very much like this. One evening, I was sitting on my ex-girlfriend’s porch in Denver, drinking wine, and I looked across the street at the various houses. There was no story, no plot, no character. I said, “I can write a story about this.” Ha ha. What story? Who? What could happen?
I’ve never thought of breaking and entering another person’s house for any reason. Occasionally, though, in a friend’s bathroom, I’ve looked into a medicine cabinet. In a way, this story was like that, looking into a stranger’s medicine cabinet—or house.
In general, I want to make characters “not me,” whatever that means. Females of different races are pretty far from being me, so I often use them. Still, it’s challenging to imagine what they’d think and how they’d behave. Starting with a Black or Latino has some of the same challenging issues. Have I been able to create accurate enough thoughts and behavior that the reader can believe me, the writer?
That evening in Denver, I drank my wine, maybe took a few notes, and days later, found myself in my self-a-basement phase in Ouray, where I wrote this story.