After I posted So, What IS a Story? last
week, where I attempted to break down the type of story told in fast-paced commercial fiction into its components, one of the
commenters quite rightly pointed out that I'd forgotten the most important
ingredient of all - the sprinkle of fairy dust.
If a story is the engine of a book, then
the Inciting Incident, the quest, the obstacles you place in your main
character's way to stop them acheiving their goal are the parts of that engine
– the pistons, bearings, pins and cranks. Essential, if a little mundane.
But fairy dust? Fairy dust is the fuel that
makes it all work.
It's that surge of excitement when a new
idea blossoms in your mind, seemingly out of nowhere. It's that moment when you
get a sentence down and it says exactly what you meant it to say. It's the
shape of your words in your head and on your tongue, as scenes you've dreamt
about for days, weeks, months, years
come to life. That fizzing in your fingertips as ideas pour out of them faster
than you can type or write.
It's the moment someone gets on the bus you're
riding to work and they ARE your main character, or you hear a song and know
instantly it was written for the story you're trying to tell. And it's that feeling
you carry around with you for days after someone reads the pages you've given them, trying to hide
the fact that you just handed them your soul, and tells you you can do this, carry on.
But it's more than that, even.
At first, trying to fit the principles of
storytelling to your work can seem dull and uninspiring. It certainly did to
me. I was outlining stories which
adhered exactly to the structure in
the diagram in last week's post… and they were so boring, they never got
written.
But then I discovered YA. I discovered
stories and characters I could connect with, and now, instead of trying to come
up with plots that fitted a particular structure, I was coming up with ideas I
really cared about, and learning how to use that structure to turn them into
stories that actually worked. And that excitement, that magic is still with me
now.
So more than anything, fairy dust is this: telling
the stories that come from our hearts.
