Letting a Story Run Away

When you sit down to write something, you truly are taking a risk. You do not know what will happen to the vision within your mind. You begin writing, with a clear cut idea in your head. But then, something strange happens. The story you thought you were writing is highjacked by forces that you can not control. Your story about Extraordinary Twins is taken over by a lawyer named Puddin'head Wilson and a mulatto woman named Roxanne.

I think any writer can relate to the dilemna that Twain talks about in the intro to Those Extraordinary Twins. Take a script I have been working on, for example. When I began writing this script, it was a story about a man and a woman on the run. During their run, they take refuge at an abandoned farmhouse. Soon, I wanted to write an entire story set in this abandoned farmhouse. So, the first project died, and was reborn as a story about a man returning to his childhood home after a few years of troubled city living. But that story transformed into a girl returning to her home to rediscover her troubled past. I essentially was a good way into two scripts before I finally started my third successful(I hope) piece.

But what a fascinating dilemna the writer places himself in! Stories write themselves. We never know where the story will go until we write it. Usually, what the subconsious fleshes out is far superior to what we originally intended. A writer must find the story within his story.

The farce that Twain started made the way for the wonderful drama of Puddin'head Wilson, Roxanne, and Tom. What began as a fun story became something much more interesting. I found the novel to be a perfect example of why we must write; we truly do not know what we will come up with. We do not know what lies within our mind. So we need to just write. It doesn't matter what. It will figure itself out once we begin.

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