Story Has a Will to Survive

Have you written a story? 

Did you write a quick journal entry? 

Did you write down a secret?

Okay, so take out that scrap of paper, tuck it away somewhere, behind a wall board, in the shed, under a stepping stone in the walkway. (Better wrap it in something durable.) Put it in a jar to exist among the nails and screws in the shop.

Maybe it will be found, maybe it won’t.  

Think of Anne Frank’s diary kicked aside by a Gestapo’s boot?

I’m not saying our addition will be as illustrious as Anne Frank’s—who wants that experience—but we have a song to sing.

Isn’t it fun to find a recipe written in your grandmother’s own hand?

Our ancestors lived and loved had lives like ours, or not like ours, we want to hear about that.

Did they stand on a hillside, eyes cast skyward and ask some of the same questions we are asking? Did they rail at God?

It was a secret railing, but grand kids, great grand kids, and great great grand kids ought to know about it.

Except it has blown away…

You might find that the people who inhabited your old house, or that dilapidated  farm in the country, a foundation now of crumbling concrete, with vines encrusted, once belonged to your grandparents. And each spring daffodils, those planted when the house was young, come up trying to tell the story of those who lived in that house.

Were those daffodils fertilized by the dust of human experience?

Maybe some of that dust came to you, it sat on your bureau, you wiped it up with a damp cloth, you threw it in the washing machine. It went into the sewer, into the water purification  plant, whoa, perhaps you drank it, a part of it went into the ocean.

In the ocean it dissolved among all the many other droplets. As mist it  flew off the crest of a wave blown by the wind. It collected in the sky, joined by a million other droplets, and the cloud that they made, when its belly was full, rained, and watered the daffodils.

Creativity is a Scavenger Hunt

"Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak."--Elizabeth Gilbert

I had Gilbert's quote rattling around in my brain, and an experience last Sunday at a garden barbecue proved it to be applicable. 

At the gathering, I ran across a man I had met before and knew from a previous conversation that he was going to India with a Missionary Group. So I asked him about it.

His group visited an orphanage that housed HIV children. The US group visited to give joy to the children, to play with them, not treat them, convert them or any other reason. 

"They were happy," he said. "People in poverty seem happier than US citizens."

My daughter and I observed that as well when she was considering adopting a child from Africa, and we began watching documentaries. The kids seemed happy, and we pondered that. We wondered if we would be doing a service to take them out of their environment. (Provided they were well fed and taken care of, of course.)

In talking with George, I learned that 80% of children born to HIV mothers contract the disease, most often, however, he said, "It is from breast milk."

I was shocked that a mother's milk could be a death sentence to her child. A death sentence, because in the provincial village that George visited the children weren't treated.

Okay, back to my original point that "Creativity is a scavenger hunt."

I had only recently been composting (yes, composting, as in mulling it over) a new novel and wanted a baby from the last novel to be the protagonist. She had been born to an HIV mother who died in childbirth, leaving her orphaned. My question was did she contract the disease?

She had a 20% chance that she did not, and since her mother died, she had no breast milk. 

I made my decision, she didn't. 

That afternoon saved my little Star.

Here are some points from Stephen King to chew on: