The Nun, the Floor Hockey, and the Horse and the Canoe

or, how you have to write the story you care about

A classmate of mine in a very long-ago writing workshop used to casually toss out anecdotes about her experiences as a social worker decades before. She chuckled and told the story of the divorcing couple living in a massive house with a ballroom on the top floor where they would play games of floor hockey with their children, the games becoming more and more brutal as the divorce went on. She told the tale of the nun she counseled who had a penchant for stealing lingerie from Filene’s Basement—which purloined underthings were found in the trunk of her car when she was arrested. While she regaled us over coffees with these little anecdotes, she spent her writing time drafting a novel about a middle-aged marriage coming gently undone.

Whenever she told us one of her anecdotes, my response was always “Stacy [not her real name], those are your stories! Write about that!” But she never did write about that. She kept on working on the (truth be told) fairly boring novel about a fairly boring marriage.

Why was this any of my business? It wasn’t. But I’ve held onto both the anecdotes and Stacy’s refusal to stray from her novel-in-progress as reminders that no one can tell you what story you need to write. And that sometimes the story that’s sitting right in front of you isn’t really for you. The creative heart wants what it wants, and sometimes what it wants is boring marriage story.

I had the exceptional good fortune to spend a month on a ship traveling from New Zealand to Argentina, along the Antarctic coast this northern winter. I wrote a bit about that journey here and here. Friends kindly expressed their excitement to read more—and they assumed that surely I would be writing more about Antarctica, either in fiction or in an essay like this one.

Of course Antarctica is massive and extreme in every way imaginable. So, one could imagine any number of narratives inspired by the place. My novel Terra Nova grew from exactly that inspiration. While on the ship for just over a month, I would joke about possible novels that could take place on board its fictional equivalent. What better closed-room narrative than a ship cruising inhospitable waters from which one crew or guest or staff meets death? Or think of the social satire one could write about class politics on board. Or the domestic drama at sea if, say, among the 100 guests there happens to be a couple ready for divorce and the other woman or man who set them on their breakup.

But none of these is my story. None of these speaks to me. I’m no more keen to write these narratives (fruitful though they might prove) than my friend Stacy was to write about the lingerie-purloining nun. Just because a topic or a what-if or a set of characters cries out to someone that a novel can come from them, that doesn’t mean you have to follow that temptation. Or that it even is a temptation. For better or for worse, my creative curiosity is already headed in a different direction—into the recent past, to a place very close to where I live, and to another place that’s Antarctcically remote in its own way, despite a myriad superficial differences.

I’m reminded of another story—told to me by husband who heard it (I believe) from a very reliable source. In the town he once lived in, there was a riding trail in the woods behind a bunch of houses. One day, as someone was trotting horseback down the trail, one of the houses had something go funny in its gas line and it blew up. In the explosion, a canoe from the back of the house was shot into the air, and it flew over the horse’s head before landing in the woods on the other side. The horse never noticed. So extreme was the shock of the event—was the theory—that the horse didn’t even flinch, never mind shy or bolt.

a canoe not in the woods (Photo by Wijnand Boerma on Unsplash)

In our household, to be “like the horse with the canoe” is to believe yourself to be finished with an experience when in fact, it’s been so huge for you that you haven’t yet had time to feel it.

I wonder if my time in Antarctica has left me like the horse with the canoe. I wonder if friends who are telling me I surely must be planning to write something about it are actually onto something I have yet to understand. An email exchange with a friend from the ship had me pronouncing with great confidence that, oh, I’ve already processed the trip. I was processing every day. “Not me,” she said. And that was all it took to get me thinking. Who knows. Maybe someday I’ll find more to say about Antarctica—I’m saying more about it right this second, aren’t I?—and maybe there will come a time when that story is my story, and I’m equipped to tell it.

Timing stories is tricky. They need to hold your own fascination before they can fascinate a reader. And you have to have the right balance of understanding and confusion to propel you forward into the writing. Understanding of the essential core of the event you’re writing about, and confusion about what it will end up meaning. I suppose in a way you have to be like a horse that’s passed under a rocketing canoe, hears it thud to the ground, and finally looks over its shoulder (do horses have shoulders?) to see the aftermath in a perfect mysterious emblem. A canoe in the middle of the woods. Huh. I wonder how that happened. Surely there’s a story here.