I did admit these would be sporadic, but consider this a good faith effort to keep the stove from dying completely. The previous dispatch covered the recording and maintenance of ideas by the concept of transcription, whereby you write things down—any little things you notice or think of—to be used later in your writing. You can read that post here. But the question remains, how do you go from a single idea, concept, or image, to something more concrete like a short story or poem?
It’s a good question, and one that I feel is essential to the making of a Writer (capital W). It’s also one of the questions I’m asked most often: Where do you get your ideas from? And my answer is always extrapolation.
Extrapolation is my concept for taking that single idea, concept, or image and expanding upon it until you have a fuller, more complex and fleshed out plot, narrative, or landscape. For me, extrapolation works via a set of questions layered over the original premise. So you have X, but what if Y happened to X? And what if Y was located in Z? And what if Z had U, V, and W happening in it at the same time? Extrapolation takes something simple or small and imbues it with the richness required for good fiction or poetry.
Luckily for writers, not all of this richness needs to be invented whole cloth in the process of extrapolation. Because, if you’ve been keeping up with transcription, you also have a host of other ideas, images, and concepts which you can use combinatorially. Suddenly, the “leaf-strewn sidewalk” and the “jaggedly crying child” scattered through your notes give context, sense, and place to your core concept. This layering also allows you to extrapolate further and in more concrete directions, because now it’s fall and that child needs a reason to be so upset even if that reason is for no reason at all.
Let’s have an example. There was once a tree in a field at my uncle’s house that he called the widowmaker. First, I think we can all admit that’s a great name for a tree, as is its synonym, the foolkiller. You see, this wasn’t his original concept; it’s a modern forestry term for a tree that has a break or a split, usually towards the crown, that makes it difficult to cut without harming yourself. And my uncle, no fool, sensibly avoided it. This memory popped into my head one day, and I jotted it down because I am nothing if not a loyal transcriber of floating ideas. It sat there untouched for weeks or months until one day I drove past a little pond that had one Adirondack chair sitting in front of it, and I thought, Huh, don’t they usually come in pairs? So I wrote down, “Just the one chair.” And these thoughts, still unconnected, continued to wait patiently and separately until I had a leak in my office window and a man from Facilities came to fix it. And he worked quietly and competently and the whole time looked intolerably sad. Naturally I wrote down “the sad man from facilities.” Then I let transcription go to work, which went something like this:
Q: Why is the man from facilities so sad?
A: Because of a death.
Q: Who died?
A: His wife.
Q: Okay, but so what?
A: They’d been together for years, built a house together out in the woods, and now he was very lonely.
Q: Fine, but what does the widowmaker have to do with it?
A: She always wanted him to cut it so it couldn’t hurt anyone.
Q: And the chairs?
A: They liked to sit in them together and look out at the field with the widowmaker in it.
Q: So then what happens?
A: After she dies, he decides to cut it.
Q: Why?
A: Because he’s got nothing left to lose.
Q: Or does he?
A: Maybe not.
And that became “The Widowmaker” which was a Write Michigan Short Story Contest finalist in 2019.
Extrapolation gets easier with practice, as well as more fluid when you improve your transcription process. The most difficult part is linking disparate ideas, because unless you have primed yourself to be thinking of these connections, it’s very tricky to tie a dream to an observation to an overheard snatch of conversation in a meaningful way. We’ll talk about this necessary mindfulness in a separate post, but for now, just do what I did and flip through your notes like a crazy person until you uncover any detail that makes a story or poem better. Realistic detail is the real key to successful creative writing, and what could possibly be richer than real life?
Thanks for reading. Be good to each other.