How to Write a Story?

I want to share something with you. Partly because I think it’s funny, and partly because I think it’s interesting:

“The Himalayan salt crystal his mother sent him for his last birthday tasted quite good on eggs. Did they taste better on eggs than the salt that came a can? Of that, Sisyphus couldn’t be sure. The issue was that it was so gratifying to chip pieces off, then crush them with another hammer, then pulverize the lot with a mortar-and-pestle (also a gift from his mom) that he ended up putting too much salt on his eggs. Then he would toss them in the trash and start over. But it was all worth it when his mother came for dinner and admired the central placement of the crystal on a bookshelf, but never noticed that it was a bit smaller than it had been the last time she’d visited. Surely, that little triumph was worth breaking a few eggs.”

This is an excerpt from a story I’m writing. That is to say: it’s pretty much the whole story. I thought it would be fun to capture this little bit and preserve it in amber. Everyone always says: how do you write a story?

Well…

How to Write a Story? Well, What’s Bothering You?

In this case, obviously I’m irritated by salt-crystals. But it’s not just that. First, my partner is Indian so I have been rather quickly and forcibly educated on the ways we (white people, I mean; myself alas included) tokenize and fetishize things about other cultures. When my partner meets a family member, it often happens that they will start telling a story about an Indian person they interacted with in the last week. What is that? When they meet their friends do they bring up how they saw another white person in the office?

Why should Himalayan salt work better for focusing your qi or your ka or any other two-letter Scrabble-word than any other mined salt? Especially given that the place they mine the salt from is generally NOT in the Himalayas?

Being angry at salt isn’t really a lot to go on if you want to start writing a story. It’s barely a lot to go on if you want to start writing a recipe. But being angry about the ways in which Americans–white Americans in particular–try to instill meaning in their lives by borrowing it from other cultures? That’s plenty to go on.

Suddenly we’re dealing with issues of racism, classism…

What’s Behind what’s Bothering You?

But at the center of this non-Himalayan Himalayan salt nonsense is the thing that most every story is ultimately about: the search for meaning. The hippy-dippy mother who is just off-stage in this story is looking for the thing that most of us are looking for: A sense of belonging/hope/meaning. And a way to fill the absence of tribal affiliation and other pre-modern sources of belonging/hope/meaning.

We are all searching for meaning. So the mother becomes a somewhat sympathetic figure.

Why a Mother?

It’s a bit misogynistic, isn’t it? The assumption that the person into meditation and salt-crystals and so on is a woman. I may have to change that in the next draft. For now, I’m keeping it. I’m wondering if I can make it so that the mother likes these crystals but has gruff, stereotypically fatherly reasons for doing so. Could be fun to play around with.

The point isn’t to avoid stereotypes. The point is to play around with them. Like how, in the TV show Never Have I Ever, the expectation is for the Black best friend to be loud and dramatic and the Asian best friend to be quiet and sciency… but the show switched the stereotypes.

How to Write a Story? What Keeps you Going?

What makes this stub of a story different from the hundreds of others I’ve started over the years and never finished? Maybe nothing. In the 2 Rules of Writing, the second rule isn’t “You must finish EVERYTHING.” It’s: “You must finish SOMETHING.” You have to be working on something, and in such a way that you’re making progress. ideas will come and go.

So maybe my question is: how do I pick which idea to move forward with? To take to the next step? Maybe the answer here is just: this one made me laugh. It’s an interesting challenge to write a story that’s not meant as a humor-piece but is nonetheless funny. Or maybe the answer is that I REALLY don’t want to revise the manuscript of my novel.