How to Recover When a Story Betrays You
Depend on what inspired you in the first place
They were holding hands; that much is real.
But it looked like he was holding her hand, gently guiding her down the stairs, even gliding her down the stairs.
He appeared that concerned, that chivalrous.
And she was just letting it happen.
Or was she? Was there something that was making her actively depend on him for her safety and well-being?
There was no way to know. I mean, what could I do? Ask them?
Accost them as they got down the stairs and ask them for an interview?
Follow them down the hill into the lower park?
My desire to know them was getting creepy.
Still, as I walked up the ramp out of the park, I wondered what their story was.
Since I did not stop the couple on the stairs to interrogate them about their story, I started to make it something beautiful and romantic.
They met only recently, and he was still in awe of her. That was a good one. The awe stage of the relationship makes it possible for people to make such grand gestures.
Maybe she wasn’t even a love object; maybe she was his sister! She was recovering from a long illness, and he was making sure she didn’t fall down the very steep stairs.
Plenty of people worry about those stairs. The next day, I observed a mother lecturing her two sons about how they had to be careful so that she didn’t tumble down the stairs with “the baby,” she said, who was strapped to her chest.
“Do you understand?” she asked in a tone that admonished them.
She was definitely not as graceful on those stairs as my couple, which is what they started to feel like to me.
“Yes,” the boys assured their mom.
And I was able to return to daydreaming about that couple and crafting my true-romance-in-Riverside-Park story. I was writing it in my head because I was leaving the park.
But then a memory interrupted my train of thought. Stalled it right there on the tracks.
The memory of walking along the park with G, who didn’t like to hold hands. He rarely walked next to me.
Those were not very romantic thoughts!
I felt betrayed by the story.
It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t like holding hands. Or that he always walked four steps ahead of me. Or wasn’t it?
He was separated from his mother too early. “My family wasn’t outwardly affectionate,” he’d explain.
We both ended up paying the price.
He would not have held my hand like that. He would have said it was dangerous and convinced himself that it was true.
“It’s too crowded.” Three words. The same three words every time.
This excessively practical and unromantic rationale for a lack of affection was part of the downfall of our marriage.
When I look further back, there was evidence that while a relationship was possible, romance may not have been.
This is the same guy who, when I was struggling on our first hike in Yosemite together, abruptly made me take my backpack off, grabbed it, and hiked up the hill of boulders carrying two backpacks.
Romantic? No. Practical, yeah. And also a tad humiliating.
If he could have been more like that guy in Riverside Park who held his wife's hand so lovingly as he led her down the steep stairs, we might have stood a chance.
And this would have been a different story.
Have you ever had a story change direction? How have you dealt with that?
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Backstory
My stories are typically based on photographs that I use to plan, organize, and execute a story idea as part of my Notes2Post system. This week is a little different. The story was conceived as the result of a moment’s glance with no photo for inspiration, illustration, or celebration in advance.
The image that accompanies the story was taken after I wrote it, not before.
This is a new variation on the system, and it proved very effective in terms of preparation for the story.
I continue to deconstruct my creative process so that I can help other writers struggle less on the upfront tasks of ideation and focus more on the writing.
This story followed the same process I created for the Notes2Post system:
I targeted my theme for the week: It was a story about romance based on what I observed on the staircase in the park
I wrote 3 Notes related to that theme that are independent, Bite-Sized stories on their own
Then I compiled them, expanded on them, and revised them as necessary to generate a long(er)-form story.
As sometimes happens, things shifted between the first Note and the subsequent ones. The focus shifted from the couple whose interaction inspired the story to a reflection on my marriage.
But the shift was easy to manage because I had the scaffolding of the initial Notes to guide me.
I’m indebted to that couple for inspiring this story as much as I am to the people whose photographs I take as part of my Notes2Post process.
It’s as if I have packaged inspiration!
Learn how Notes2Post can help you plan, organize, and improve the quality of your weekly writing projects.