There is a philosopher, I forget who, who has a scale of emotions with apathy and depression on the lower end. Confusion is a very high state. I’ve always thought that questions are much more powerful than answers. We are thrown (like a potter throws clay) to want the answers, but when we have the courage and fortitude to allow ourselves to stay in the question, in the confusion, the Universe opens up for us.

This is relevant for creativity.  When we “know” how to do something, when we know the outcome and every piece in between, there is no room for those wonderful little blips that the unconscious loves to throws our way on a project that we’ve been dwelling on for some time.  I like to map out my stories, consider them, design them, if you want to call it that, but when I sit down to write, I am always looking at the story pouring out on my computer screen as if it were something someone else wrote, as if I were reading, as my Mom used to say, “a thumping good piece of literature.”

With this as a way of looking at it, the story will often surprise you.  Your character will often surprise you and refuse to do what you think they should.  Writer Annie Proulx said she’d never experienced characters coming to life in that way and thought it was something writers say to sound mystical.  That is until she wrote Brokeback Mountain.  She had been imaging Ennis del Mar Jack Twist for so long and so deeply, with such compassion and emotion, that they did surprise her.  She had once called the “falling in love” with your characters “repugnant”, but then she wrote that story.

I like going into a project confused, unsure.  It’s an exciting place to be.  I recommend it for anyone who feels they don’t have the creative juices to write.  Or anyone who does.

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

Today I thought I’d do something different, and post part of a character study I started writing a few years ago about a married couple and the town they lived in.  Someday, I’ll use some of this for a larger piece, perhaps a novel, about the town I grew up in until I was thirteen.  This is much longer than most of my posts and not about the process of writing.  This one is about what that process became for me once upon a time.

Coffee And
by
Geoff Hoff

It’s probably a gradual process, but it doesn’t seem that way.  Everything seems to be moving along, day by day, in exactly the same way, in the glory and indestructibility of youth, then suddenly cuts and bruises don’t heal quickly or well.  You get used to that, then, in a few years, you wake up one morning to discover you can’t focus on the print of a newspaper page.  Then, one afternoon, after five or so years, your skin suddenly becomes thin and hangs loosely from your muscles, which hang loosely from your bones, which just hang loosely.  You are no longer indestructible.  You are no longer young.

Bill and Mary appeared in the small town of Flatbrookville, NJ, just like old age.  One day they showed up and slowly occupied the town.  They moved in to the old house on the Old Mine Road where it was met by the foot path that meandered over tangled roots and weeds down to the Flatbrook, a few miles before it emptied into the Delaware River.  About a quarter of a mile beyond the house they moved into was the one cluster of homes, the one populated area of Flatbrookville.  This town center consisted of no more than ten or fifteen houses and buildings, most on the side of the road away from the brook and each a few hundred feet from the other.  It ended in a large weed filled field beyond which was the St. Moritz Inn.  Past the inn, besides the bridge over the brook, there wasn’t another structure for well over a mile.  From the bridge, past the inn to the one gas station, the brook rushed right alongside the road and seemed to be running a race with you if you were walking in its direction or to be trying to push you back if you were going the other way.

The gas station was about mid way in the cluster of homes, and one of the few structures on the brook side of the road, but the brook veered away from the road shortly before that as if it had tired of the race with humans and wanted to explore other distractions behind the trees.  At the station you could barely even hear it bubble as it played over the rocks and around fallen trees in it’s shallow bed.  Bill and Mary’s house was, like the gas station, on the brook side, but by then the brook was probably a quarter of a mile down the path.

Flatbrookville was sheltered by two mountains, shaded and protected by them from all that went on elsewhere.  The sun that shone down on it seemed to have been filtered, cleaned and refreshed as it ran past the trees and through the brush like a mountain stream, and the air that surrounded the small cluster of homes had a soft energy that gave birth to the broad, white, odd smelling Queen Ann’s Lace flowers in the fields in the spring, sparkling fireflies that kept the night awake in the summer and glistening snow and puddles by the side of the road, both covered by a hairbreadth thin crust of ice in the winter.  In the fall the trees that covered both mountains like a coat, which had awakened the spring before and clothed themselves in soft, pale green buds, set themselves ablaze in a conflagration of colors before shedding their summer wardrobe in preparation for their annual hibernation.  Birds of every color, size, and song visited every spring on their way north, to feast on the berries, nuts and insects in the woods, and again every fall on their way south.  The brook itself was home to trout, to green and orange spotted salamanders, blue and red crayfish which looked like tiny lobsters, water skeeters that walked on its surface and bullfrogs that sprang from the tadpoles that swam in relatively calm pools bordered by smooth rocks at the banks where the water rested momentarily before it rejoined the foamy, frothy race toward the Delaware.

The people in the town seemed unaware and unaffected by the cyclical bounty that surrounded them as they walked their small, linear lives toward death.  They mowed their lawns and cooked and ate and gossiped and held grudges while white tailed deer and rabbits ambled up to their back porches, unnoticed.

The inn was the social center of the town.  People came from early afternoon through the evening and into the night to drink beer and whiskey, shoot pool and shuffleboard, eat and gossip.  It was owned by an older Italian couple, expatriates from Newark, my grandparents.  The bar, which had been built in what had been the basement of a huge old church, bustled nightly, although the well appointed restaurant attached to it like an appendage was chronically empty.  The boarding house across the small lawn, a series of clean, simple bedrooms that shared two bathrooms on each of the two floors  was filled only in spring.  That’s where I grew up with my large family.

Suddenly one day after they moved in, a new routine appeared:  Bill would show up to the inn in the early afternoon, sit on the same stool at the bar and slowly drink beer until Mary came in the late evening to fetch him.  The two would walk back home on the side of the one-lane paved road, along the guardrail that was a single metal cable strung through eyelets on concrete guard posts about two feet tall, spaced enough apart that young children could sit on the cable and swing with their feet leisurely moving them back and forth.  They would walk past the service station that had the old pump with the little bulbous glass window, yellow from the gasoline that flowed through it which spun the little pinwheel inside when gas was being pumped.  They walked past the center of town to the dinner that Mary had laid out for them to eat while Bill silently drank his beer.

The people in the area referred to Bill and Mary behind their backs as Maw and Paw Kettle.  Mary was a large woman, a bit loud, with a big laugh.  I didn’t see her often, but she was always kind to me when I did.  She told me she had a thyroid problem and that once, a doctor had put her on an eating regimen designed to combat that and help her lose weight.  She said that there was so much she was required to eat on the diet that she couldn’t force it down and had to quit, and so remained large.  It seemed magical to me at the time that there was a diet where you had to eat more than you could stomach in order to force a strange little organ in your body to help you lose weight.  I now suppose she was just fooling me, and probably herself.

Bill was quiet, extremely thin, not very tall, and seemed to me at that tender age to be a very old man.  Looking back, I realize that old age must have come as a huge shock to him.  His skin was furrowed, the skin of someone who had worked hard under the sun all his life.  Perhaps he had been a farmer before frailty and marriage and alcohol had surprised him during the night.  Or a forest ranger or fire fighter.  Or a ditch digger.  After moving to Flatbrookville, he began to breed night crawlers in his basement and sell them to the fishermen from the city that were the main lifeblood of my grandparent’s inn and Rosencrantz’s gas station.

They put up a sign that said “Coffee and,” which, Mary explained to me,  was how you advertised coffee and donuts in that corner of the state, if not in the rest of the country.  She said that was what the fishermen from the city would expect.  Just below that, they put the sign advertising Bill’s progeny, the nightcrawlers.  That one said “Worms.”

Coffee and Worms were their legacy.