Three Little Questions

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I always find prompts about houses evocative. Although I know houses are inanimate objects, I can’t shake the feeling that they are affected by the goings on within their walls. A house bears silent witness to the misery and sorrow as well as to the hope and joy of its inhabitants, and in doing so seems to absorb some of those emotions.

I have no idea how this could happen. Some type of energy transfer? Timber and stone soaking up all those pheromones floating around in the air? However it happens, the result can be palpable. There are houses you enter that just feel wrong, that humans and other animals avoid, that sit empty for years and year because no-one wants to buy them.

I had a number of choices for a particular prompt which was based on an image of two children outside a rundown house, but I chose to write from the point of view of the house. There is something freeing about writing as though one were an inanimate object come to life. For a start, one gets to throw logic out the door. Not that I have anything against logic. It is invaluable tool for ensuring a story makes sense. But it can get in the way of exploring possibilities, so parking logic outside the creative process for an hour or two can be fun.

Then I get to ask my all-time favourite question - What if? What if this house was lonely? What if it had seen something awful? This invariably leads me onto my next two favourite questions - How would it feel? What would it do or say? Answer these questions and the story begins to write itself. (Note I said ‘begins’ - it takes a bit more to get it finished.)

I don’t always ask these three questions before I begin writing. Sometimes when I see an image or a prompt, an emotion or a phrase pops into my head straightaway, and I start writing from there. However, it would be rare that I never ask those three questions in the course of getting a story down on paper - and quite often during the editing process as well.

I’m not the only person in the world who uses ‘What if?’ Indeed, I learned about its power in my acting days then during my university years. I am fond of this quote from the acclaimed author, Margaret Atwood:

“Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.” 

I would disagree though that their focus makes them fundamentally different. Having trained as a scientist as well as a writer, I know that they both aim for one thing - to uncover some truth we have yet to truly understand.