How writers turn reality into a story

Last Saturday, I promised to return to a question that has occupied my mind for two weeks: What actually happens between the moment a writer encounters reality and the moment when that reality appears as a story? I am convinced that creative writers conduct research. That is why I promised to unveil the conceptual model I have been developing to explain how this happens.

Today, I keep that promise. I call it the Narrative Transformation Model (NTM). This is a conceptual model that explains the process through which a creative writer transforms observation, experience, research and reflection into a narrative. I am not suggesting that every writer consciously follows these stages in precisely the same order. No. What I am proposing is a way of understanding the creative process.

Let me begin with an important proposition. A writer does not simply invent a story, but first encounters reality, interrogates it and transforms it. When we read a novel, we encounter characters, conversations, places, conflicts and events, but we rarely stop to ask where these materials came from. We see the finished story but not the long process that produced it.

Specifically, we do not see the conversations the writer remembered, the books consulted, the places visited and the questions asked. Yet all these things eventually find their way into the story.

So, where does a story really begin? I think it begins with curiosity. A writer sees something and becomes curious about it. A conversation may raise a question. An encounter may leave the writer wondering. A childhood memory may refuse to disappear. For me, it is usually a newspaper story that provokes fascination. Sometimes, a place may evoke an unexplained feeling. In essence, curiosity is the spark.

But curiosity alone does not produce a story. The writer must enter the world that has aroused that curiosity. This is what I call immersion. The world becomes a field of inquiry. A writer working on a historical story must enter that historical world through reading and investigation. The writer then begins to observe. Observation is different from merely seeing. We all see people every day.

Let me explain what I mean by drawing from one of my own stories, Shadows of Love. Of all the stories I have written, this is perhaps the one that many young readers remember most vividly. The story did not emerge from a single incident or a single person. It brought together many people, experiences and characters I had encountered in the course of my life. Over the years, particularly through my work at the university, I have encountered many different kinds of people. Some have remained in my memory because of their personalities. When I was writing Shadows of Love, some of these encounters became part of the raw material from which the fictional world was created.