Or— “Nothing was working for me until I quit fighting my story and let it do what it wanted.”
Or— “I have no control over my story. I just sit back and let it take off.”
Or— “My characters made me do it.”
These comments may sound like wild exaggerations to our listeners, but we mean every word. Our stories often do seem to have minds of their own, and those minds usually seem to understand the subtleties of story craft much better than we do.
What Does “The Story Knows Best” Really Mean?
As our nervous non-writing friends would be quick to point out, a story isn’t a conscious entity. It can’t know anything. Our characters are just figments of our imagination. Outside our own minds and the words we’ve put on paper, our characters don’t exist, much less exercise control over us or our story worlds.
So how can we claim to “listen to the story” when the story is really just an emanation of ourselves?
To some extent, “the story knows best” is a pie-in-the-sky concept used by writers in an attempt to describe the indescribable. When you’re in the throes of creative passion, hammering away at words that seem to appear faster than you can think them—or when the story does things you never planned for it to do—or when your characters take the bit in their teeth and gallop away onto trails unknown—that’s something almost too magical to put into words. How do you explain any of that to someone who’s never experienced it—when you can barely grasp it yourself?
We can’t. So instead we say, “the story did it.” Or “our characters took charge.” Or we were “just a conduit through which higher inspiration could flow.”
The Truth About Our Best Writing Inspiration
None of the above ideas are really true. What is true is this:
The story doesn’t know best. The characters don’t know best. You know best.
Yes, you.
When we say “the story knows best,” what we really mean is “our unconscious story sense knows best.” Even when we can’t consciously articulate what we’re feeling, something deep inside understands how to craft our stories into perfection. Authors must make a point of not just acknowledging this underlying story sense, but of recognizing it in action and refining our ability to interpret and channel it.
Talking about how our “stories know best” is a fun and easy way to describe the process, but it can inhibit our ability to see our instinctive story sense for what it really is and to work toward harnessing it in perfect tandem with our conscious, logical story skills.
The next time you’re talking about your story with hapless non-writers, let that twinkle in your eye shine out as you unnerve them with your announcement that your story knows best. But don’t forget to remind yourself that, really, it’s your inner story sense doing all the heavy lifting.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you really mean when you tell people “the story knows best”? Tell me in the comments!
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