Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
Interpretation
Memories can inspire creativity, but the final product often transforms beyond the original thought.
Alice Munro reflects on the process of storytelling, indicating that while a memory or anecdote may spark an initial idea, the evolution of that story can lead it to become something entirely different, sometimes unrecognizable from its origins. This speaks to the fluid nature of creativity and how inspiration can morph through the act of writing.
In practice
An author discussing the influence of memories in their writing workshop.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
I must say here in France I had more serenity or security as I was working because I knew I was making the film the way I wished and that the film would be seen, ultimately, which is not always the case in Iran. In Iran, you always work having in mind this worry of will I be able to carry on my project as I wish and will the audience see the film.
That's what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.
What I love so much about drag is that it has politics at its very core; drag performers aren't afraid to talk about politics in our community and the changes we need to see systemically in society.
In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.
I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer.
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