I think I’ll blame my parents.
My mother was an actress. My father a director. To them, everyone had a STORY.
Our dinnertime sport was to speculate about people’s characters and their story. What was hidden? What was percolating to the surface? How were their struggles revealed in a hesitation, a hand gesture, a choice of words? What villain hid behind a well-crafted façade? What scars?
Five minutes into any movie, my father would announce who was going to die and who was the villain. We would tell him to hush, but to him the set-up was so obvious. Then throughout the movie, he would point out motivation, timing, overacting, pathos, mood. Sometimes we made up the characters’ back-stories. Eventually we all joined in the guess-the-villain game, arguing over who would betray whom and why. But my father was the one who got it right. Always.
For years, my parents ran a summer stock theater in the Poconos. It was a family affair. My siblings and I built the sets, scrounged for props, and manned the box office. The plays were light, summer comedies, romances and mysteries, certainly not “art.” Night after night, I watched the audience reactions. Laughter, tears, fear, anticipation, relief, applause. I grew up witnessing the power of a story, even a simple story, to touch an audience and connect a roomful of people to a common experience. That’s when I fell in love.
I tried acting, of course. Every role I ever got involved crying on stage, probably because I had cherubic cheeks and curly “Little Orphan Annie” hair. Frankly I found it terribly boring to play an injured innocent. Plus I wasn’t any good. By that time I had figured out that a good actor has what I call transparent eyes. She lets the audience see into her eyes all the way to the character’s soul, or her own soul. I do not have transparent eyes. I am analytical and distant, traits which are more useful to a writer than an actor. My on-stage tears were pathetically unbelievable. As bad as I was, I could still look out into the audience and see the power of the story. That’s when I decided to make up the stories instead of performing them.
My first major writing project was a play titled Telling Tales. A light comedy about dating, it explored the tension between trying to find your soul mate while still acting cool and disengaged. It enjoyed a short run in Los Angeles, and I loved seeing my worlds brought to life. I also wrote a screenplay which made the rounds in Hollywood, but was never picked up. Then I had twin girls – my own built-in audience. I began to write wonderful stories and fantasies for them.
The problem with playwriting and screenwriting is you need a team of people and a lot of someone else’s money to bring them to life. Too much is outside your control. With a short story, novel, essay or poem, it is just writer and reader, ready to connect whenever the reader wants. So I get to do what I love, tell a story, and launch it into the world under its own power.
Some writers love words–clever, pointed, precise words. Or stunning descriptions that transport the reader in time and place. Or insights which are both unique and reassuringly familiar. All those are components of great writing. But I have to say that my first love, and my longest lasting love, is the love of stories.
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Helen Sedwick is the author of Coyote Winds . A finalist in the 2011 Mainstream Fiction Writer’s Digest Competition and the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Contest, Helen Sedwick recently won second place in the Redwood Writers Flash Fiction Contest for a piece adapted from Coyote Winds. She is a lawyer and lives in the Sonoma wine country with Howard Klepper, a builder of handcrafted guitars, and an exuberant hound dog named Farlow. www.helensedwick.com.
