Bev Vincent

No one can tell you when to start a short story.

People can give you all kinds of advice about how to write one, but only you can decide when you are prepared to start.

This is something I deal with all the time. I’ll have a window of opportunity where I can work on a short story, and I’ll have a market in mind, and all I do is spin my wheels when I try to think about the story itself.

Case in point: I want to submit a story to an anthology that has a submission deadline fast approaching. When I first heard about the theme back in 2010, I did some relevant research, created a file, scribbled some notes and put it aside to gestate. Now that several months have passed, I’m only a little bit closer to having a story than I did back then.

That’s not entirely true. Last weekend, I started doing some location research. I have a scenario of sorts in mind. In fact, I plan to resurrect a couple of characters from another story, and I know why they are where they are and how the story opens, more or less. I stumbled around looking for a setting and I found one that is absolutely perfect. So, for the past couple of days I’ve been learning everything I can about this place. I wandered its streets on Google Earth (and isn’t that an impressive tool). I found news stories and a few videos that give me an even better sense of the location and the scenario that forms that background for the location and the story.

But I still don’t really know what is going to happen to the characters after they make a significant discovery.

Sometimes, a story happens like this: anthology theme, “clever” take on the theme, figure out who the main characters are and what they want, start writing.

Right now, I have the anthology theme, my twist on the theme and the characters, but I still don’t feel ready to start writing because I haven’t come up with the consequences of the twist.

It is possible, on occasion, to start with these elements and let the words flow from that mystical source from which they come. The characters do things and the story develops. I don’t know where the story is going, but it goes.

And yet, when I get to the computer these past few days, I can’t bring myself to create that new Word document and write the first words. That tells me the story isn’t quite ready. I’ve plowed ahead and hit brick walls often enough to believe that this sort-of block (something akin to Mike Noonan’s block in Bag of Bones, though not nearly so severe) is telling me I’ll be wasting my time if I go that route. I just need to think about the story a little more. I can see over the first hill or two, but there’s at least one more hill I need to crest before I begin. I don’t need to see all the way to the end—I rarely do with short stories, but I need to see far enough to build up that momentum that will help me get there.

That being said, though, there’s nothing like a looming deadline for motivation. At some point, if I really want to submit to this market, I need to stop dithering and start writing. And hoping the story comes…from that mystical source from which they all come.

I’m not sure how relevant this essay is to writing. Perhaps it is only to the extent that it pertains to who I am.

For the past month or two, I’ve been exploring my roots. I believe that you have to reach a certain age (I can see 50 on the horizon) before starting to wonder about such matters in earnest. It’s a shame, really, that this curiosity usually doesn’t manifest earlier in life, when there are more people around from earlier generations who know stuff first-hand. It wouldn’t have taken me the better part of a month to find out simple details about my grandmother’s mother if I had bothered to ask my grandmother before she died at the age of 99, for example. Similarly, I recall anecdotes about my grandfather, but only in the vague, hazy way that I remember books I read when I was 20. Now that my parents are gone, few people are left who remember these stories.

I grew up in Eastern Canada. My mother’s family was full of McThises and McThats. My paternal grandmother was a Skene, a family that originated near Aberdeen, Scotland. I knew that my grandfather Vincent emigrated from England early in the 20^th century. I visited distant relatives when I spent a summer in Oxford in 1984, but it didn’t occur to me to ask questions about that part of the family when I had the opportunity. I thought there might also be a little Irish in the mix, but I defined myself as Scottish/English.

My British relatives referred to us as the “French Canadian” cousins. I felt bad about deflating that myth, telling them that, no, we weren’t French—the only French I knew I learned in school and my father turned around cereal boxes in grocery stores so the English side faced out.

And yet, behind many rumors and myths, there is often a germ of truth. Turns out my Father’s grandmother was French. Once I stumbled onto that part of the family tree, it exploded. The French have done a much better job of making genealogical information available online than the British. While I can trace parts of the Vincent and Skene lines back to the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the central portion of my family tree is chock full of my great-grandmother’s ancestors. In some cases I’ve been able to go back as far as the 1460s.

Along the way, I’ve discovered some fascinating bits of family history. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was burned alive by the Iroquois in 1653 in Quebec. His young son was captured and may have grown up among the Iroquois. Shades of Dances With Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans. Some of my ancestors were forcibly deported from Nova Scotia in 1755 as part of le Grand Dérangement, commonly known as the expulsion of the Acadians, which was inspiration for the famous poem Evangeline by Longfellow and is the reason we have Cajuns in Louisiana. Another ancestor may have headed in the opposite direction, a United Empire Loyalists who wished to remain true to the King of England, so he moved from the US to Canada. A couple of the women in my family were Filles du Roi, sent from France to Quebec to balance out the genders and boost colonization during the time of King Louis XIV.

I’ve found first cousins who married each other, and sisters from one family who married brothers from another, which turns the layout of the family tree into a real mess. I haven’t identified any royalty, but I turned up someone who sold drugs to royalty—the official apothacaire to Catherine de Medici, queen consort of King Henry II of France in the 1540s and 50s. The Vincents also connect to a Sicilian family who moved to France and then England in the early 1800s. They were famous luthiers, and many of the violins, guitars, cellos and bows they constructed are still around to this day, and fairly valuable.

I’ve been rereading Ross MacDonald’s noir crime novels lately. In his books, past generations usually have a huge impact on the present. Forgotten or unknown family connections are the motivations behind heinous crimes. Generations diverge (as in the two McCormack brothers in my tree who moved from the Isle of Arran in the 1820s—one family became McCormicks and the other MacCormacks over the years) but there are still blood ties, no matter how distant.

All these details are circulating inside my head. Will they ever find themselves in stories? Who knows, but I feel invigorated by this new information. I dream about distant times. Even though my bloodline is at best 1/16^th French, I’m newly curious about the Acadian story and French history. I want to know what was going on when my ancestors were alive.

Entire communities packed up from France or Britain and moved to the New World, hoping for a better life. Some found it (many were granted large tracts of land to clear and farm), others didn’t. These are the giants on whose shoulders my life stands.

This is how I see this pertaining to writing: I know something new and interesting about myself. If we look at certain (or, perhaps, all) acts of writing as self-discovery, I now have new fuel to run that engine. No, I’m not going to start writing historical fiction, but I have something more to explore. Somehow the things I have learned over the past two months will likely influence me in unforeseen ways for the rest of my life.