The story is inside and out.

Imagine Emily Dickinson writing most of her hundreds of poems, only seven of which were published before her death in 1886, in her second-floor bedroom.

While Dickinson is seen as a great poet, applying her methods of solidarity seems detrimental to living a full, healthy life.

At one point, not so long ago, I could picture myself spending long hours cut away from life in an office, with the door closed, maybe locked, and me, writing and writing and writing. I had romanticized the idea of writing in solitude and, in doing so, I had swiftly pushed people away.

To truly focus on writing I indeed need to minimalize distractions. But people and their stories are the only chance we have at making our own writing good.

We learn from professors, students, friends, family and strangers. We learn craft; we learn methods; we learn stories. Only so much can come from your own head, and every now and then you have to get outside of your own realm of thinking.

Every now and then, you just have to give your life up—let go, become detached.

When you can let go, even temporarily, you can stop observing yourself, and when you do venture into the world as a storyteller, you can truly start to observe others, and build a repertoire of faces, quips, and tragedies you can later use when alone in your office.

This time, however, the door will be open and I will not push people away.

Rewriting.

Whether you call it rewriting or editing, it comes down to rethinking the story as it is now. To achieve perfection in storytelling you must edit and you must rewrite. If the two are any different, the difference is, rewriting is more intimate and personal.

I always hear about directors deciding to cut favorite scence or authors scratching beautiful sentences. It’s always hard, but they know it must be done, and after they do it the story is better served.

In Max Barry’s “The First Draft,” he says, “What I’d give for the ability to erase my memory after each draft, so I could read my own books for the first time again. It would all become so clear: where the story sagged, where the promising leads left unfollowed lay, where my characters’ motivations got muddled and, oh God please yes, what the core of this goddamn story really is.”

The hardest part about rewriting might be finding clarity; being able to know what needs to get cut and what needs to stay. I’ve said it before: you can never get enough perspective on your story.

But with so much perspective, how do you know who to listen to? Maybe you have a single person you trust; maybe a handful. But maybe not. Maybe you are left with the impossible task of finding clarity in multiple perspectives. Maybe you agree with some ideas and disagree with others. Maybe you don’t know what to do with your story; where to take it; where it will end.

Maybe you need to clear your mind, because you can’t clear your memory. So, you step back and let the story alone for a while. But not too long. After all, you still want to achieve perfection at some point.

See from their eyes.

On my cork-board, above my desk, hangs a list of storytelling facets that I try to employ whenever I write. Soon, I will remove this list and print a new one, having added this:

Reveal the world from the perspective of others.

If anyone struggles with length or depth, maybe this could be a good bit of invention. Generally, I’m a writer of short stories. And I mean short; 7 pages might be the longest, but that length, I can’t deny, suited the story. But, when I think about creating a story now, I try to think bigger and longer. Expansion. Expanding description, details, character actions, character thoughts. More now, then maybe ever, storytelling has become about letting the characters breathe; letting scenes take on a life of their own.

Thus, if I put, say, four characters in a scene, and something happens, then I have four different perspectives to draw from. One character may leave out details, and another character may be able to fill in those details. One may interpret the happening this way, while another will interpret it that way. Soon, a mystery is born, and each character holds different clues.

A timeframe of the mystery is established by each of the four characters. Character one, Wilcot, has the long version; Miranda has a shorter version that falls somewhere in the middle of Wilcot’s; Samantha’s version might start just before Wilcot’s ends; thus, not including any of Miranda’s; and Zach’s view overlaps Miranda’s somewhat but doesn’t stray beyond Wilcot’s.

I’ve learned if one wishes to maintain a good mystery, one must develop and maintain characters’ relationships with the reader. That is, the character must never be so vague or general that the reader doesn’t grasp his or her essence. Think of it this way: to have a good mystery, one must first ground the reader in something tangible. Set up a timeframe, get characters talking about it through their own eyes, and the mystery gets to be mysterious.

Just the way I like it.

Writing as passion.

I’d rather just write.

Maybe I don’t know how to organize my time, but the way I see it there isn’t enough time to organize. Either way, another semester has started, and I’m already in the thick of it. And characters are left trapped on the page.

The Red Man is left in his red jumpsuit and red ball cap standing on his roof waving at Jonathan as drives to work, his car filling with worship songs.

I call this static motion.

Another character’s thoughts exist only in my head: I’m left with no choice but to plan my sleepless existence. The girl I loved, the girl who left me, she showed up in my doorway in the middle of the night. I saw her like you see yourself in the mirror. She appeared to me as the ghost image of herself. Yet my eyes saw her physical, material body. Yet she was only there, up in my head.

I call this borrowed consciousness. His thoughts stumbling around in my head. Doesn’t seem fair.

What’s worse is the collaborative efforts that are now pending: one focuses on a stripper, the other a prostitute. (That realization is striking.) Don’t worry; the stories are about so much more. And in Amelia’s defense, she doesn’t stay a stripper for long. As for Veronica, her story is a satire about what we find ourselves settling for. They have stories to tell just like anyone else.

I love the openness, the ambiguity, the mystery, the playfulness that comes with creating characters.

In my only published (and award-winning!) story, Cursed, the interpretation of the main character/narrator varies depending on who reads it. The gender of the character, it turned out, was left undefined. It took my gracious and beautiful editor to see this. (Oh, the power of other eyes on one’s work! Truly, the more people who read your writing, the better it will become. This is a fact that I will always hold to.)

I didn’t leave the gender open deliberately. Though, when I realized I did, I teased it a bit, played with it, and added a thing or two that might suggest a thing or two about the character.

This, creating characters, is one of the great joys of storytelling. You can do anything.