I’m traveling as I write this, and because I’m traveling, I’m listening for stories.
I hear whispers of them as I look out the windows of the train I’m riding across southern Germany. A ruined villa atop a forested green hill to my right. A row of rusting old train cars to my left. Two small boys in matching sweaters, waving uncertainly as the train pulls out of a station.
Stories are all around us, but sometimes, surrounded by the familiar landscapes of home (for me that’s the United States’ Southwest), I forget to look for them. Traveling reminds me to pay attention–to listen. I know when I return home, for a time I’ll listen harder there, too, because the place I live has plenty of stories of its own.
Of course, traveling often only gives me brief glimpses. The train pulls out of the station, leaving the boys behind. The villa passes by before I even get its name. I never see everything. Even when I get to chat with someone, in the evenings in the hostels I stay in–a retiree come to Germany to learn the language, a musician who crossed an ocean to play here–still we all head off in different directions in the end. As a traveler I’m a visitor, and as a visitor I’m always in the process of leaving. The castle whose borders I paced out yesterday will be open tomorrow, but I’ll already be gone.
That’s okay, though. Stories can grow not only out of what we see, but also out of what we don’t see–out of unanswered questions and in the blank spaces we have to fill in for ourselves.
And it’s not only out of people (an old man frowning into his newspaper on the train, a surly teen sitting alone on a hostel’s terrace) and their creations (a forest trail winding through the ruins of another castle) that stories grow. It’s also out of the land itself–and each land has different tales to tell.
Before boarding the train where I’m now writing, I spent a few days hiking through the Schwarzwald, Germany’s Black Forest. As I walked through the fog among fir and birch and linden, stepping over roots that twisted through the path beneath my feet, I was listening too–and wondering, what’s the lore of this place? What’s its story? I knew I was in the country of the Grimms’ fairy tales, and that the woods around me could well be the sort of woods in which children tend to come upon witches and wolves. But I wasn’t hearing–or seeing or feeling–that as I walked. What I saw was just a forest, one made lovely by mist and moss and the brightness of new deciduous spring leaves against darker year-round conifer needles.
Places aren’t like people. They always don’t offer up glimpses of their stories right away. They wait a little while, as if to see first whether we really are listening.
But after a while walking through that forest, I turned a bend and saw what looked like–a peaked roof, low to the ground, above a green house–though I knew that made no sense.
As I drew closer, I saw that the roof consisted of two fallen branches, meeting just so; the green house of moss clinging to the dirt beneath some tree roots. Yet it still looked like a house, too, complete with tight-curled fiddleheads planted in the front yard. A tiny house for tiny folk.
I’d never fully understood stories whose mythic creatures happened in miniature before–the sorts of stories where dwarves and gnomes were pint-sized, where winged fairies were small enough to land in the palm of a hand. There seemed no good reason mythic creatures should be smaller than the rest of us. Yet that mossy little house was so clearly made for just such a creature. I saw more little folk houses as I walked on, though none were as well-formed as the first. Slowly a certain sort of story began to make more sense to me–because I finally understood one of the places in which such a story might live and breathe.
I don’t know, yet, if I’ll use any of this in my own writing. I do know that if I do, that walk through the forest will only be a starting point–because while stories might begin with what we hear and what we don’t know, at some point the heavy lifting of research is needed to pull it all together. That was definitely the case when I wrote Thief Eyes, a book that grew out of Iceland’s landscape and sagas, out of whispers heard on the wind in a volcanic rift valley. Those whispers were only the beginning. It took both research and a second trip to Iceland, once I knew what I was looking for, to understand what I heard and to finish the story.
All of that came later, though. I’ve found I don’t always know, when I first hear a hint of a story, whether that hint is going to take hold and become something more.
So I figure it’s best to keep listening, at home and when traveling both–just in case.
Janni Lee Simner first became fascinated with the Icelandic sagas–and with the woman whose uncle said she had the eyes of a thief–during a visit to Iceland. Standing in the rift valley of Thingvellir with a battered copy of Njal’s Saga in her backpack, she realized the characters she was reading about had walked the same ground. As the wind blew around her, she sat down and wrote the opening scene of Thief Eyes.
Janni lives more than four thousand miles from Iceland in Tucson, Arizona, where the hot, dry desert weather is about as unlike Iceland as one can get and still be on the same planet. Janni is the author of Bones of Faerie and the recently released, Thief Eyes.
To learn more about Janni, visit her Web site at www.simner.com.
Wonderful article and so much like my writing process. Now I must read THIEF EYES!