Stories come to us from myriad places. From snippets of things we read. From first hand experience. From walking past an open window and glimpsing someone else’s world for a second. From eavesdropping on a train. From travel. From isolation. From the shortcomings of our families and friends. From their triumphs. An inch of news at the back of the newspaper - although these days, who is reading anything in print.
I’ve got archive boxes chock full of these snippets. Schrödingers stories. Incidents that happened that are scrawled in a notebook, or on an index card. Clippings from a magazine. Adolescent journals that, amidst bad poetry, feature themes and ideas, characters and dialogue. One of the notebooks is labelled ‘The List’ and it contains all the things that twenty one year old me wanted to write about.
And that’s just the physical forms.
On thumb drives and old laptops there are the screenshots that I promise I’ll come back to, the bookmarked pages, the sites I’ve emailed to myself for review later on. Here too are the digital versions of ‘the list’. Not content with the lumbering 1990s Toshiba laptop edition, or the 3.5 inch computer disks that can no longer be read by any working computer in my studio, there are flash drives and cloud files with these snippets.
It’s a lot to carry, to hold, to make space for. To retain. To…hoard.
In Schroedinger’s thought experiment, the cat is like the atom, existing in two states until observed and measured, both living and...expired.
My cache of snippets are simultaneously not stories, and stories. If I examine them, will they shatter into the dust of poor ideas? What is the nature of these fragments that I’ve clung to across time and space? Do they have life in them? Do they have truth?
Will they be the seed of something that at the time I didn’t have the experience or the perspective to turn into a story?
Right now, I am writing a script that has its roots in loss and nostalgia. And how people, places, and memories attach themselves to us through objects. At a time when everything can be backed up to the cloud, and our lost ones can be reimagined as artificial avatars, I think there is something essential about the thing itself. Before it is scanned and ingested. Before it becomes fodder for a model.
So for now, I will continue to make space for these aide memoires.
These snippets of story, they contain life until I don’t.