Where do Stories come from?
Where do stories come from? – Tracy Fells on the inspiration behind The Naming of Moths and other short stories
I love coffee and cake, and seek out great cafés to enjoy them together. One café visit triggered the writing of my most successful short story ‘The Naming of Moths’, which won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Prize (for Canada and Europe), £2,500 and a trip to Singapore for the award ceremony. The inspiration literally came straight off the café walls as they were decorated with the names of moths, no pictures just names… The common names for moths are beautiful, unusual and bizarre, and I mentally noted to research these later.
Ruby Tiger. Cinnabar. Dusky Peacock. Brimstone. Rosy Footman. True Lover’s Knot.
I also knew The Naming of Moths was a terrific title for a short story, but that’s all I had – a title. Time passed and I wrote other fiction, while the title skulked in a corner of my mind, resting, maturing and slowly evolving into a story. Stephen King is a master storyteller and in his memoir of the craft ‘On Writing’ says “stories are found things, like fossils in the ground… relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” For me that’s partly true, I can relate to digging out the full story from just a bone-tip but it’s also morphing into something new during the excavation process. I wrote ‘The Naming of Moths’ three years after that initial café trip, when the story soup inside my head finally mixed it together with the golem myth (of Hebrew origin) and the plight of refugees.
At dusk in a scented garden, a refugee names moths. The dying Miss Bethan asks Sofia to do a terrible thing. Something a mother should never ask.
Don’t ask how or why, it’s just where my stories come from and too much interrogation can scare them away.
While studying for a postgrad degree in Creative Writing, a lecturer said, of me, how refreshing it was to find someone who wrote about their obsessions and not their own lives. I’ve always done that because I don’t find writing about ‘what I know’ particularly interesting, but of course key events and emotions from my own life have seeped into my writing. Mothers and childbirth feature in several stories in the collection, informed by own experience of having an early baby. Like Mo, from my story ‘Household Gods’, I met a very wise nurse in the quiet of the night, surrounded by hissing incubators in the Special Care Baby Unit of the hospital where my son was born.
Mo is a pagan, because a battalion of household gods are needed to protect your loved ones. Maybe Vesta is watching over his wife’s sick baby in the special care unit, as he makes an important choice.
And in ‘Coping Mechanism’ I reflected some of my own difficulties as a new mother –the exhaustion, and misery, of feeding a baby that’s always hungry. I never had a sinister doppelgänger, nor an unsupportive partner, but Hannah’s spiralling anxiety and endless fears came from a place of truth.
It started with stealing her clothes and modulating her vowels but now the au pair has stolen Hannah’s identity. Why does no one believe Hannah is the real mother?
My guilty secret is that many of my stories spark into life while watching TV. Sitting on the sofa IS legitimate research, as is reading, binge-watching box-sets and visiting cafés. In my defence it’s watching TV documentaries that mostly inspire story ideas, anything on nature, history, art and science can generate a smorgasbord of factual snippets that I store away for future reference. A documentary on Australia triggered ‘Vector’, a story set in the Outback featuring a firehawk (a bird of prey that appears to deliberately start bush fires by carrying and then dropping burning sticks).
A mute teenager makes a critical decision in the midst of a bush fire when he realises a firehawk is a vector for change.
The story ‘In the Copper Canyon’ was kick-started by a TV series on Mexico, in particular an episode focussing on the famous long-distance runners of the Rarámuri region.
On the eve of her marriage, a younger sister chases a ghost as buried memories resurface of running the dangerous paths high in the Copper Canyon with her tribe in Mexico.
As a fiction writer my career depends on inspiration and generating new ideas. My debut collection features eighteen stories but I’ve written plenty more and published over a hundred. That’s a lot of ideas! I don’t suffer with writer’s block, because when the story’s ready I write quickly, but my greatest fear is never having another new idea.
But I’ve learned to chill, and trust my process. Like many writers I keep a notebook, where I scribble potential titles because, as with ‘The Naming of Moths’, that’s usually where the first seed of an idea starts. If a title catches and intrigues me, then I may start to read/research further and jot down notes. Then it can take some days, months, years even, before the final story arrives to be written. And thankfully, when it does turn up it’s usually fully formed with a complete story arc. No, I don’t understand how. It’s a painful process, but (eventually) works for me. And if it doesn’t then I can always visit a café for that cake and coffee fix…
About Tracy Fells:
Tracy Fells is an award-winning author. She was the 2017 Regional Winner (Canada and Europe) for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her short fiction has been widely published in magazines, journals and online. Tracy is a reader for international story awards and leads workshops on writing short fiction. Her novella-in-flash Hairy On The Inside (published by Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021) was shortlisted for the 2022 International Rubery Book Awards. The Naming of Moths is her first short story collection, to be published 10th November 2023 (Fly On The Wall Press).
More here: https://tracyfells.com
THE NAMING OF MOTHS features stories of magical realism, myths and legends re-imagined, where all the characters are undergoing transformation or facing a pivotal moment of change in their lives. People and animals interchange their shapes. Story landscapes flit from fairy-tale woods to urban homes. Here love, hope and kindness weave between the realities of man’s endless talent for cruelty.
Pre-order here:
https://www.flyonthewallpress.co.uk/product-page/the-naming-of-moths-by-tracy-fells
from www.Waterstones.com
or from www.Amazon.co.uk
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