The Arrival of the Swifts: How Writers Find Their Stories
Author Tara Badstubner shares how writers are like migratory birds, especially when it comes to their drive to find stories.
Wings thrumming in my chimney announce the return of swifts from their long-haul migration, a crushing three to four thousand miles. When we first moved into our house and I heard a hissing sound, I was alarmed. Several days of close investigation revealed the source: chimney swifts. These tiny ballerinas of the avian world spin and dive with acrobatic grace across the setting sky. Once I observed them in motion, I could not imagine doing anything to dissuade them from thinking of our chimney as home.
My writing desk sits a few feet from the chimney, steps away from the roosting birds. The low murmur is companionable background blather in a pursuit that often feels lonely, sometimes desperate. The soft pulse of bird’s wings as they lift off at dusk, sometimes a rattle as if dozens of snakes live tangled in the confines of our chimney, other times the thumping of a heart about to burst or a high-pitched complaint, but always as I write.
How do migratory birds know where to go? In early spring, chimney swifts leave South and Central America, migrating along three distinct paths toward the Midwest and Northeast of the US and farther north into Canada, the drive to fly instinctual. All migratory birds rely on genetic instructions encoded in their DNA: vector navigation, an internal GPS that tells them which direction to fly and when they’ve arrived.
Writers are not so dissimilar from swifts. Starting a novel has an instinctual quality; instead of flying the instinct is to tell a story. Our understanding of how stories work is rooted in our foundational humanity, the essential components—beginning, middle, and end—encoded, descending from our ancient traditions of oral storytelling. Most writers, at the outset, have no idea where their story will land, its destination, but like a swift they set off nonetheless, trusting instinct and persistence will guide them.
I arrived at a writer’s retreat four years ago with nothing more than a germ of an idea: a young widow overcome with grief. That sounds like multitudes of other novels out there, nothing original. Somehow, I knew the natural world played a pivotal role in the widow’s healing, a starring role even. I paint when I’m feeling especially stymied in the writing—little, inconsequential watercolor paintings. In a moment of mental weariness, I painted a fox, a crane, an Irish setter, and a snake. I felt immediately these creatures were not mere smudges of paint but somehow played vital roles in my novel. How? I had no idea. But as I showed up daily, their purpose revealed themselves to me, all at a creeping pace.
Vladimir Nabokov gave a name to these intuitive, subconscious flashes that create a writer’s piecemeal movement. “These are the nerves of the novel,” he wrote. “These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted—although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed…” The subliminal coordinates are the writer’s understanding of their own story, a kind of internal flight path that, in the end, only they can trace. Doesn’t that sound like vector navigation in birds?
We write from point to point, seldom knowing what lies beyond that line or the next scene. The longer I persisted with my novel, the clearer it became that the natural world—the fox, birds, a snake, beetles, even trees played a unique role in the healing of my protagonist. My subconscious knew the way, my native guidance system miles ahead of me, mapping the terrain. And not unlike migratory birds, sometimes my story went quiet in the chimney. An unnerving silence. Yet, I persisted. I showed up still, pushing myself to have faith in the guidance system. Well, not just faith, patience, too.
My novel is the result of many subliminal coordinates (A to B, B to C, C to D) until eventually it delivered me at my story’s destination. But when we are flying high in mid-novel, circling and circling, whether above the rooftops or circumnavigating by stars, it can be hard to trust the subconscious is working. Swifts, even a caged swift, faces the direction of its flight path, its instinct steering even in captivity. This is the kind of dogged faith each writer needs in the wisdom of their subconscious.
George Saunders has some compassionate advice about this patience-testing, confidence-rattling process every writer should keep at hand: “…a rough patch in a story is not an error or a defect or evidence of our lack of talent or proof that we are imposters, missing some essential frequency being broadcast from Story Central. It’s an indicator that our heroic, brilliant subconscious is working out a problem as it stumbles towards beauty, and is asking for our help, and what it needs for us to do, just now, is have faith. And wait. And, while we’re waiting (as an active form of waiting), keep revising (revising that bit and everything around it).”
An example of Saunders’ advice is my “inconsequential” watercolor of the snake, the crane, the fox, and the dog. My impulse gave me the initial direction. The coordinates were accurate to a point, but as I wrote the crane became an osprey, and instead of a physical bird, it became the name of a pivotal location in my novel, “The Osprey House.” My steady subconscious piloted me through an evolution of ideas and brought me something far more nuanced.
Just as my swifts arrive each spring, their cacophony announcing their return, the writer must trust their subconscious is at work and will, given time, effort, and patience, arrive with a story, one with layers, symbols, and themes the conscious mind, in all its mundanity, would never conceive. The story will land, dear writer, but for now, let it fly.
Check out Tara Badstubner's Every Room Remembers here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
