Audio By Vocalize
Last Saturday, I promised to return to a question that has occupied my mind for two weeks: What actually happens between the moment a writer encounters reality and the moment when that reality appears as a story? I am convinced that creative writers conduct research. That is why I promised to unveil the conceptual model I have been developing to explain how this happens.
Today, I keep that promise. I call it the Narrative Transformation Model (NTM). This is a conceptual model that explains the process through which a creative writer transforms observation, experience, research and reflection into a narrative. I am not suggesting that every writer consciously follows these stages in precisely the same order. No. What I am proposing is a way of understanding the creative process.
Let me begin with an important proposition. A writer does not simply invent a story, but first encounters reality, interrogates it and transforms it. When we read a novel, we encounter characters, conversations, places, conflicts and events, but we rarely stop to ask where these materials came from. We see the finished story but not the long process that produced it.
Specifically, we do not see the conversations the writer remembered, the books consulted, the places visited and the questions asked. Yet all these things eventually find their way into the story.
