Let me just reach in and and gently lift your hands from the keyboard, setting them in your lap. Don't start your story this way. Distance is not insight, observing is not a story, feeling superior is not a virtue.
Stories don't happen to people... they happen between them. It's far more interesting to watch two people struggling to figure each other out than to watch us wrestling with ourselves. So let's do that. Let's put the pity party on a shelf and write a story about two people. And here's what makes it hard: neither of these people are going to be us. To repeat the aphorism, it's more interesting to watch us explain two people than for us to explain ourselves.
If that makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing. Anything that pushes us past the impulse to make writing a mirror for ourselves and into a window into the rest of the world, increases the likelihood that someone will like our story. After all, now they have three people they might potentially relate to rather than one: person A, person B and us, describing them.
What comes next is even less savoury for many an artist: these people have to like each other. Stories about people hating each other are irritating, two-dimensional and inevitably tiresome. There are many, many stories that already exist that indulge themselves in the discontent that pesters our mood when we think about writing, especially when we haven't been successful at it. Though to be completely honest, every writer intuitively understands that it doesn't matter how successful we've been, the next book must stand entirely on its own. That's how the reader sees it, so we must also.
There is a strong tendency to think that tension means conflict — and that, therefore, if the two hate each other, more conflict, more tension. But it's been demonstrated only by every good book ever written that there is more tension and conflict in two people who love each other, or depend on each other, than there can ever be in two people who feel only hate. So let's lean into this part of human nature and make our two people care.
Creating a scene that enables this demands a clarity about spontaneous human interaction: with improv theatre, it's known as the "yes principle." The expectation is that when person A says something odd, off colour, intrinsically emotional or whatever... the other person must "go with it" in a fully committed, positive way. No other option is permitted, because every other option kills the interaction.
Let's take something simple; the simpler, the better, because things that happen every day are instantly comprehensible. Writers tend to pooh-pooh the ordinary, rushing towards worlds that are already constructed of weird bricks — but the better goal is to start plain, then add bricks of whatever shape we want in due course. So as we begin to stain our blank white page with symbols, let's be boring.
A character in line at a grocery lifts her card to pay for groceries and the reader doesn't recognise it. She tries again, and it fails again. And she... does something off colour. She breaks down crying. Now, this can be a man or a woman; each embraces its own social characterisation. Our other character, again a woman or a man, has been, like an improv performer in our imagination, has been put in a place where they must say "yes." How might we best do that?
Our ability as a writer depends on how we answer this question. A poor writer reaches for the most obvious solution; person B offers to pay, person A accepts, person B says something cute, person B says something cute back, an invitation is given, our person A and B are in coffee shop explaining themselves to each other. Normal, everyday, positive interaction. It works... but could it be better?
Here is the real struggle where a writer steadily progresses in ability from ordinary to talented. Writing instructors, lacking any better way of lifting a writer's senses, fall back upon gimmicks and techniques like "write your way out of a paper bag," which essays to force the writer into solving a problem that appears initially to be insolvable. But this approach is misdirected; we don't get out of paper bags in writing literature... we write ourselves into them by failing to understand that mundane, easy solutions are not the answer we want. We can be ridiculously inventive writing our way out of a bag — an artificial constraint we'll never have to solve — but writing our way out of the mundane, our daily experience, is far harder. We live in the mundane. It is our crippling illness.
There is a strong tendency to shatter the mundane with a weird brick: "... and then the aliens landed." Which is laughable, makes for good comedy, and sometimes achieves a temporal success with an audience until someone else tops it. But the majority of readers won't buy in. They're too jaded; they know the writer "ran out of ideas." Which is true. We didn't solve the conundrum at the cash register. We had aliens do it for us. We should not blame the reader when they can clearly see the hand waving behind the curtain.
If we remove the failed card, we can find an example of this scene solved by someone 50 years ago, in a song that hit home. Dan Fogelberg wrote, "Met my old lover in the grocery store; the snow was falling Christmas Eve. I stole behind her in the frozen foods; and I touched her on the sleeve..."
There are no weird bricks, no sudden spectacle — just a man seeing an old lover in a grocery store. It is universal, it is timeless; it demonstrates how hard a perfectly normal, mundane scene can punch right in the gut when ordered rightly. If this construction can hold the weight it does, why shouldn't we be able to match that? We are living lives that are full of intensely felt moments, thousands of which have never been implanted into a story, have never risen above the story we tell others in the coffee breakroom — and yet which we still remember with perfect clarity decades after they've happened: bitterly, happily, embarrassingly. With emotions that others can share as intensely as we felt them.
Those moments are waiting, ready to be put to use. Some will be hard to employ. We may find ourselves tearing up as we write out the words. Others will arouse shame that is so acute that we feel pain with every keystroke. But what we feel, the reader can feel. What we have experienced, the reader has also. That is intrinsic to the whole pattern of this human experiment we're stuck within. None of us have seen the aliens land. We've almost all had ex-lovers.
Mind you, this isn't about writing what we know. It is writing what we've felt.
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