Years ago one of my students captured the idea of this slippery beauty. We were talking in class about “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” In the tale the princesses take boats underground past jeweled trees to go dance in a palace, away from their strict father. It’s a powerfully dreamlike image—and then the story ends, a little randomly, with a marriage. Why a marriage? We talked about this in class. And why must it be that the eldest daughter marry a soldier? What’s that about? One student, David, raised his hand. He said he thought the marriage was just a way to wrap up the story so that it looked like a story and could be heard as a story, but really what we wanted and craved was the imagery in the middle, that mysterious difficult-to-interpret underground world of dancing and rebellion. And we need the bookends of “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” to give us access to that amazing series of images. To lure us into the dream.
As writers, we can try the “and then” as a way to go deeper into the woods of the story ourselves. If a trail of “and then”s can take a reader or listener where they never thought they’d go, it can take the writer there too. Later we can fill in motivation if we want to, after we see an arc of movement; we can see if causality tucked itself in the mix on its own; at the very least we’ll have some rich material to work with and expand. What if we think of it as a kind of breadcrumb path of language? It even looks like a breadcrumb on the page. And then…and then…and then…
Venture Further: Identify a moment in a poem or a plot where you’ve felt stuck. Read the piece out loud, and as you approach the moment that feels inert, instead of reading on, make a swerve—and improvise that swerve on the spot. What’s the most interesting or surprising or thrilling place you could go next? {read}