Last post, I shared my latest short story “This Story is Continuing to Develop.” I wrote this piece because a colleague asked me to participate in a reading, and whenever someone does that, I usually try my hand at writing fiction. I’ve shared a few of these pieces before, namely “Paper” and “Adieu.” With the former, I also wrote a craft essay discussing where the idea for the story came from and I made some of the stylistic and thematic decisions that I did for that story. Today, I want to do the same with “This Story is Continuing to Develop,” providing you with some insight into what I think about when I write.

It’s been said that every story, no matter the genre, resides in at least 95–99% reality, the rest comes from elsewhere. The longer I think about the idea, the more I agree with it, no matter if I’m watching a film like Star Wars or reading something like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The foundations for stories come from reality, from our lived experiences, and we incorporate that reality into the works that we produce. “This Story is Continuing to Develop” does just that, reaching back into my own life and stories that others have told me to construct a narrative that, read alone, seems like it has no real connection to any type of reality. It feels, at times, like a phantasm and at other times like an over-the-top gore-fest. Yet, every aspect of the story stems from reality.

The opening of the story, where the narrator awakens and cannot scream or move, comes from similar experiences I had during childhood. I recall, vividly, nights when I would awaken in bed. I would look to the foot of my bed and see spots that seemed to form a figure standing over me. I would try and move, but I couldn’t. I would try and scream, but I couldn’t. I’d lie there, desperately trying to communicate that some being sought to do me harm. I watched a lot of X-Files and read about aliens, so my immediate thoughts would always go to alien abduction, just because that is what filled my head. However, no extraterrestrial being entered my room and held me down on the bed to abduct me.

Years later, it occurred to me that what I experienced was sleep paralysis, a state where, awakening from a deep sleep, I was conscious and aware of my surroundings but unable to do anything. My eyes, adjusting to the darkness, produced the spots, and those spots caused me to hallucinate a being in my room trying to attack me. The recurring usage of spots in the story, even when the narrator starts to ascend the stairs after seeing him mother in the kitchen stems from this. Even after I vigrously rub my eyes after waking up, I see spots here and there. The feeling of a being standing over the narrator and then beckoning the narrator down the stairs comes from these two things, bringing them together to make the hallucination real like a succubus or an incubus.

During undergrad, I took a creative writing nonfiction course and wrote a personal essay based on these experiences. I pulled from Radiohead’s “Kid A,” specifically the aural feeling of dread and innocence in the instrumentation and also due to Thom Yorke singing about ventriloquists with heads on sticks at the end of the bed. These aspects of “Kid A” conjured up the feeling of paralysis I felt in bed, the feeling of dread mixed with the fact that I was still a child. It’s an odd feeling, waking up and not being able to move, feeling as if you are being tortured for no reason and you cannot cry out for help. Sadly, I don’t have that essay anymore. I wish I did, but it has been lost to the furthest reaches of the digital wasteland.

The scene where the narrator comes downstairs and sees his mother in the kitchen comes from a story that a student told me one day before class. The student told me about a young kid who, waking up in the middle of the night, went downstairs and saw their mom cleaning up spaghetti. The kid asked the mom if they could have some of the spaghettei, but the mother sent the kid back to bed. Years later, the kid, now grown, found out that the spaghetti was actually blood from a home intruder that the mother shot in the face. The child couldn’t see the body because of the layout of the kitchen, and the mother kept the child’s view away from it.

When the student told me this story, I instantly thought I should incorporate something like it into a story I would write someday. I initially thought the student knew the person that this happened to, but the student old me they saw it on Tumblr. This fact makes me question whether or not it actually happened, but even if it didn’t, the narrative fits within the themes that I wanted to explore in “This Story is Continuing to Develop,” notably the theme of memory and how we interpret the past. The individual knows the truth about what happened that night in their kitchen, but they still think about the person’s blood on the floor as spaghetti sauce. That’s the tricky nature of memory. Reality and fact get mixed up, even if we know the truth.

All of this leads to the second half of the story where the narrator sits with a therapist and talks about the home invasion, even questioning if it actually happened the way it really happened or if their memory is correct and the newspaper account is wrong. Along with this, I threw in another moment from my own past. The story about the narrator’s mother commenting, off handedly, that her own mother shot herself in the office happened to me. When my family went to the Holidays at my parents’ house a few years back, my mom, sitting by the tree, nonchalantly made a reference to my grandmother’s suicide. I was about 44 at the time, and I had never know that my grandmother did this in the room I spent so much time in as a kid and that my aunt, who lived there at the time, found her. Again, this is memory and transmission of memory.

The final aspect of reality comes from the date of the newspaper article. I did not know when my grandmother died. Truthfully, I didn’t know she died almost a year after my birth. I wanted the date on the paper to be the date she died, so I did a search on Ancestry and found that she died on September 27, 1979. The newspaper article stems, of course, from the story the student told me, the facts of what happened juxtaposed against the narrator’s memory of the events.

The ways we remember and relate our memories has been an ongoing interest for me over the past few years. I’m not completely sure where this comes from, but I know that reading Lillian Smith, Wilma Dykeman, Magda Szabó, and countless others have me thinking about the ways we remember the past and the stories that arise from those memories. These topics are important, for numerous reasons, but at their core, memories and our recollections tell us not just what happened, but they tell us, through the ways we relate the stories, about ourselves and our communities.

I hope you enjoyed the story and this post about the writing of the story. What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.