Hidden Doors, Secret Keys: A personal story about stories for Thursday Wordsday

My first encounters with doors occurred the best part of 30 years ago.

Not your everyday common or garden or even lesser-spotted physical doors, of course.

Doors of another kind.

My life was otherwise back then. I was in a band, optimistically focused on a future career in music. Almost all my creative energy went into songwriting.

Being ambitious, I wrote ambitiously, aiming to make every song somehow special in at least its approach to its subject matter. Being a lover of the craft of writing, however, I pretty much stuck to the classic delivery modes and concepts I’d known since childhood.

Some of my songs broke the fourth wall, addressing the listener directly; some addressed a third person, almost as if a letter, or a record of a shared moment; and some of them were stories.

The story songs were the ones I usually found most challenging, most frustrating, and most rewarding in the getting right. Because I wasn’t usually interested in telling simple stories for their own sake. I wanted to tell stories that would transport, challenge, surprise, and illuminate.

Because of that, I often spent a lot of time and energy chiselling down exactly how a story I was working on should be told. The angle. The tense and person; the sense of time and location. The contexts that would make all the elements of that story effortlessly fall into place and work.

What I called the 'Way In'.

The Way In seemed a perfectly apt term. A sound visual metaphor I could use to explain my frustration and, I would always hope, my eventual joy to my non-creative-writing nearest and dearest.

‘Andy seems distracted,’ one of them might whisper to another. ‘He’s very quiet. Is he all right, do you think?’

‘Oh, I think so. He’s been working on a song…’

‘Ah. Say no more. The Way In.’

You see, sometimes a big idea would feel like a treasure vault. A secret room garlanded with wonders. I’d be able to smell the visions, emotions, mechanisms all beautifully, perfectly feng shui’d inside. I'd know I'd only need to walk into that room for that song to course through my head, heart, and hand onto the page.

If I could find the door.

Sometimes, it was far from easy.

On such occasions, I’d walk all the way around the outside of the room, if I could. Several times, if necessary. Or many, many times. Sometimes I found odd doors in unexpected places. Some of them turned out to be windows - just big enough to get my head through, as if the idea wanted to be written by someone who could see but not touch. Some of them were skylights, allowing me a literal overview - but from a distant, ethereal angle. Some of them weren’t much more than loose boards, and I would hold my breath to squeeze through a gap a younger me would’ve slipped through as easy as diving under his bed to drag out the Scalextric. Some of them I missed repeatedly and then wondered how I had.

And sometimes, after finding The Way In, I’d realise there was another issue.

Sometimes, the door that I’d worked so hard to find… was locked.

Occasionally, through frustration or impatience, I might have been tempted to try to pry a locked door open with a crowbar of linguistic cunning... or beat one down with a sledgehammer of laborious application. But a door is itself a part of the room it opens upon. Each listener would need to step through that same doorway as a part of their journey. Unconsciously, if not consciously, they would feel the signs of my breaking and entering. They’d know I was a trespasser: an intruder with no right to welcome them inside.

No. When a door is locked, the best option is always to find a key.

And I believe there always is at least one. That for every barrier to understanding, for every obstacle to shared emotion, for every sealed entrance, there is an elegant solution.

It might be as slight and subtle as a change of tense or person in one place... or perhaps as a difference of three words, two words…

Or just one word.

Because sometimes, changing one little word can make a line work, which can make a verse work, which can make a section work, which can turn a disconcerted and disconcerting tangle of neural threads into a story that was obviously just meant to be. One you then couldn’t imagine being any other way. As if it had always been there, waiting for you to tell it for the first time.

I don’t regret the doors I’ve found to be locked. Not in the least. Without them, I wouldn’t know the excitement of finding a key or of feeling tumblers smoothly falling into place at one's turn. I wouldn’t know the joy in the click of a lock. If every door I’d ever found had swung open at the merest touch of my hand, I would’ve missed out on some of the most fulfilling moments of my life.?

I certainly wouldn’t use those terms to describe the work I do now though. Any copy editor using those terms to describe their work would likely be considered ridiculously unprofessional. Not to mention naively romantic and fantastical.

So, instead of saying I look for hidden doors into sealed secret rooms and search for the right keys to open them, I say I analyse copy and content, highlight issues getting in the way of ideas, suggest solutions, arrange information into the most effective order, and identify and remove any words that might interrupt flow or subvert my client’s message.

Sometimes, one of my non-creative-writing nearest and dearest will ask me how it’s all going.

And I’ll say something like:

‘Sometimes it’s pretty easy. Sometimes it’s more challenging. Sometimes it’s really frustrating. But however frustrating it gets, it’s still too much fun to feel like work.’?