Finding the Form with Lynda Williams
The first time I saw the Pacific Ocean, I left my cowboy boots on the beach and walked straight in. My companion captured a photo.
Fast forward twenty years and I came across this picture as I scrounged for story ideas. I briefly considered writing the story I already knew, the one of me and a random guy I met at a bar in Ottawa called the Heart & Crown. Obviously there was a story if we made it to a beach in Vancouver, but that story didn’t appeal to me. As I looked at the photograph, I wondered who else might walk into the ocean, and for what reason. I held that thought in my head for a couple days, letting the possibilities percolate.
Like many of my stories, this piece began as a few lines typed in my notes app. A wise writing teacher once told me not to give away the whole poem in the first line, so I knew almost as soon as I’d written the second paragraph that it had to be deleted, that it was just me telling myself something important about the story I was trying to capture.
For a different writer, this might have led to an outline or some type of enthusiasm for the endeavor ahead. I’ve heard of writers who never write the first line until they know the ending. Unfortunately, 2023 Lynda had never written a story knowing the ending.
For better or worse, I’m a die hard pantser. I write to discover what will happen, and I edit as I go. I may have the world’s most ineffective writing process, but somehow, with a major amount of hair-pulling and modest gnashing of teeth, I get my stories down. This one was easily the most challenging one I’ve ever written, simply because I knew the ending and once I did, I raced towards it. The initial draft was a paltry 1700 words.
I was fortunate to be studying under the mentorship of Danila Botha at the time, and the salient points of her feedback included slow down, be more vulnerable, humanize Eddie, and slow down. The final paragraphs of that draft read exactly as they do now, but they had little effect because they were unearned.
While the initial draft was incredibly difficult to write, I enjoyed the revision process tremendously. Often my endings evolve or change altogether during this process, but with “Everything After,” the ending was the only portion of the story not up for debate.
The task of humanizing Eddie, which was of paramount importance given his violent behaviour, led to some of the best parts of the story. Church beer, the first date, and the electrical cord incident all came about in service of adding layers to Eddie. In that first draft, he existed mainly to serve the plot, to get the narrator and Danny to their moment on the beach. When I read the story now, their grief resonates; I can imagine it drawing her from the shore like the ocean’s tide.
This story taught me that although it’s valuable to understand your own process as a writer, it’s important to hold it lightly. More than ever I believe the fight to bring each story to life demands its own process. Ideas don’t care what you’ve grown comfortable with, so it’s vital to explore different approaches to developing them. I have yet to attempt an outline, but I’ve heard reverse outlining is helpful, and thanks to the time I spent working on “Everything After,” I can see myself trying it.
Lynda Williams’ stories have appeared in Grain, The Humber Literary Review, and The New Quarterly, among others. She holds a graduate certificate in Creative Writing from the Humber School for Writers and is a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. Her debut collection of stories, The Beauty and the Hell of It, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in September 2025 and is available for preorder now.
Photo courtesy of Sebastien Gabriel.