Where the Stories Walk In

As I have stepped away from the next volume of Whakataukī Among the Stars for a little while, I thought I’d spend some time talking about the writing itself.

Not the polished bit. Not the tidy version where everything sounds planned, sensible, and faintly impressive.

The real bit.

The messy, magical, occasionally coffee-fueled process behind the stories. An ideas rarely arrive politely.

They do not knock on the door, wipe their feet, and say, “Good morning, I am the plot for your next story.” That would be helpful, so naturally they refuse to do it.

More often, they creep up while I am doing something else. Making coffee. Washing dishes. Trying to sleep. Walking.

Especially walking.

For me, long walks are not just exercise, though I suppose they do technically involve moving the legs and therefore count. They are where the mind loosens its stays. Thoughts that have been sitting stiffly in rows begin to wander about, bump into each other, start arguments, and occasionally form something useful.

Some of my strongest ideas have come from walking through the red zone.

There is a particular kind of silence there.

Not empty silence. Not peaceful silence, exactly. More like a held breath.

The land remembers.

You walk past places where homes once stood, where gardens were planted, where people hung washing, argued over fences, burnt toast, lost keys, raised children, grew old, and probably complained about rates because some things are universal. Then the ground changed the rules. Streets remained, but the life they carried was altered. Driveways led nowhere. Trees stood beside gaps. Paths continued with the strange politeness of things that had not been told they were no longer needed.

It is a broken landscape, but not a dead one.

That matters.

Because desolation is never the whole story.

There are places in the red zone where nature has not so much returned as cleared its throat and said, “Right, you’ve had your turn.” Grass pushes through cracks. Birds move through the quiet. Wildflowers appear where lawns once behaved themselves. Trees lean over empty sections as if reading the ground. The land does not forget what happened, but neither does it lie down and become only ruin.

That tension fascinates me.

Loss and renewal standing in the same frame.

A broken path with new growth at its edges.

A place where people are gone, but memory remains.

That is where stories begin for me. Not with a neat idea, but with a feeling I cannot quite shake. A landscape that asks a question. A silence that seems to contain voices. A place that says, “Look again.”

And I do.

I look at a cracked road and think of a colony built on unstable ground, the inhabitants pretending everything is fine because humans are very good at putting curtains over terror. I see an empty section and imagine a planet where the houses have been moved but the ghosts refuse to update their addresses. I watch grass reclaim a boundary line and wonder what happens when nature, or ancestry, or memory, decides that ownership was always a much more complicated story than the paperwork suggested.

That is how a walk becomes a story.

Not all at once. Never neatly. The first spark is usually small and inconvenient. A sentence. An image. A question. A mood. Something like:

What if the land remembered everyone who had ever stood on it?

What if a city could grieve?

What if renewal was not gentle?

What if the thing coming back was older than the people who thought they owned the place?

There it is. Trouble. Lovely, dreadful trouble. The writer’s favourite weather.

The red zone reminds me that landscapes are never just backgrounds. They are characters. They carry history. They shape behaviour. They hold wounds. They grow strange things in the cracks.

That idea turns up again and again in my writing. In space, on moons, inside ships, beneath domes, among alien ruins, around stubborn little settlements clinging to the dark. I might move the setting far from Earth, dress it in stars, give it impossible weather and technology with far too many blinking lights, but the emotional root often begins somewhere much closer.

A walk. A broken road. A quiet field where houses used to be.

Science fiction is wonderful for that. It lets you take something deeply human and move it sideways. You can write about grief by inventing a planet that mourns. You can write about displacement by building a colony over bones. You can write about renewal by sending moss across the hull of a dead generation ship. You can write about memory by making a house that refuses to forget.

And somehow, because it is happening among stars or moons or impossible machines, the truth can sneak in without wearing its heavy boots.

That is one of the reasons I love using whakataukī as the seed for these stories. A good whakataukī does not simply say, “Here is the lesson, now behave yourself.” It opens a door. It carries layers. It has weather inside it. It can be practical, sharp, tender, funny, warning, grieving, and hopeful all at once.

A proverb gives me the heartbeat.

The walk gives me the bones.

Then the story begins putting on its own peculiar hat and causing problems.

And yes, the problems are important. A story without trouble is just people having a nice sit-down, and while I am deeply in favour of a nice sit-down in real life, fiction needs a bit more bite. The red zone teaches that too. Nothing about broken landscapes is tidy. Renewal is not a postcard. It is messy. It grows unevenly. It leaves scars visible. It does not put everything back the way it was.

Nor should it.

That is something I think about often when writing. Healing is not the same as erasing. Survival is not the same as being unchanged. A place can be beautiful and wounded. A person can be funny and grieving. A future can be hopeful and still carry the cost of getting there.

Perhaps that is what keeps me awake.

Not monsters. Not usually. Though I am not ruling them out. There are always administrative forms, after all.

What keeps me awake is the question underneath the story.

What do we owe the past?

What happens when we inherit damage?

How do we make a home in a place that has already known loss?

Can renewal happen without pretending the breaking never occurred?

And, most importantly for the kind of stories I write: what do ordinary people do when the universe becomes unreasonable?

Because that is where character lives. Not in the grand speeches. Not in the shiny technology. Character shows itself when the road cracks, the map fails, the door locks, the ancestor speaks, the moon shifts, the ship sulks, or the cat eats the last ration biscuit with the moral certainty of a tiny emperor.

People reveal themselves under pressure.

So do places.

So do stories.

When I walk through the red zone, I am reminded that endings are rarely clean. A job ends. A house is gone. A street changes. A city is remade. A life turns a corner it did not expect. But somewhere in the broken ground, something green begins its quiet work.

That is where I find ideas.

In the cracks.

In the silence.

In the places where something has ended, but the story, inconveniently and beautifully, has not.

-         - Rebecca 

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