Even if we have a reliable method and a process that seems to work there is still a lot of mystery in writing.
It’s a act of faith sometimes.
Somehow magic is involved and patience.
Sometimes a story calls you to come and find it, but you can’t quite locate where it’s hiding.
Sometimes an idea appears in your mind for a moment and you are so sure that it will work– but it won’t.
I think a writer has to be a bit of dreamer with a willingness to search imagination the way a stargazer searches the endless sky.
In a way a writer is looking for distant galaxies of meaning and metaphor–trusting that somewhere, beyond the dark matter of a half-baked plot, there is a story that needs to be told.
Astronomers know that beyond the glimmer of a of a billion years lies astonishment. And a writer must be like an astronomer and trust that beyond the dark matter of self doubt that story will appear.
