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.