I’m starting at the beginning.
I’ve started at the beginning of my story many times before shifting the starting point and pondering the origin story – what it is, how to tell it, where and how does it start…
Imagery is important to me, I’m a visual writer often writing what I see in my mind and doing my best to document that vision as I tell the story. Sharing what I see is my story telling method which makes me a sucker for descriptive writing. Using the images that I have in mind also makes the narrative sketchy with gaps at times and caught up with too much thought around details that I question as necessary.
With my writing to date I have created a word document where I have pasted my work in order as best I can. I’ve done three things with this file for navigating my work.
1 – I’ve pasted the writing in sections of chapters as I currently see them to cluster story parts together which makes it easier to find the story part that I’m working on to save me time and frustration when looking for ‘that bit’.
2 – I’ve colour coded each piece of writing to help define different pieces that I’ve written over time, in part this has become unnecessary as I dissect and move the pieces about editing in new writing as I go. Colour coding has and still does help me to move through the writing referencing where I am at visually with colour though.
3 – The file is now my work in progress as I continue to shuffle what I have written, add to it, and use past writing as the bones of what I am working on.
For the past few days I have chipped away at how I will tell the story with a focus on committing to a style. I want to tell this old disputed narrative that sits in the intersecting realms of fantasy, religion, history, and origin with a tone that honours all. Can I do this? I really don’t know but I am going to get lost in that idea and give it a go. This type of story has always appealed to me, I get sucked in to the awe and wonder that they embody within their telling. If a story has me questioning I know that it’s a good one, I know that I can lose myself their and revel in my imagination. To root myself in that the lost time that imagination serves up I have a saying of my own that I always come back to when considering any story that provokes me in such a way and that is:
I don’t care if a story is true, I only care if it is good
With this in mind I will attempt to capture the feeling of being lost in a story because it is good.