Essays, poems, stories, novels… each of these have their genesis in an idea, vague and fuzzy. It might even just be the idea that there’s an idea that needs to fill the space of a blank page. The beginning of every creative work is nothing more than an idea and a blank page.
When ideas are elusive, writers find themselves staring at a blank page, their cursor blinking up at them, patiently waiting for those words that just won’t come. The right words are not available for the idea to take shape on the page.
Other times, ideas pound at writers, seizing writers in a burst of excitement which demands we get the words out now. This is how story seeds end up on cocktail napkins, sick bags, and even scrawled in ball-point pen on the inside of someone’s forearm.
The Prince and The Pirate Princess began with the desire to tell a story. That desire was the seed which prompted an hour of creative play with a set of storytelling cards (more on those in another post). After that hour, the story had a spine or plot. It is with this (rather detailed) plot in hand I will challenge myself to craft 25,000 words of prose fiction within the next thirty days.
Cadence McKinnon 