I had a weird thing happen yesterday morning as I was writing. It was one of those little gems that pop themselves up every now and again, and that maybe wind up being nothing or maybe wind up being … well … not nothing.
In a recent post, I noted that my writing process had become different these days, meaning that I’m not doing anywhere near as much pre-plotting these days as I have in the past. I’m starting more and more with a situation, then growing stories more organically from that point. To that point, among several accomplishments I made this morning was that I managed to write a couple hundred words of a new story.
When I was done, I had this little internal dialog with it:
Ron: Okay, that’s interesting. Where are you going?
Story: Nowhere.
Ron: What’choo talkin’ ’bout Willis?
Story: I said I’m not going anywhere, and don’t call me Willis.
Ron: This is a problem, dude.
Story: Yes, it is. But, luckily, it’s not _my_ problem.
And so I stewed and thought about it. Why wasn’t it going anywhere? And then one of those little shivers struck me, you know, one of those “hey, that’s weird” zen-yoga things you get when you know something’s right but you just hadn’t seen it that way before.
I realized at that moment that I wasn’t looking at the beginning of a story at all. Instead, what I was looking at was the end of it.
Interesting.
It immediately got me to asking lots and lots of fascinating questions about these characters and the situation–another fact that leads me to believe that I’m right in interpreting this as the back end of a story revealed to me. So now I get to play the game differently the next couple days and figure out what events have conspired to wind up with the little bit that appeared this morning.
As I think Dale Carnegie once advised, I’m beginning with the end in mind.
It’s something new every day, eh?