Beatrix Potter said: “There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”
I don’t know where the idea for a story begins. It’s just there inside my head, like a vision, but behind a gauzy veil. I can see it, feel it, taste it, hear it, as though it were already formed, whole and complete. It catches me, like the rays of the sun flaring outward before the sun sinks below the horizon.
As I begin to write, the vision fades. But I have seen and felt that wholeness. It exists somewhere deep inside me. I reach for it continually as I write it word by word, striving, aching, to remember the vision behind the veil. The road I take with words leads ever toward it, until I write the word finis, and the story is there before me. The vision is tangible now.
And it is wondrous.