Developing Story Ideas, 3rd Edition

Part VI

Developing as a Writer

Telling and consuming stories is essential to becoming fully alive—which some writer, probably Henry Miller, once defined as “living your life as though telling a story.”¹ What makes the act of writing extraordinary is that it allows the human mind to contemplate its own workings, then to surpass them. When my friend Lois Deacon said, “Nothing is real until I have written about it,”² she said a great deal, for writing lets you engage with life’s riddles and recognize the substance of your own life. In a fascinating interview, the distinguished American novelist Paul Auster talks about writing and getting older:

By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time ...