The Call of a Writer

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” - Orson Scott Card

Walking On The Beach by Vera Kratochvil

Discovery is something that I look forward to every day. My mind dreams constantly of finding something new. A possibility, a hope, a unique object, a memory, a future... I grasp at the thrill of discovery, sending life through my veins. With the possibility of a story, I feel happy. The amazing thing about discovering a story, is that it can come in many different ways. One that comes to me, whispered by the wind, or thrust upon me unexpectedly. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

    A story can be lived, written, sung, told, felt, dreamt or yearned for. That is what is so amazing about discovering them. Like Orson Scott Card said, we walk past stories everyday. The person sitting next to us, they have a story. The penny we find on the sidewalk, it has a story. The small flower sitting in a spot of dirt, it has a story. We just don’t know it. But that is the art of a writer. We find stories, dig them up from the dirt if we must, catch them from the sky as they whisk by like a shooting star, or just spend a moment listening to a tree, silently waiting. People walk past us, we find a story. The sun warms our back, we find a story. That is the call of a writer, discovering stories.