When putting words to the page, understanding clarity of mind is truly helpful to a fiction writer. Here’s why:

• In a clear mind, you can listen to the story as it comes through. You are receptive and open, letting the story breathe and flow.

• In a busy or preoccupied mind, you are trying to think the story into existence. You’re trying to second guess what the characters should be doing or saying. You’re thinking about the ‘bigger’ story you’re trying to tell, or what someone might think when they read it. You’re thinking about writing, rather than being in the moment writing.

Human beings are story beings. As water is to fish, stories are to humans.

Stories take place inside our heads. This can be seen most simply with fiction books. We’re reading or listening to words, and those words create experiences inside us. The author puts the words together, but the actual experience of the story unfolds inside us. Each of us has a unique rendering of those words. Ours might be similar to another person’s, but it will never be exactly the same. Once we see this, it is not much of a leap to realise that the same is true of our moment to moment experience of our life—that it takes place within us. All of us live our lives within stories.

In a previous post, I wrote about the shift I experienced from understanding creativity as something human beings do to something we are. Once I’d started writing fiction, I began to discover whole other layers around what stories are and how they come into being. A few weeks back, I was talking about fiction writing with a friend—hey, Trevor!—and it gave me reason to articulate something I had, until that point, only experienced. Here’s my second attempt at wrapping words around it.

As you’ll see from the about section of this website, writing fiction was something I wanted to do for years before I actually began having a go. Here and there I made a few notes or tried to plot out a story or come up with characters, but I never got as far as actually writing. My memory may be hazy, but it feels as if the change from not writing to writing happened overnight. This change largely, if not completely, came about from a shift in perspective and it’s only in hindsight that I can see how important that shift was.