Birth of a Story

The writing of a story begins when the writer falls in love with an idea, and that idea gives birth to a word. With love, that word grows into more words and becomes a sentence. That one sentence meets other sentences and becomes a paragraph. With some love and nurturing, that paragraph gives birth to more paragraphs that form a page. That page, along with its other siblings, reveals the plot of a story.

But, a story is more than a plot. Within that story characters are born. Those characters come alive, as real people, with emotions and conflicts, as real as our own. We love them; hate them; envy them; remember them; gossip about them; and sometimes, try to become them. The amazing thing to think is that it all began with a simple idea in the mind of a person whom, out of love, wrote down the first word. It is love that produces the sentences, paragraphs, and pages that become a story. Every story is a love story.