I was recently watching an interview on two authors I've come to enjoy. And it struck me as one of them explained how they outlined their novels.
He mentioned that, events that he assumed would be five chapters, that when he got to it, he found they were only a paragraph long. And it was not so much this revelation that he described that struck me but the fact that it was not that he had tailored his skill to make the event fit into either the five chapters or the one paragraph, it was that he had discovered it to be like that.
As if the story was already there and he was just filling in the words. I enjoyed that descriptions and I think it's a symptom to a larger idea of storytelling that is very hard to place into words. That perhaps stories are not so much birthed in our imagination but a collaboration between what we can fictionalize and what touches the chords of a stories soul that lives in all of us.
Because there's a reason as to why that event did fit better into a paragraph and not five chapters. Its a feeling that we can only capture by saying 'No its not right,' or 'yeah that works.' That's the story's soul and its something we interact with at a unconscious level.
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