Birth of a Story

I’m an impatient writer. I tend to write in cloudbursts of creative energy. Stories come gushing out like torrential downpours, 5000 words flooding onto the page. Writing is in some ways a birthing process. Ideas germinate, gestate and at some point, when they’re too big to be contained, they just have to come out, there’s no stopping them.

But just as in giving birth, the work doesn’t stop once the baby is born. A story needs nurturing, it needs to mature. It needs editing, rewriting, revising, workshopping. It needs fresh eyes, new perspectives. If you’re lucky, and if you’ve given it enough care, someday it will get published, maybe years after you first scribbled it onto a napkin in the haste to capture the kernel of the idea.  Continue reading “Birth of a Story”

How Eagle Got a Crooked Beak

This is just a fun little parable type story I came up with the other day out of the clear blue sky. It is purely fictional. 

Five sheep lived on a grassy green hillside. Life was good. The sun was warm but not too hot, the grass was sweet and tender, never in short supply. A spring bubbled up from granite boulders at the lower end of the pasture, and the water was cold and refreshing and plentiful. When the sun became too hot the sheep stood in the shade of an ancient oak tree at the top of the hill where the breeze always blew cool and fresh. Continue reading “How Eagle Got a Crooked Beak”