.png)
Back in… what month is this? August. Yeah. I’m on it.
Back in August, a single sentence popped into my head. As most great ideas do, it came to me in the shower and I used my special shower crayons (I’m a grown-up) to write the sentence on the wall. Then I stared at it. For four months.
Monday, I turned on my laptop and lo, a whole story popped out. I swear I had no prior knowledge of this story in this form. How could I, I’ve been trying to work through whatever connected to a single sentence for eighteen weeks. But this story and that sentence do connect.
So far, I’d been trying to approach the story in the wrong way. I thought the whole point of the sentence was to show a character’s emotional growth after a length of time passed. I thought the story was supposed to begin several weeks later.
I was wrong.
The real story took place between the inspiration sentence and the point I kept pushing to start. The real story is the interim: it’s the character moving from the inspiration sentence to the “several weeks later”. It wouldn’t come out because I wasn’t telling the right story. And if you think I’m being cryptic, I am. I have to be.
I submitted this piece for publication and I found out this morning the blind panel accepted it. My story will be published in January in the first issue of WayWords! I’m using a pseudonym.
On Thursday, I picked up a piece I wrote earlier this year that needs heavy revisions. I wrote three pages.
Fiction projects: 2
Fiction words this week: 3500+
Acceptances: 1
About the author: Theresa Green is the co-founder of The Writer's Workout and a crime fiction writer.