Creatively there are many ways to attack a project. You can sit in silence and let ideas form, you can walk around, you can talk to friends, you can read a book, you can listen to music, etc. For me, it’s been walking and talking with friends that generates most of my ideas. There’s also the moments, where in the quiet between music and receiving any other sort of stimulus, I am gifted a short section of an idea or lines of dialogue.

Today I worked on parsing through a new anthology, or possibly longer form story. I have posted probably 20+ snippets of it in the past year or so. Let’s set an a not evil fantasy world and we’re trying to find out why an entire kingdom has disappeared.

I have been struggling to finish longer projects for a long time now. That’s easier to read short stories, and easier than that, to not finish anything at all. But I’ve been wondering if a lot of the stories have created are interconnected. I’ve been wondering if many of them are actually sit in the same world, and given the chance have noticeable connections between them.

All of this is in the midst of thinking about the changes in personal habits and creative processes. I’ve been productive enough on a daily level that I can consider myself a writer without feeling ridiculous. Truly, if you write at all, I think you have a claim to being a writer.

The funny thing too is learning habits of other famous writers. Mark Twain was really big on dictation. Which makes me feel better because I use dictation on my phone for a lot of my stories. It’s easier for me to get the ideas out from voice to text and then it can be to write everything. Of course, this isn’t exactly ideal if I’m in crowded environment. So I also have my fair share of traditional writing.

Further still, I’ve been figuring out the types of stories that draw the most persistent work ethic out of me. I think there is a large amount of glee that I have in mining the absurd. I love antiheroes and mysteries and general flippancy. I think beauty, magic, and tragedy are all evocative subjects. Just as horror and thrillers are. I’m a big scaredy-cat.

I can also be extremely skeptical which comes from a stubborn irreverence. I have studied a lot of history and I’ve always loved stories. The thing that has remained clear for me is how much of history and personal narratives are an expansive gray area. So many events have multiple viewpoints that are valid and emotionally resonant, but it’s common for the most direct or easy to push narrative to be the one that’s propagated.

If you’re wondering how this ties in the storytelling and isn’t just some tangential rant about the complexities of human existence, and cultural perspectives, it would be that it’s exactly those things that make stories worth telling.

So often we forget that we’re on this miracle of a planet, in the middle of love, and ever expanding universe, in which we truly don’t know too much. To combat that immense sense of overwhelming insignificance we can concoct stories for ourselves. They grow in the stories that are then later taken as immutable fact.

The great gift of not knowing. The great gift in no one being able to tell you for certain what is or what will be— is that the universe remains vast. Our curiosity is able to run riot— and that it certainly does.

The way we see the world, our perspective, our education, our cultural, upbringing, all the ways that our existence is framed for our personal experience is unique. We can be similar to other people. It’s often the case. But what happens within the deep recesses of your mind is something for you alone.

This inability to know for certain is one of my greatest joys. It doesn’t matter your wealth or status or school you went to or didn’t. It doesn’t matter your gender, or race or social economic class. Nobody knows. And a lot of us like to pretend that they do. Countless people make a lot of money out of spreading hope or fear based off of this unattainable thing.

We stand each moment at the precipice of existence. Nobody knows what’s on the other side.

What a beautiful thing.