Somebody on another social media page shared a quote from Hans Christian Andersen and it immediately struck a chord with me:
Everything you look at can become an adventure, and everything you touch can tell a story! lt hvad De ser på, kan blive et eventyr, og alt hvad De rører ved, kan De få en historie af!
I look at something – a person, a scene, something glimpsed from the bus, and I think “ooh, I wonder what’s happening there/what they’re talking about/what she’s doing/ what he’s got in that bag/what they are arguing about/what’s behind that curtain/where that road goes to/who lives in that house… and so on. Sometimes these are just passing thoughts and drift out of my head as they drifted in, but sometimes the unknown people I was looking at develop characters and have names and occupations and families and ambitions or grievances. Sometimes these characters begin to have some sort of story – or part of a story, and sometimes that story makes it on to a page.
Not all of the things I wrote go further than the pages they’re written on, but sometimes that story grows and other stories are added or are woven into it. This may mean that I have to go back, further back than the inspiration and find the history – and sometimes I realise that I need a different beginning, one that doesn’t start in the middle of the story. Many – in fact many many of these stories just remain unfinished. Occasionally one may be revived and is completed, but more often I’m writing whatever is current in my imagination and attempting to finish that before it adds to the unfinished list.
I wonder what I will see tomorrow that will set me off on a new story!
Lois Elsden 