Credit: Author

Early morning is my favorite time. It’s quiet and still. The air cools. The sun has yet to begin its assault, blinding me, burning my skin. People stir under the covers or hear the familiar gurgle of the coffee machine calling them into the kitchen. There’s the brushing of the teeth, there’s the lone hand reaching into the shower, testing the water’s temperature. There was once a phone under the pillow, but lately it resides in another room much like loveless couples who sleep in separate beds.

In the small home I rent, the design is decidedly 1940s. From the original cabinetry to the preserved hardwood floors, it’s taken me a while to get used to living in a house that makes sounds because it can, because it’s been around the block a few hundred times, because possibly after eighty years it still has something to say.

Often, I sit up in bed in the middle of the night wondering if it’s the walls or maybe someone broke into the house and they’re downstairs with an ax and a saw, ready to murder me. (I watch entirely too much true crime.)

This morning, I stare at the curtains on the windows. They’re nothing special, they’re not fanciful or gossamer silk. But they remind me of…

The curtains, the copse of trees, the whitewashed windowpanes — they remind me of Liz’s parent’s house in Connecticut. We are in college and I’m padding up and down the stairs. I’m sleeping in her childhood bedroom where we whisper in the morning and Liz confirms, I think my mother’s putting on the coffee. While we talk about the day and the Portuguese bread we’ll eat and the drives we’ll take, I stare out the window and feel safe.

The curtains, the copse of trees, the whitewashed windowpanes — they remind me of an estate (also in Connecticut) and the guesthouse my friend has let me use so I can finish my first book. My friend drives me in her war-torn Saab and as we drive over a bridge (yes, a miniature bridge can be found on the property), the sensors alert the staff who come out to greet me. Come the weekend when my friend visits, I wave my hand all around the estate and say, I knew you had money but not Connecticut compound money. We laugh and sip wine by the pool and she asks how the book’s going and I tell her I’m having a French new wave moment, and have you ever noticed the curtains in the room upstairs and the beautiful, beautiful view? That night, I watch her drive away from the window while I fall asleep to birds weaving through the trees.

The curtains, the copse of trees, the whitewashed windowpanes — they remind me of an estate — this time in Long Island and I’m two years out of college living with my pop in a small apartment above a barn on the estate where he tends to thoroughbreds. The window in my room overlooks a track where I spend most evenings. I clutch my Sony Discman and run, and run, and run. In circles.

But the view.

This is to say that a story can start with a single image or word or a piece of music. It can start with a character blurting out a line or the way the trees scrape the screen when it storms.

I never go into a story with a big idea. I don’t have a theme, a plot, a story, or even a fully-realized character, but I have a single strand of hair. A wisp of hair that can jettison me to another time, a place, a memory, a moment, a friend, a father, an old friend. An evening of rain coming down in sheets.

The strand of hair is your “in,” your passport and backstage pass to a story. And great stories are built on that single strand of hair. One strand is the curtain, another is a room, a time, the shape of someone’s face. The strands multiply until you have the thickness of a braid woven in your hands.

Reconsider the — I’m going to write a story about this…because the largeness of your ambition can blight the story, get you stuck, box you in. Because a story always starts one way and ends differently. A story is never about one thing and often it never is what you intended it to be because here you have this time, this place, these people, their voices and they maybe take you to places you hadn’t anticipated but find necessary.

Or perhaps you have an idea, but tuck it away for a bit. Start small. Start with something you can hold in your hands. Something you can slowly build upon. Something you can wind and weave. Something you can mess with, fuss with, detangle and re-braid until it — the story — becomes stronger, impenetrable.

Start with one small thing.