Every story begins with a door
An old atlas, a blue door, and the questions that become a novel.
The question in the notebook
What if a door could take you somewhere you had forgotten? That was the first sentence in my notebook for A Garden of Doors. There was no plot yet, only a blue door standing in a field of long grass.
I spent a week imagining what might be on the other side. A childhood kitchen. A city built around a tree. The last afternoon of a friendship. The most interesting doors were never the grandest ones. They opened onto something ordinary that someone had lost.
Finding the way through
When a story feels too large, I come back to three small questions:
- What does this person want to find?
- What are they afraid of remembering?
- Who might be waiting on the other side?
The answers change as I write. That is part of the pleasure. A map can show you a path, but a story gets to surprise you.
This journal entry and the author are fictional, created for the public author-page demo.