In the beginning… it was a dark and stormy night… call me Ishmael… it is a truth universally acknowledged…. in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
These are all beginnings. Lines that have kicked off stories, taking readers by their imaginations and leading them into realms of thought and whole new worlds. Stories can be read from the safety of an armchair and promise adventure without the risk. We can follow the story, comfortably making friends with the characters, until an unexpected twist turns the story on end. The conflict builds into a climax to create the arch of the story. Our new fictional friends may suffer for the twist, but we readers love having a front seat to the action.
This gives us a break from the twists in our own lives, which often seem disorienting. We are the characters in this story away from the safety of our armchair and often our beginnings don’t make sense. We wish we could have anyone’s story but our own. It is a mishmash of storylines. Here we are in the beginning on a stormy night, and a man named Ishmael is going to tell you about universal truths while hobbits live in the ground, and there is a frickin dragon looming on the horizon. You can wait for the twist to happen to you, to feel the fire of the dragon’s breath. Or saddle up with Ishmael and take your universal truth to the dragon itself. Go on an adventure and be the best character of your own story.
It’s like the 90s song… “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
Have a beautiful beginning.
Amelia Shugar 