How Do You Create?

There’s no one way to create good work.

Despite the plethora of how-to-write books that promise surefire recipes for writing success, there is no right way to write.

The way a person creates is a mysterious thing, similar to a person’s favorite color. Why do some people like a certain color and not another one? Blue has been my favorite color for as long as I can imagine. Yet some people like red, others prefer periwinkle, and then there are those who like fulvous (a brownish orange). Why? It just is. And it’s a good thing, right? We need the world to be painted a variety of colors. We need to walk through rooms with different hues, to feel life as a celebration of color in its many forms, to make life, well, colorful.

When I begin a story, I sit down with an itch of a story idea stirring in my mind, and I write a sentence, without too much thought, without any maps of logic, and then I write another sentence, and then another, one thing leading to the next, writing in pursuit of faint inklings and distant whispers, writing to discover, writing just to write.

It’s a fun way to write — to write as a quest.

It’s as if I’m lost in a foreign city, and I’m trying to find my way home, but I can only follow hunches, scents in the air, wisps of memory. I’ll…