Face the Page

“Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.” —Anne Lamott

Depending on where you look, there are claims that there is only one plot, or three, or seven, or twenty two. But even if it’s a hundred and twenty-two, that’s still a pretty small number considering the number of books that have been written. The challenge then isn’t coming up with a story that’s never been told, but a new way of telling the same old story. The differences will be in the details filtered through your unique personality and experiences. Like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, the same plot can be retold a hundred, a thousand times, and still have a new angle, a fresh feel, an emotional connection to readers.

Writing practice is collecting all those bits of colored glass to be used to give your story its own flavor