“Everything you read, things that you write, things that you listen to, people you encounter, all go on the compost heap, and will rot down, and produce beautiful stories.”
This quote is from Neil Gaiman’s incredible Master Class. Basically he is saying here that our stories pull from all of our experiences, as well as older stories we’ve written that maybe never materialized into a finished product. And that’s where I am right now, taking a story I’ve been working on for the past few weeks and throwing it into the compost heap.
It was a decent idea- a story about a Dream Maker who only appeared to people who believed in a life beyond the norm. And he would magically show up and hand them a blue envelope with a dream inside that gave them permission to explore their passions instead of just resigning to be a lawyer or a businessman or something else that didn’t inspire them. Kind of like Santa Claus for nomadic 20-somethings.
But as I looked at my half-finished story, I realized that it was pretty much a jumbled mess. And I had no idea where I wanted to go with it and didn’t really feel inspired to finish it. Now, I’m a big believer in continuing along until you finish a project, as it trains your mind not to quit too early. I typically wonder halfway through a story where I’m going with it, only to eventually push through and come up with a pretty solid ending and create a decent finished product.
This time, though, I’m just not feeling it and want to put the story in the compost heap and use it to help fertilize a more captivating story in the future. So Daniel, the Dream Maker, into the compost heap you go, off to rot down and hopefully inspire something beautiful.