Writers: Is 186,000 miles a second really the cosmic speed limit?
Or are imagination and memory faster than the speed of light? As the author of “The Story Within, New Insights and Inspiration for Writers” (Penguin Random House/6th printing), I’ve learned that writers who take my workshops craving deadlines and discipline need only one thing: inspiration. Inspiration is simply motivation without the drill sargent. Look up. Look back. Look for contradictions and mysteries. Look for the puzzles in the counter-intuitive. For instance, the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang but why are we gathering speed?
Billions of years from now light from all those galaxies and stars you see faceting the night sky will be unable to reach us. Even the whisper of the Big Bang, the microwave background radiation, that static-y hiss you hear between radio stations, will have dissipated to nothing in the utter emptiness.
Earth astronomers will hear only silence, see only the Milky Way, and will have no reason to even suspect there was ever anything else.
What a strange miracle this window of time is. We have evolved enough to wonder where we came from, we know enough to predict how it will all end, and the fleeting evidence of those mysteries has not yet completely dissipated.
What do you know that will be lost forever if you don’t write it down? Whose story in your family has never been told? When did you first make a promise you knew you would break? Tell a secret you meant to keep? Who or what first broke your heart? What would you have to lose to not be yourself? Is there a moment in your life, after which, nothing was ever the same?
What evidence of your story will vanish with you if you don’t capture it now? What experience or memory is flying away at the speed of light? Stop the wild momentum, capture and collapse time.
Begin your story. Today. Watch the universe fall together again.
Book: The Story Within — New Insights and Inspiration for Writers
