Mythurgy
"This is magnificent - and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?"
The Story
One day, the Author woke up and said to herself “This story I'm in, how do I write it?”
Inspiration
“Obviously first I’ll need inspiration. That’s really the starting point. To write a story without being inspired is like living a life without being born.”
She paced up and down. “But that must have already happened, because the story has already begun. Did I do it at the start, and not notice? Of course I couldn’t notice, because it hadn’t started yet. But how did I do it before it had started? When was the start? Was it when I spoke to myself? Was it before then? That wasn’t the start of this monologue, this came after the pacing. And it wasn’t the start of the pacing either. Or this sentence. There’s always a start if you look for it, and inspiration is always there, beginning everything, all the time.”
So the Author went looking for inspiration, and found it everywhere she went. Inspiration made objects, it sustained people, it flowed out of icons into the Author’s hands so she could shape it into her story. Her unique story, which nobody else could write.
Idea
And all this left her to wonder, “Why can I do this?”
“Because you have me,” said her Muse.
“That’s all very well to say,” said the Author. “But how can you do it?”
“I can’t do it either. I’m just an idea, an idea that’s been had before, and an idea that’ll be had again. But an author with an idea, that’s where the magic happens,” mused the Muse.
“Don’t beat yourself up. Just because you’re an idea, doesn’t mean you’re not real.” The author smiled. “Ideas can do anything. They’re figments of the imagination, can do anything it can imagine. A good author can find them anywhere, bring them to life and make them hers. And if this story is going to go somewhere, I’ll need some.” So she grasped her Muse and her inspiration and stepped into the imagination.
Ideas swirled around her. Some were bad ideas, and she got rid of them, but others were vibrant and interesting. She gathered those, fed them inspiration and prepared to take them back to help her write her story.
“But wait,” the figments said. “We're from other stories, not yours. We can’t be in two at once.”
The Author smiled. “Of course you can. There’s any number of stories an idea can be in, and and number of ideas a story can have. There’s no end to imagination, so all of them are found here somewhere. You just need to find them, and give them a path into your work.”
Plot
“This is an awful lot of ideas you have,” said the Muse. “At this rate your story will be very confused.”
“You’re right,” said the Author, and she sorted through what she had gathered, picking out the important things and seeing which plot they lent themselves to. Then she made sure to pick the right ones when she needed them, out of all the ones that might have fit, to keep the story in the shape she needed it.