Start Where You Are

How I start a writing fiction to heal story

Jan 22, 2025

If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is an essay in my ongoing “Writing Fiction to Heal in Real Time” series where I deep-dive into my writing fiction to heal method as field work and a case study. To begin, I will be working through my story, The Archive, which you can find more information on here.

“Where do I even start?”

That’s the question I get asked about most when it comes to my Writing Fiction to Heal process. Valid question because unlike mainstream writing methods that operate under an assumption that there’s “one” way to do things — that is not the case here.

I talk about this beginning stage pretty heavily in my book Forged in Fire: Writing Fiction to Heal and even give writing exercises to help bring all your ideas, feelings and story idea together. If you already have the book, take a look at Chapter 5.

Because I’ve been working through this process for many years, I don’t often need to turn to the exercises to get to the juicy center of what I want to write.

But I do journal. A lot.

More than a lot. Pages and pages and pages of journaling.

That’s where I recommend starting. It’s from this place that everything else comes together.

Plus, it’s really amazing to have evidence of your idea taking shape from it’s inception to where you are now.

Case Study

With The Archive, I’ve been sitting in the creative stew of this idea for months (years, even). By that, I mean that the idea for this story has been bubbling into my consciousness, giving me little hints or ideas or scenes or dialogue or character quirks along the way.

When I looked through my journals, the first mention I could find of this idea was back in 2017 after watching American Horror Story: Cult.

Regardless of what people have to say about Ryan Murphy, I think he’s a genius when it comes to his ability to work out personal and collective trauma on the screen. In Cult, he managed to take so many of the fears, emotions, and conspiracies that many of us had and explore it within the characters and the show.

I was inspired. In my journal entry from December 7th, 2017:

I don’t care what people say — the show felt prophetic. Almost like it had an inside viewing of my head and heart and wanted to warp, warp, warp it. Sure, there’s lots missing from the narrative. But overall? I think AHS: Cult nailed the season. It made me want to do something similar but in my own way. Explore my fears and own conspiracy theories that abound.

Like most of my ideas that are not yet ready to be written, I promptly moved on from the idea.

In 2020, when the world as we knew it stood still — again, I wrote about the idea. From my October 10th, 2020 entry:

I wonder if this is what an apocalypse would feel or look like? There’s a part of me that doesn’t quite believe it because… life is still moving on. It feels like things are still too “stable” to be considered a pathway to the apocalypse. Not that I want it to happen — just thinking again about writing a story that involves one. Would I use this experience as evidence? As a primer?

And again… nothing came from this entry.

In 2022, I wrote some generic entries pondering the story idea, yet it didn’t feel important enough to follow up on.

But 2023 and 2024 were the years that the idea really began to ooze out of me. Many of my “dark nights of the soul” included references to feeling like I was in a post-apocalyptic novel — more so from the emotional side. These entries included a lot of ideas, thoughts, jumbled theories on the collapse of the world, etc.

Since November 6th, 2024, however, the idea went from oozing and bubbling to spilling over.

With journals in hand, I knew it was time to explore this writing fiction to heal story.

I give you this breakdown of years and entries because I want you to understand just how fluid the process really is. Intuitively, our brains know when we are “ready” or not to work on certain projects. And all those years of questioning were preparing me for the NOW. I don’t think I could have started this story any earlier than I am now. Or maybe, I could have, but it wouldn’t have had the same ferocity. I had to live through some big experiences to be able to crack open the parts of me required for this story.

Start where you are

So the answer I like to commonly give to my students and clients who ask the question of “where do I start?” is:

Start where you are.

Dig out that journal and start writing as if your life depends on it. Examine, interrogate, question, hypothesize about what the story idea is trying to tell you first. If you trust in yourself and your process, your intuition will tell you when it’s ready. You just have to be willing to listen and answer the call when it comes.

Next time…

In the next essay of this series, I’ll be talking about moving from the realm of ideation to sitting with the match, the spark, and the flame of stories. How do we start building something from nothing?

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