Member-only story
Writing Inspiration From A Chicken
Where do stories come from?
I think about this question a lot. I think about it while I’m driving to the grocery store and while I’m walking my dog. I think about it when I’m reading to my kids at night and while I chop onions for dinner.
One afternoon, I was thinking about it while I was collecting eggs from my chicken coop.
An egg is a beautiful thing. It’s easy to forget that when you buy them by the dozen and only think about them when you are deciding how many to crack into the pan for your breakfast.
But consider this: have you ever seen a pregnant bird?
No, you have not. Birds don’t get pregnant because they evolved to fly. An egg is a bird’s version of a pregnant belly. An exterior womb, if you will, so that the mom can still fly around while her baby grows from a single cell into a fluffy chick that can survive in the outside world.
An egg is like a story. When you look at an egg, all you see is the smooth, round shell. You don’t see the twists and turns or the chemical reactions of protein synthesis and calcium deposition that happened deep inside the hen long before the egg exited her body.
When you read a good story, it has a smooth, finished flow. Every story has a backstory and every backstory has…
