credit –  discoveringfossils.co.uk

Many of us are familiar with the basic, linear plot line: beginning, middle, end. There is a start, a problem, a rising action, a climax, a falling action, a finish. The central character, the community is altered, thrown through a series of events that unfold in a linear way. This is a very basic idea.

A couple weeks ago, I went in and encouraged everyone to write stories about solace, about times when the world fell away and they felt safe. Many of them said that those times were rare. When we came back together, one woman said it was hard to tell stories when most of the time, her stories started in the middle and jumped all over the place. They bent time around central ideas and she thought they would be difficult to understand.

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