Guest Post: Basel Dayyani - Some Thoughts on Writing

Start the first sentence and thoughts will spring out from the factory of thoughts, your mind. Once the first words started to come to existence, other thoughts fight fiercely for your attention. The intellect starts selecting them from amongst thousands of competing thoughts like rays of light bouncing off a rare exquisite diamond. My story of the first novel I wrote, Kingdom Infinitum, started by a lecture that a few ladies from Australia and England and other countries like so much.  The ladies asked if I had written anything, I said “No”. These ladies helped my mind generate a thought of writing a ten page booklet. Finally I sat down to write a ten page guide but the moment I started writing the first sentence tens of thoughts came rushing to my awareness fighting for attention. Instead of writing a guide the fighting thoughts asked my awareness to bring them to existence as if they were new born creations. These thoughts wanted to experience life in the mind of the many readers that will read their stories and the hearts that will be touched by them. What I found that stories starts by listening to your innermost thoughts. So let these thoughts free to present themselves and select the most beautiful of them to bring about beauty to the world we live in. I learned not to suppress any thought as any one of them could be that one that triggers a raging river of more beautiful competing thoughts. Follow the most striking of these thoughts with your mind and heart and let the most beautiful of words describe them.

I learned from my story, that my characters became free and alive in the story that was unfolding. They tried very hard to tell me how they want to live, some wanted to love, others wanted to sacrifice themselves for the sake of good, justice, and freedom while others were evil. Let those beings in the world of your story be free and they will tell you endless secrets. They will lead you to beauty beyond beauty. If a character wants to do something that you do not want, you will be surprised of the secrets that will unfold later and how smart and sophisticated they are if you follow the character. Surely, one of the characters will become you and you become it as if your world and its world have merged into one. Your dreams become the dreams of this character and the dreams of the character become your dreams.

Whatever world we imagine in our mind and whatever characters we bring to this world actually exist. The mind has already manufactured these imaginations in another dimension. A world that is created in the mind exists in that realm and so your belief that this world and its living beings exists provide you a powerful spear of imagination in writing your story. Your unwavering certainty in the existence of your new world has hidden force that will make your novel a mesmerizing story to remember.

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