Timothy Johnson

Category: Big Thinks

  • Finding Your Story’s Starting Line

    Track athlete in a light blue track suit crouching at a starting line and preparing to run
    Photo by Gratisography / Ryan McGuire from Freerange

    I was on a panel once that was taking questions from the audience, and a guy raised his hand and asked how to know when to start a new chapter. He said he’d written hundreds of pages, and it was only chapter one. A silence fell over the room as the audience waited with rapt attention and those of us on the panel had no idea how to respond to that. Without seeing that guy’s manuscript, I was certain his problem was he hadn’t found the beginning of his story yet.

    To the guy’s credit, he’d started writing his novel, and that’s admirable. Moreover, he’d started doing the work, and that’s progress.

    I don’t remember how we, the panel, responded to him, but the point here is, again, without seeing that manuscript, I would expect to find pages and pages and pages of world building and information about characters, places, customs, traditions, etc. That stuff is important, but it’s not the story.

    Finding the starting line is a very common problem for us writers because we are (and this is true—unless you’re using generative AI, which is bad and I’m going to get to someday) human beings, and it’s natural for human beings, when beginning any creative process, to search for information. Even legal cases start with a discovery process. As storytellers, we begin by asking questions like, Who is this person? What is this place? We build a foundation.

    I’m here to tell you, while that stuff is incredibly important and you need to work on it because everything rests on it, the story starts elsewhere.

    (more…)

  • Walking the D.C. Trail of 2020

    An image of 10,000 small American flags surrounding the Washington Monument with a sign that reads, "200,000 dead, they deserved better"

    Washington, D.C. is known for being the center of politics and power in the United States, but there is a sense of disassociation among the American people. It is a sense that Americans have lost control of their capital and perhaps even that it is hostile territory. This sense sometimes manifests in the city’s streets.

    America continues to grapple with racial injustice and police brutality, which remains unaddressed by national leadership. With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the relative balance of the Supreme Court is at risk. And always in the background of 2020 like a crackling static, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to kill more people in America than in any other country in the world despite a relatively low population density.

    On the final day of summer 2020, the 200,000th American died from Covid-19. The next day, I decided to take a walk.

    (more…)