I hope you don’t mind if I put you to work today. But I have a question and I hope it’ll be a fun one. I’m teaching a class called Writing Popular Fiction this fall, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot today. I’m asking the students to write an opening chapter and a synopsis during the course. It’s a task that sounds fun to me, but I know there might be a few who weren’t expecting to wade so deeply into storytelling during an undergraduate course.

Still, I’m convinced that there’s a story inside us all just waiting to get out. Maybe most people don’t have twenty or thirty or a hundred the way some prolific authors do. But I think we all have at least ONE.

Some people don’t have the desire to tell the story, of course. I know some folks flat-out don’t enjoy writing. That doesn’t stop the story from lurking inside us! Haven’t we all thought at some point, “That would make a good story.” It seems like everyone I meet—who isn’t a writer—tells me at some point that they have a great idea for a book. The writers I know, of course, have ideas for books too but they keep them for their own Muse to work on.

One of my favorite authors, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote a book called Women Who Run With the Wolves. As a cantadora, or storyteller, Estes talks about the story as medicine and our need to carry on the storytelling legacy. She writes, “Although some use stories as entertainment alone, tales are, in their oldest sense, a healing art.” Look how much we learn about life and ourselves from stories. And frankly, I think some of the stories that are fore entertainment are healing in and of themselves since occasionally we crave the total escape that only fiction can offer. That ability to travel into a book is one of the most healing pastimes I know.

Assuming we all have a story to tell, what would yours be? That’s my question today and I hope you’ll take a moment to think about it. Maybe you’ll shout out the answer the moment I ask the question because you already have an idea for a self-help treatise for people married couples or a memoir about your childhood in a foreign country. But if you haven’t already got a book idea brewing, what kind of fiction story would you tell if you had the talents of a writer at your disposal to put the idea on paper? They say the best story to write is the one you want to read. So maybe you can ask yourself what kind of book you’d like to read in order to answer the question.

I know I’d like to read something historical and paranormal. Something involving magic and romance. I’d also like to read a great twin story in Blaze… maybe as an Encounters. So… what story ideas are brewing in you?

**I’m giving away a copy of any book from my backlist to one random poster today.