As people, we ask ourselves questions all the time. As writers, we do the same thing. Only our answers tend to yield pages and pages filled with answers. And I think sometimes, even through all of those pages, we forget the power of what if.
I know I forget about it. I probably wouldn't have remembered how powerful asking what if could be if I hadn't been knee deep in this month's submission. But as it was, I scrambled to finish the last of my thirty pages yesterday for the deadline and I just stopped and asked myself what if this happened? And then I waited for the answers to find their way to the page.
I'm sure this all sounds very mystical, but I promise you it isn't. It's actually quite simple. All it takes is the right question to spark fifty more. So if you're scared of an empty page or stuck on an idea that's just not working stop and ask yourself what if and bask in the knowledge of things you never thought possible. Maybe we're all just scared of the impossible and that's why we don't ask ourselves more questions. Maybe we're scared of the answers: true or false or fiction. To quote Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, "people want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer." But if we know this to be true then maybe we can remember that impossible things happen every day and just go from there.
xoxo
K.K.