What would it be?
What story would I tell?
What would it symbolize?
What themes would it have?
What characters would be included?
But wait, how many of these questions should even be answered before writing a sentence?
Why not just start with a story I find interesting and go from there?
Why not let the themes come during the course of the work?
Why not let the readers determine what the book symbolizes?
Why not let the story decide which characters to introduce?
Why did I initially think I needed to know everything from the start?
If every work began that way, then there wouldn’t be many at all. It’s more enjoyable to let the story surprise you than to know what will happen next.
All of human history, after all, played out that way.