The Heart of a Story
A letter to all who wish to tell stories.
The heart of a story is something felt, but is always unseen. It is born in the flames of passion and breathed to life within the framework of an idea, like a tiny ember nestled within a coal. It's nurtured until it ignites a great controlled blaze within a furnace that is an idea blazing to life as a story.
A story will always remember she who breathed life into it first. When she leaves, she thieves the life from the story, she orphans the story.
It's possible for someone other than the mother to find the heart of a story, but it takes a great deal of time and effort. To find the heart of story is to search through thousands of coals within a furnace, trying to find which one of those coals was the very first to exist, that coal that ignited the rest.
This is why so many story remakes, adaptations and re-imaginings fall utterly flat compared to the original. An orphaned story.
Just like we do, a story needs a heart. Without it, the story is dead on arrival.
This one facet of storytelling is the difference between the Lord of the Rings books being converted into Peter Jackson's beloved cinema adaptations, and the hatred directed towards Avatar: The Last Airbender's live action adaptations.
About the Creator
Monique Hardt
Monique Hardt is a longtime lover of the fantastical and the impossible, crafting works of both poetry and fictional prose. She began writing books at the age of ten and has been diligently practicing her craft ever since.
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