Yes, there is a way I was taught to think that's very suited to writing. And, of course, I'm thankful to have grown up in a world filled with stories.
Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.
I think we think in terms of stories.
In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.
Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.
We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.
I always viewed life as material for a movie.
I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.
