The Story of the Story of The Girl in the White Dress

As a long-established writer and teacher of writing and English, I always try to cover all the bases when it comes to teaching others the ropes. That being said, there is something about writing I simply can not teach anybody, and that is because I do not fully understand it myself. It is a mystery about writing, as deep as the mystery of The Girl in the White Dress itself.

I have to confess, I did not make any plans or follow any rules for the story of The Girl in the White Dress. I just got myself into the zone and out it poured from the wellspring of whatever creativity I might possess.

I really did not have a clue where that story was going to take me. I simply made it up as I went along. Obviously, the painting gave me a starting point. All I did was start to describe what I visually saw with my eyes. And then my creative mind took over without me even noticing.

I started on my own favorite subject, me, with some true biographical details from my own childhood. Then from there, I interloped myself into the painting. I put myself invisibly into the picture of the girl in the white dress.

The girl became my escape from the wretched hardship I was born into. I think there was an element of wishful thinking on my part, wishing that there had been a girl in a white dress for me to sit and while away some time admiring a beautiful girl in a woodland glade.

From there I thought how intriguing it would be if I managed to maintain an air of mystery. To be truthful, I simply could not think of anything interesting for the girl or myself to say.

And in the misty atmosphere of that air of mystery resides the paranormal, the extraordinary, a place where verbal dialogue is, more often than not, conspicuous by its absence. However, there was a visual connection I could build upon.

In the end, well, the end is not always the end. I let the story marinade some and for want of anything meaningful to write, I simply brought the story to an unsatisfactory close.

Now here is a funny thing. Almost every time I write anything, as soon as I hit publish, too impatient to publish for my own good, suddenly a million great ideas spring to mind. Thankfully, as a Vocal Media Plus member, I can go back and do an edit or two.

Suddenly, an idea came to me from nowhere, or maybe it was from watching a great film with Nicole Kidman in it called 'The Others'. Or perhaps it was the novel, 'The Turn of the Screw', by Henry James who I studied many decades ago. Whatever it was, I liked the idea of turning the premise that I was a normal boy looking at a vision, upside down. What if I was the vision and it was the girl who was normal?

What if neither of us was real? What if we were a vision for each other on some astral plane where we had been supernaturally transported? Maybe we had met in some afterlife state of Limbo?

I often think it is better not to spell it out what it all means, far better to let the idea marinade in the minds of the readers to create their own meaning. I think that that can make the reader's interaction with the story that much more pleasurable, rewarding and perhaps, above all, highly memorable.

I hope this attempt at an explanation goes some way to help the reader to understand how the story came about.