Kirsten Mustain, Author

On this Sunday at Dragonback, the wind yowls like a cat and the weather mavens predict strong storms.

And on this day I saw my first Baltimore Orioles of the season, lighting and fluttering above the pond.

 The rose-breasted grosbeaks, the scissor-tailed flycatchers, and the hummingbirds have all returned as well. And the goldfinches have gone from drab to bright.

Summer is not far behind, and so I have spent my day planting flowers and working on my long-neglected novel.

If you want flowers in your yard, you must clear the leaves and weeds and plant them.

It is true, flowers may grow up anyway. The life force is tenacious, and weeds will jut from unlikely places and bloom.

However, if you wants your favorite flowers in the places you would prefer them to grow, you have to do the work of putting them there yourself.

It is like the difference between falling into a job at a podunk newspaper in a rabidly right-wing town and pursuing a job at say, Smithsonian.

And if you should happen to be a novelist, you must do it regardless of whatever else is going on in your life. Novels do write themselves in a sense, but they need a physical act to manifest in the material world.

Storytelling is a divine calling, I believe.

Sri Paramahansa Yogananda wrote that we are all as actors in a divine film.

A book I recently read described, through quantum physics, the idea that we are all ultimately one observer seeing through billions of different eyes.

So if we are alive only in that we are all God playing billions of characters in a vast story with billions of settings and plots and subplots and surprise endings and strange beginnings, then those of us who are the storytellers must be engaging in a very special kind of creation.

And really we are all storytellers because we are all making up the stories of our lives from moment to moment.

I think that is what is meant in the book of Genesis when God says, "Let us create them in our own likeness."

I am surely not the first novelist to observe that characters often spring into the mind fully formed. They often seem to know the story better than the writer does.

In my experience, characters demand to be given a voice. They demand to be placed in a story. And they pester me until I let them out. Give voice to one, and more will follow.

Is that how it is for God? Is God's mind full of characters clamoring to be released into being?

Personally, these days I often clamor to go back. But then, this has not been my favorite chapter.

It will, however, provide excellent fodder for fiction.