The New Year begins and so does my new novel. So far, I only have bits and pieces, odds and ends, and some scattered images that, if I’m lucky, will show up when I sit down to work, but mostly appear when I’m driving or taking a shower or doing some other activity where a pen and paper are non-existent.

It’s like this with each new project.  In a million ways I feel like I’m chasing a goose, one that keeps dodging my grasp and leaving me with only a handful of feathers. What I want is the whole goose, but that honking sound in my ear reminds me that it takes more than a chase to capture her.

When I first met Holly McGhee, we spoke on the phone and she asked me to answer this question: where do you see your writing a year from now?

It caught me off guard. Such a simple question, really. In my long career I had been asked about the stories I was working on and the stories I had already written, but I couldn’t recall anyone asking me where I specifically wanted my writing to go. She didn’t ask me what I wanted to write or when I wanted to write it. She didn’t ask me who I wanted to write for or why. Nothing about how. The question was about where. All at once, it felt like this: if I could figure out the where of it all, the other questions would be answered at the same time.

But where was it that I wanted it to be?

I hung up the phone and promised Holly that I would get back to her.

In the moment that followed that call, I felt rattled, unsettled. The call had left me unnerved. To answer the question, I had to first figure out where my work was at that particular moment. That was easy. I knew exactly where it was. Stuck! After fifteen years, I was at a place in my career where I could have continued writing the kinds of books that I had been writing all along. And truthfully, that would have been okay. I was satisfied with the work I had done. And for the most part my books had been well-received, and even won a few awards here and there. I didn’t need to make apologies.

I also didn’t need to stay there. But why not?

Simply put, my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

My heart!

All at once my heart ached. Physically ached, as if someone had reached into my chest and grabbed it. Suddenly, I could barely breathe. My heart! I had forgotten that trusty organ, the one I had called upon so many times, but had somehow set aside. How does one set aside something as powerful as your own heart? What I realized was that in my work I had reached a level of competence that didn’t require me to tap into my heart so much. No wonder I was so stuck. In a trice I became painfully aware that what was missing in my current writing was heart. My heart.

The ache became almost unbearable, and all I could do was rest my head on my desk and weep. Where? Where was my heart?

And then I knew. Holly had asked me the essential question, and in the asking of it she reminded me that a story’s heart requires the teller to crack open her own heart. Yes, I wanted to catch the goose, but chasing her was only part of it. The other part was love, falling in love with that honking goose, even though it might require some serious discomfort.

Holly asked me that question on New Year’s in 2005. Since then it’s the question I pose to myself every year. It’s the question I pose to my story—where is it that the heart cracks open?

Here’s the thing . . . where the heart cracks open is where our deepest longings lie, and that is what Story is all about. It’s where our characters ache for something that is missing. It’s where we feel the tug and pull of our own patch of ground. It’s where the goose spreads her substantial wings and flies straight into the stars. There. Come on then, let’s follow. Let’s go there.