David Sheppard

Story Alchemy: the Search for the Philosopher's Stone of Storytelling David Sheppard

The title Story Alchemy isn?t a metaphor. It?s the real deal. Ideas for stories, the prima materia of the story alchemist, are gifts. They are provocations from the unconscious, lures. The unconscious lies in wait, stalking you with a story aimed directly at your heart. Even when you get an idea from the outside world, it has resonated with something locked away inside your Unconscious. A story has its own ego. It wants to be told. Once the idea has come to you, and it comes of its own volition, you must consciously establish contact with the psychic energy that contains the story. It takes a collaboration between Consciousness and the Unconscious to bring the words across. We know certain things about stories that will aid us in the telling. Story is a particular form of psychic energy to which details cling, a unity of psychic energy. That energy has the same shape, the same form, but the details are different, so different that we hardly recognize the form from one story to another. Cinderella is such a story that has been told many times under different guises throughout the centuries. You must find your stories, those meant for you alone. To tell them, your awareness must cross the psychic threshold, the Iris of Time, and enter the Imaginarium. Story Alchemy unveils the alchemical processes involved in that divine art, the Philosopher?s Stone of storytelling.