Or . . .
Once upon a time there lived a lovely little Princess named Snow White.
Or . . .
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that--a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that the dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
In 1937, these first lines shattered the silence of the blank page. The first is from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. It locates the story to follow in a particular place outside of time. Walt Disney's Snow White book begins in an undefined time and place. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner creates immediately both the time and place of the work.
How to begin? It is a challenging and difficult question.
Like Tolkien? By a hole in the ground there lived a Fox.
Like Disney? One summer, pastor Bob Fox had an amazing journey into magic.
Like Faulkner? On May 31, the weary hands of the clock pointed at two and three in the terminal filled with stale air and crowded with molded seats and weary and expectant travelers, my journey East began and would continue through London, Paris, Orlando and California all in search of the elusive thread that ties together great stories and their tellers, the role of place and space, and maybe even the question of good and evil--a journey to the source of imagination, the power of the tale, and the way stories bring together human beings of all times and places to work together and dream a future.
It begins . . .
