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Topic : Re: Not wanting to "spoil" a story due to lack of skill I have a story that is dear to me and that I would very much want to write about. However, I don't have lots of experience in writing - selfpublishingguru.com

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This answer joins Mary: ‘Write it’.
Perhaps, some inspiration from another writer -- Robert Graves -- might help.
I am including a transcript of an interview, and although Graves speaks of how he writes poetry, it is entirely possible to apply his process of writing to anything.
Note that he refers to writing and rewriting as something simply inherent in the nature of things. For him, a poem (the final literary work) has already been written - it exists before he starts. He is not writing it. He has to get “back to the original” that is there.
Here are his words:

Graves: ...a cloud descends on you, you do not know what's happening; then you suddenly realise that there is something, some problem of extreme importance that's got to be solved, then you realise there is a poem around, and then, suddenly, two words or three words come to your mind and that gives a start, and then you write the poem, and it's as though the poem has already been written, and you are trying to reconstitute it; you have got the poem as something already there; you have got to get back to the original, your original view of it, and so you work hard and hard to get it back to something near what it really is, was, would be...
Interviewer: Could it be compared to a mystical experience?
Graves: Of course, it is mystical…
Interviewer: Do you feel that you have succeeded at times in doing this, in getting this thing out?
Graves: When you find the poem, and you can’t do anything more to it, then you put it away.
Interviewer: But you keep on revising it?
Graves: It is easy to cheat yourself, and very often you think that you have written the poem that is alright and then after time you realise that in some slight way you have cheated…

So, what you want to write is "already there". Start, and words will “come to your mind”! (And then correct where you will discover that you have “cheated”...)
The full interview is here.


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