A writing coach suggested to me this week that listening is crucial to writing. Not listening to advice, or music, listening to the voice of the story. She called it “discovering the soul of the story.”

That happens to me sometimes. Something about the story just keeps going in my head and I write it down. I once visited the Salvador Dali museum, which has art going back to before we were human. As I browsed this eclectic collection, I wondered what an alien would make of it. Somehow I could almost hear the alien’s voice, wondering what it all meant.

My story, The Museum at the End of Time, grew out of that effort. I write it in a very short time and, aside from edits of the strange pronouns I was experimenting with, it pretty much stayed the way it was until it was published.