Beyond the White Curtains

What story might begin with a forest where no forest should be? In Beyond the White Curtains, strange questions open paths into hidden waterfalls, family clues, uncertain memories, and the small oddities of everyday life.

This guided journal for adults offers fifty open-ended questions to help you explore the choices and details that shape your storytelling voice. Follow a raven’s message, consider a locked book, revisit a dream, or decide what happens when a familiar promise slips from memory. Use each prompt to draft a scene, test a character’s instincts, explore a disagreement, or take an unexpected idea in your own direction.

The prompts move between imaginative situations and reflections on writing itself, including your instincts, your experiments, and the communities and experiences that influence how you tell stories. Eleven illustrations accompany the journey. A page on how to use the book and questions for the reader are also included.

There’s no single route through these questions: linger over a detail, follow a new possibility, or return to a prompt that keeps drawing you back. Keep this journal for your own creative practice or give it to an adult writer who enjoys exploring unusual ideas and finding fresh ways into a story.