You Are The Protagonist
What story will carry you to the end?
For the sake of our time together, let’s imagine you are the protagonist. Because, well…you are. No matter the genre, every author will tell you to find out what your main character wants. This is what propels the story forward. Their name might come next. How do they dress? Where do they hang out? What do they listen to when they’re feeling powerful, sexy, sad — how about all three at the same time? Nina Simone, yeah. What city do they live in? Is she Brooklyn’s Black Carrie Bradshaw, is she a part-time librarian and full-time black feminist baddie living in Chocolate City weaving bespoke reading lists with her neighbors, or maybe she started a worldbuilding school trying to find her way back to Harlem? Yeah, that’s it.
Here’s what every storyteller will tell you, start with desire. From inside desire another sort of magic emerges. Something those determined to get free call, agency. Deeper than audacity, wider than imagination. Agency inspires the verb in worldbuilding. Inevitably this protagonist, part noun-part verb will, at some point in the story, realize she has to do something. Something must be done. And here comes the drama. Agency inspires action and now she’s rehearsing scripts of her own design. Her best friend tells her to rest, lie down, take a nap and she does. Her lover tells her to soak in the bathtub while he does the dishes, the laundry, the grocery shopping and the very important job of leaving her alone from time to time and it is good. The trees tell her to take long walks, she is obedient to no one and nothing but the trees and she is restored. But still, no amount of rest can replace the ecstasy of action. The story climaxes.
What happens when, all at once, we remember we are the authors of our lives and the next move we make is entirely up to us? What happens when we remember, in this story, we are both the author and the character? What happens when we remember desire is what we were born through, born into, born with — the seed of our selfhood — where agency is always, already ours to remember and reclaim. The act of reclamation brings the drama, and this time it’s the good kind. The kind where we remember we are unique but we’re not special. We find a bed in this memory, using our 1-of-1-ness to spin a plot all our own between starshine and clay1. Determined to make it up. In those particular moments of deep tenderness we give ourselves permission to make it up, permission to take action, permission to make mistakes. Inside that tenderness, we let the wind carry our shame because the wind is picking up and the story is gathering momentum now. Desire is in our sails and the captain surrenders to the air2 for a ride to the next paragraph.
We can go on like this for years, and it all starts with that crucial first step. Remembering your desire. After all, it is longing that will carry us all the way to…the end.
🌱 Seeda School News
🌳 Inside the Treehouse we host monthly workshops inspired by the 12 worldbuilding elements that make up our stories and our lives. This month the ecstatic action we’re taking is “queering our education”. With the worldbuilding element being “Education”, together we’re focusing on what we want to learn and unlearn through creating our own syllabi to expand our political imagination, inform our creative dispatches and even seed a grassroots, DIY graduate study program of our own design. Want to worldbuild with us this month?
The workshop is available for purchase for one payment of $75 which includes the “Queer Your Education” Workbook and the original Seeda Syllabus zine (2020) to print, fold and fill out on your own 11x17 paper!
“what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay”
— Lucille Clifton, “won't you celebrate with me” from Book of Light
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon