A WRITER’S TREASURE
CHEST
Every writer should have a treasure chest—a place to store
golden nuggets of brilliant ideas, keeping them from being forgotten and giving
them a place to mature. Ideas are very different from stories. Stories have a
beginning a middle and an end. If a story doesn’t have all three of those
elements, it’s a story fragment—not a story. To become a story, an idea often
needs to be strung together with other seemingly unrelated ideas before
sparking the inspiration to becomes a fully formed story.
For my idea treasure chest, I use cheap composition
books—those stiff cover, lined-paged, 9X7 notebooks I used in college (back in
the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth). Over the years, I’ve collected a
bookshelf’s worth of these invaluable resources. Whenever I am beginning a new
writing project of any kind, I plunder these notebooks for inspiration.
First let me explain what kind of ideas I put in my treasure
chest. Recently, I was driving to a writing conference while listening to Weekend Edition on my local NPR station.
Before the first hour of the show was finished, I had to pull over and scribble
down four ideas sparked by the
profiles and interviews to which I’d been listening (you can’t consider
yourself a writer if you don’t keep a pen and paper handy at all times). I
later transcribed these scribbled notes into my current composition book.
What were these ideas? Here are the notes I wrote down:
Food Fraud…Billion dollar
industry…Food fingerprints...
A teen molested by her
father is forced to pose as dead…Father obsessed with True Crime
magazines…Recreates murder scenes using daughter as the corpse...
Faded sit-com star—one of
the first Asians to be portrayed in a positive manner despite her soft around the edges body and plain face)—finds she still has an
impact on modern youth…Letters sent long after the show is over…Weave in
story of how protagonist made her character positive by manipulating the
show’s writers…
Italian judge fights
organized crime by taking away the children of Mafia families and placing
them in foster homes to break the cycle of inherited violence...Some
mothers beg the judge to take their children...Many of the fathers in
jail...Patriarchal animosity…Judge must be stopped before he destroys the
balance of power...
I later added a fifth note for the day after reading a
newspaper article:
None of these ideas pertain to any current work I have in
progress. They might never have anything to do with anything I ever write—but
they are there if I need them.
And now some words from, Alice
In Wonderland...
Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said. "One can't believe
impossible things."
“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was
your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed
as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Why did I choose those lines from Alice and the Queen? Because
far too many beginning writers are fearful of having their ideas stolen. What
they don’t realize is most established writers give away more ideas before
breakfast than a beginning writer comes up with in a month.
By the way, feel free to steal any of the above ideas.
Why?
Because I like you.
Actually, I don’t even know you, so that can’t really be the
reason. I may like you if we ever become acquainted, but sharing my ideas with
you is not dependent on my liking you or not. What I can tell you is even if we
took the same idea and began writing at the same time, we would produce totally
different stories.
Synesthesia (a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation
of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences
in a second sensory or cognitive pathway) played a very important part in my
novel Lie Catchers. However, the idea of synesthesia had been in my
writer’s treasure chest for over ten years. When I flipped through my notebooks
in preparation for writing Lie Catchers,
I came across my entry on synesthesia and immediately knew I’d found the
perfect place to incorporate the idea into a whole story.
My notebooks are filled with off the wall ideas. Many of them
I may never use, but I know I’ll find a way of using many of the others in
future stories. Often two or three ideas from my notebooks end up in one story—usually
a novel. Other times, one idea from my notebooks may inspire a short story
years after I first jotted it down. Life and our subconscious have a way of
giving ideas proper context at the proper time.
What’s in your writer’s notebook?
"Far too many beginning writers are fearful of having their ideas stolen. What they don’t realize is most established writers give away more ideas before breakfast than a beginning writer comes up with in a month."
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I've been asked many times why do I give away ideas? Don't I understand that I could be giving away a million dollar idea? Maybe. But I also realize that I'll never live long enough to write all the stories I want to write. So why not give away a few of them to somebody that may benefit?