I HAVE an IDEA for a STORY!

By Sharon May 

We hear (or say) that all the time. Just what we’ve been looking for. We savor the moment, and then realize someone else already used it. How can we put a twist on a common plot line and make a story like no other? Don’t want to waste ideas. Some writers say we can run out of ideas.

 Where do they come from? Some writers swear their muse takes care of that task. Others keep scraps of ideas stuck in books and corners of desks. Just in case the muse is on vacation, I like believing there are sources for us to mine.

The perceived world around us is one source. We hear bits of conversations and want the whole story. We see someone whose image sticks with us, and becomes a character. We smell Grandma’s house though it’s long gone. We touch a lover and remember others. We take a bite of an exquisite dessert and taste the individual ingredients.

 The imagination is the mind at work. We dream, create things that may or may not exist in the exterior world. We mull over and examine a thought or image from every angle. We toy with this and that until we can articulate an idea.

 The most amazing source is the soul, where ideas haunt us until they are through with us. The soul’s ideas that must be written and is often a story only we can tell. You know the one – it’s that novel that you spent most of your life writing.

Getting an idea is only the beginning. Ideas have to be expanded into plots, characters, settings, dialogue, conflicts, themes. The story has to be built the same way a house comes out of a design.

What happens when the idea grows away from us and we lose control? I wrote a 4-page story last year on an idea I got from a real-life incident of a package which contained a child’s gift being stolen out of a car and then given to the thief’s son for his birthday. I thought it finished but the idea wouldn’t be quiet.

I began revising it, filling in the gaps and discovering lots about the characters and their relationship. Suddenly the boy’s mom appeared. I had thought her long gone if not dead. At first, she led me to believe she would die from a drug overdose. She had plans of her own. Sixteen pages later, I’m still revising by letting the characters and plot evolve without my interference. The thief still gives the boy the stolen gift as in the original, but that’s the only similarity.

Sometimes when we are stymied, it may well be that we are trying to control the story and characters too much. We may have to give up micro-managing, and let the idea expand into the story it wants to tell.