WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR WRITING IDEAS FROM? BY SANDRA HARRIS.
WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR WRITING IDEAS FROM?
BY SANDRA
HARRIS. ©
People who know I’m a writer are always asking me where I get
my ideas from. You can find inspiration literally anywhere in life, I tell
them. Look around you in the house; pick up an ornament and make up a story
about it, or write a non-fiction piece about its origins, if you know them.
Read books, watch films, study paintings or listen to music.
Better yet, get out of the house altogether and go for a walk. It’s better than a book of writing prompts. You’ll see ideas around you wherever you look. People always look a bit dubious when I say that. A walk? Really? Just walking around and observing things and people? They probably wouldn’t believe me if I added that, if walking around the place observing and inter-acting with people were a job that you got paid for, I’d do it in a flash.
And, just to prove my point about how rich and fruitful our
local neighbourhoods can be as a source of inspiration and ideas for our
writing, I can reveal that I went for a bit of a local perambulation today and
came up with a few things which I’ll gladly share with you in the hope that you
might use them yourselves as the jumping-off point for a story or a poem:
1. There was a guy walking down the
street with a live- as opposed to late- parrot on his shoulder. I did a double
take, as did most of the other pedestrians on the same street. How did this
parrot get so tame that its owner could trust it not to fly away when they go
out together? See if you could work the man and his feathered friend into a
piece of writing.
2. I passed a parked van by a parade of
shops with the indicator lights going, to show that the driver had just stepped
away from his vehicle for a moment. In the passenger seat, sitting up straight and dignified and
looking very important indeed, was a brown woolly dog! I waved in and smiled
and tried to attract his attention but he didn’t get excited, he just looked
over at me mildly as if to say, do you mind? I’m a very important doggie and I'm trying to mind the car here…!
3. I passed a hoarding next to a
building site with the following words painted on it: KINDNESS STATION: TAKE A
COAT IF YOU ARE COLD, OR LEAVE ONE IF YOU HAVE ONE TO SPARE. Underneath were
four hooks to hang the coats. You could write a story about a random act of
kindness, maybe, or about one of the many facets of homelessness or poverty.
4. An outdoors plant shop proved a particularly
inspiring place to browse in for an hour- or two! I saw a huge tub filled to
the brim with rainwater, and imagined a rather grim story about a mother who
refuses to accept that her child, who was lost at sea during a family holiday,
is never coming back.
5. The plant shop was playing music that
sounded like it came from a silent film-slash-romantic comedy, something in
which you might see Buster Keaton take a lady to the beach for an ice-cream
only to end up in a rocket being launched into outer space…! Think up your own
romantic comedy story, even if it’s a bit far-fetched.
6. I had to yank on an old-fashioned
bell pull in order to alert staff at the plant shop that I wished to make a
purchase. Where else might you find a doorbell like that, the kind that makes a
clanging noise when you pull on it? A haunted house, maybe, situated on a
cliff, and it’s a dark stormy night. Who’s ringing the bell for access to this
dreary mausoleum on a night like this? Surely only the souls of the dead are
abroad on a night like this…?
7. We’re in the cake shop next, where
I’m picking up a birthday cake for my daughter. The first cake brought out to
me has the following inscription on it: GOOD LUCK IN YOUR DRIVING TEST KEVIN!
They got it right in the end, but think of what hilarious shenanigans might
ensue if the mistake wasn’t uncovered till the unveiling of the cake, at the
actual birthday party…?
8. I saw a woman staring at a brown
paper box on the ground outside the off-licence. The box, which was addressed
to a woman called Vanessa, appeared to be empty. Who is Vanessa? Does she live
over the off-licence? Did she get her package, and how did the box end up on
the street? Might there be a story there?
9. On a visit to a charity shop, in fact
one of my favourites, it transpired that they were selling a couple of
European-made chairs for nearly three hundred quid each (each!), and myself and
an old man were kind of looking askance at each other, wondering what the hell
was so special about these two fairly ordinary-looking kitchen chairs that the
management was charging the best part of a grand for them. Then the old man turns to
me and says: ‘I was talking to your man the manager here, and I sez to him,
are ya running a charity shop or a feckin’ antiques showroom…? He wasn’t very
happy about it but I made my point.’ Imagine and write down the
conversation that took place between the two men.
10. And finally, and this was such a
random sighting it had me in stitches, on the way home from my perambulations,
I saw two men standing on the pavement outside a shop, throwing cushions up to
a man leaning over his balcony, clearly the occupant of the flat above the shop.
As if that in itself wasn’t strange enough, there was a lot of bantering going
on and one of the pavement men shouted up to Balcony Man: ‘Is this how you
get your Deliveroo as well…?’
So you see, there’s a
lot happening out there if you’re prepared to open yourself up to it. I’ve been
told that I’m quite a quirky, inquisitive person and that’s why odd or
interesting or even eccentric things always seem to happen to me, which I like.
Let the universe know you want to be open to some of its weird and wonderful
happenings and it will, hopefully, show them to you. Then get writing…
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