On Writing: How do you come up with writing ideas?
How do you come up with writing ideas?
It depends on the circumstances, really, as well as my current state of mind.
As it stands, other than my blog and my answers on Quora, I can point to three things that I have written for public consumption:
Each of these projects had a unique “point of origin.”
The oldest of these is Reunion: A Story. Although I self-published it last summer, it began life as a creative writing assignment in my sophomore year in college, circa 1987. I don’t remember what the assignment was now, but I do remember that I wrote a dream sequence set during the protagonist’s last day as a high school senior. It only earned a B, but I kept it in my college work files with the intention of maybe reworking it into something a bit more readable.
And that’s exactly what I did in the spring of 1998, during a particularly depressing period in which I was hopelessly single, bummed out that I couldn’t afford to attend my 15th high school class reunion (tickets were $300, and I was barely making ends meet), and I had just read that an acquaintance from high school had been killed in a car crash. I had no one - except my mom - to commiserate with, so I went to my computer, opened a Word document, and began writing a short story about a young up-and-coming historian who returns to his hometown to visit his high school crush’s grave.
At some point in the writing process, I remembered that I had that “dream sequence” stashed away in my desk drawer; I retrieved it, saw that it had potential, and even though I had to revise it a lot, I incorporated it seamlessly into the main story.
Save Me the Aisle Seat was born out of a need to get something published before I turned 50. I wasn’t keen about going through the complexities of getting my first book “out there” via traditional publishing, and in any case, I didn’t really have any manuscripts for a work of fiction handy - except, of course, Reunion, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to publish that.
However, I did have a lot of movie reviews in my Word document files; in 2012 I was still submitting consumer reviews to the now-defunct Epinions, and many of them were in the media categories (Books, Movies, and Music). I knew that Roger Ebert and other film critics often republished their movie reviews in book form, so why shouldn’t I?
Of course, I couldn’t just choose a bunch of reviews at random, save them in a Word .doc file, add a clever title, and publish the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle as a book. I had to revise them (a task that I now must admit I did too hastily), organize them in a logical fashion, and write an introduction. Then I had to find the right outlet (I ended up choosing Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing for the ebook and CreateSpace for the print edition), submit it, make any necessary corrections, then submit the final version, create a cover, an author bio, and a back cover blurb before hitting the magic “Publish” button.
As for A Simple Ad, I simply got very lucky - in more ways than one. First, I was asked to write a screenplay for a short film by Juan Carlos Hernandez, a New York City-based actor-director. I met Juan when we were both in drama class in high school, and we became fast friends and hung out together with a small circle of our mutual buddies till he went off to Loyola University to study drama and TV production.
To make a long story short, Juan and his wife Adria have a small independent film company, Popcorn Sky Productions, which is their main outlet for making their own low-budget movies. I’d already co-written a screenplay with Juan back in 2010, so when he needed a screenplay for a “short” (ideally a two-minute flick), he turned to me.
For the first day or so after I accepted the assignment, I had no idea what story I could tell in such a brief time. I sat in front of my PC, with a screenwriting program open and a blank document page on the monitor, challenging me to come up with something.
It wasn’t until late in the afternoon of the second day of working on the script that inspiration struck. As I kept on wondering how in the world I was going to tell a believable, relatable story featuring two realistic characters in two minutes, I remembered an apocryphal story about Ernest Hemingway and how he allegedly wrote a short story that’s only six words long.
According to the legend - and it is a legend - Hemingway made a bet with other writers that he could write what we would call today a bit of flash fiction in only six words.
“Oh, Ernie,” one writer is supposed to have said. “No one can write a complete story in six words!”
Hemingway supposedly smiled and asked for a sheet of paper and something to write with. When someone proffered those two items, he wrote something in longhand in less than a minute’s time, then showed it to his fellow authors.
On the page, the legend goes, Hemingway had written: For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.
And from that apocryphal tale, A Simple Ad was born.
And from that apocryphal tale, A Simple Ad was born.
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