Writing is Like Love

When they discover they are expecting another child, parents sometimes wonder how they could possibly love it as much as they love their existing offspring. They worry that there won't be enough to go round more than one child, but when the new baby arrives, they usually find that their love quotient per child hasn't been reduced - they have even more love to give.

Writing is like that. Your ability to write increases the more you do it. It isn't as if you have a set number of words inside you, 100,000 say, and once you've used them all up you'll have nothing left to say. You write more, you get more to write about.

Of course, it's a good idea to keep feeding your creativity so that the ideas you have to work on are good quality ones. But commit yourself to writing and the ideas you have to write about will automatically multiply.

Ideas for Writing from Everyday Life

While I was out and about this weekend, keeping my eyes and ears open for things to write about, a couple of buses caught my eye.

The first was a modern bus which appeared to have no passengers. What particularly captured my attention was the LCD display on the front of the bus which usually shows the route number and destination.

It contained only one word followed by a comma:

Sorry,

I assume that there should have been another screen to follow which would explain why the bus company was sorry. Sorry, bus driver in training. Sorry out of service. Sorry, contract only.

But instead there was just that hiccupping apology and we could only use our imagination to fill in the reasons for it.

It struck me as a great hook for a story. You could do all sorts of things with that one word as part of an unfinished message.

What could it be from? A 'Dear John' farewell letter? A letter to an estranged friend? A suicide note? The possibilities are intriguing, but it's the very incompleteness of the message that makes it so tantalizing.

The other bus I saw was a very old one, a vintage one, possibly - I'm sure you know the sort I mean, with a separate cab for the driver and a platform open to the elements. How many of us used to jump on and off a platform like that when we were in a hurry to get to school?

This bus had something on it that you don't usually see on public transport - two white ribbons adorned the front, like the ones you get on wedding cars.

That opens up lots of possibilities for a story too. Could the story be about a couple who met on a bus or worked on buses? Was the bus taking the happy couple to the church? If so, then they must be quite unconventional characters? Or was it taking them off on their honeymoon? Perhaps it could have a 'Just married' sign and and a pair of old boots trailing from the back?

See what you can do with either of these buses. And don't forget to tell me if you manage to write something fantastic based on this exercise.

Finding Ideas for Writing - Here, There and Everywhere

I was sitting having lunch in the bistro today, and I couldn't help overhearing a couple of ladies chatting at the next table. One of them was telling the other how she had met a man on a train and got chatting to him.

She'd said to him, 'Do you believe that some people are psychic because I'm getting all sorts of information about you?' Then she proceded to amaze him by telling him lots of facts about himself, all of them true.

In fact, she was just playing a trick on him. Someone she knew had told him that a friend of hers was going to be travelling on the train, and the description fitted him so perfectly that she guessed it must be him.

It got me thinking though. That was just a normal lunchtime, but what a great story! Just think of how you could incorporate some of that true life tale into a fictional piece!

It could focus on the conversation between the woman and the man - maybe with a supernatural twist for Hallowe'en. It could lead on to a love story in which the two people do have some sort of close, almost telepathic bond. Or it could lead you to write a story about someone who deceives someone else, either from the point of view of the person doing the deceiving or from the point of view of the person who's duped.

You could write an article about people playing tricks on other people. Or you could do some research on paranormal activity to see whether some people do have psychic information about strangers and how they get it. You could write a crime story where the woman uses her knowledge to win the man's trust, start a relationship, and then con him.

All these ideas, just from a lunchtime conversation!

Now do you see why writers should carry a notebook at all times?

Just for the record, I think she did eventually tell the man that she wasn't actually psychic; they just had a mutual friend.