At the last meeting of Marlborough Writers, the question was posed – where do I get ideas for my writing.
A great place for me, for prose or poetry or a script scene even, is the news.
News is a far wider market place than it used to be, which makes for even richer pickings. It could be the headline, story or photo.
Today, for instance, I opened my Firefox browser, and it offered me a bunch of suggestions such as ‘humans may have hibernated’, or from an email from The Guardian newspaper: ‘the longest ever chess columist reaches the 70th year’ or ‘Do feed the animals: zoo appeals for owners to donate pets as food’.
So how do these become a prompt? Where do you take these as there’s already a well-written story behind the headline.
I go from the questions which begin popping into my head like bubbles rising to the surface of a lake.
When did they hibernate? Why? How? Why have they suddenly come up with this theory? Who are the scientists who made this potential discovery?
How did they keep up a column on chess for 70 years – how old did they start? Why? Gosh they must really love chess, and writing about it. What must they have seen? What legends of the game did they meet (and did they win)? What ambitions of their own did they have? What vast knowledge of the game?
Why an earth did the zoo think it was a good idea to ask for pets to be donated as food? Who prompted this monstrous misfire? Or did it all begin with a misquote? Did the zoo need some prepostrous newstory to ‘break through’? How can I write a story without my own emotional reaction smothering the readers’ own thoughts about it?
Then the ensuing story tends to be an exploration of the answers to the questions, or why humans do it, or (more likely for me) a weird fantasy story about the joy of sleeping out the winter, or obsessions or a stubborn adhearance to routine or what happened when someone takes the zoo up on their offer?
So, where do you find your prompts?
Headline photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-76052-0335 / Kohls, Ulrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons
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