Come Write With Me: The Idea Files
by Barbara Deming
On my computer I have set up a file titled Ideas. Very original, I can hear you say. I use this ordinary file for story and article ideas that have been scribbled in that small notebook I always carry, on scraps of paper, or on trashed envelopes. Sometimes I open the file to allow my muse to control entries—not such a good idea on days when your brain is as scattered as mine can sometimes be. But who knows? From those hit and miss ideas may sprout the story of the century.
Despite the electronics era we find ourselves in, however, this is not my favorite file. I keep manila file folder(s) for clippings, those random articles I just had to keep because they tweaked my interest, that picture that said a thousand words if I could only arrange them into a story, and those brochures I always pick up when I travel. If you open my file today you will find newspaper clippings, pages from magazines, special stories I read (both fiction and non), quotes, even items I have printed off the Internet when doing research for other projects. I advise every writer to keep those clips of interest.
Don’t worry about organization—just pop them in. You will organize them to some extent when you pull from your file one of those ideas that begs to be written; then you can go through you file to extract all clippings on your subject matter. Every week or so, I go through my file hoping to find a gem. And it works. I have been known to write something of interest to others from some note or clipping found in my file and in doing so have seen my byline grace the pages of magazines, newspapers and books.
There is a newspaper clipping in my file on a woman who, by choice, is homeless, rootless. She roams from town to town, job to job because, as she put it, she has no family and is searching for the perfect job in the perfect town before she settles down. Some nights might find her with no job and no roof over her head; her little station wagon becomes her room at the inn.
I want to write a happy ending for her. Is she actually running from something—or someone? Is she searching for someone—a brother, a child, a friend? Or does she only need to meet the knight in armor who will sweep her off into love and hope and family so she will give up the wanderlust?
Someday I will write her story and the others tucked in my idea file. Or some of them on my computer. Until then, and as I pull the pieces out to become stories, I will continue to develop an inventory of active ideas.
*************************
Barbara Deming lives, teaches, and writes in San Marcos, CA. Her latest book, Growing up Barefoot in the South (Essays by a Southern Writer), and her collection of short stories, The Quilt Maker, may both be purchased at www.Amazon.com. A completed novel is with an agent and she is working on another collection of quilt stories, a romantic suspense novel, and a nonfiction book on hooking your reader.
