The way I see it, stories are unfolding every day in the most common places. Waiting in line at the post office, pushing a cart through the frozen foods section of your local grocery, getting a letter from your mom. The writer’s task is to observe, everywhere, all the time. Whole stories will rarely present themselves to you, but pieces of stories are everywhere.
Notice what you see. Listen to the ways people relate to you and to each other. Take notes! I keep a big binder full of pieces of scrap paper where I jot down things I see, or great lines of dialogue, or the details of an interesting café or laundromat or whatever. Be patient, check your binder now and then and see if any of these story fragments spark something for you. If so, launch into a story using one of these as lift-off. If it’s not a whole story, what does it lack? What can you invent or bring in from your own experience that will fill it out?
With potential stories such as these rushing into a writer’s awareness every day, added to the huge wealth of stories we each possess by virtue of having lived our lives thus far, how can we ever run out? The problem instead, it seems to me, is how to select from all there is, the stories that most deserve to be told.
We can never get to every idea on our personal lists, never flesh out every fragment we observe as we move through our world. But if you’re disenchanted with your own ideas, or haven’t been feeling particularly observant, you can always start a story by doing any number of writing exercises, available in many different writing texts.
I read a wonderful story in a magazine, and the writer explained at the end how he’d played a writing game with himself and the result had been this tale. The game was to put all sorts of random details written on bits of paper into a large bowl. Some were character descriptions (e.g. guy with six fingers); some were places (an overgrown ditch in a rainstorm); and some were objects (a mirror). He made himself put a few random details into the bowl every day and when he came up against a dry spell, he’d pull three scraps of paper out and force himself to produce a story using those three details. In the case of the story I read, this exercise worked very well for him. There are many games and exercises like that one that you can rely on for a jump start.
