And often, I can't tell you. But this week, the birth of one was easy to track because I was so concerned that I had shut off the part of my brain that's receptive to new ideas as I tried to finish my novel.
I was in Canada and reading The Globe and Mail. There was a very long story on a young sheriff who was killed when he answered a call on a noisy houseparty. I read it thoroughly, but there was very little about a crime in it. Mostly it dealt with the town's sorrow over a man with an eight month old child dying in a remote part of Canada.
Flash forward two days, and I'm back in Detroit on a bus and a woman across from me is reading Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I wondered what kind of story would this woman like? She was in her sixties, no makeup, plain clothes, but enthralled by that magazine and suddenly the entire story took hold of me. She'd like a story about a young police officer who died needlessly. In my story, he won't be the same guy at all. Already I know he won't be a father and it'll happen in Michigan, where I'm on firmer ground.
Now this is not saying the story will work, or that it will be good or that it will find a home, but it will get written. I'm mostly glad that my brain is listening again.
Can you usually track where your story ideas come from?
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13 comments:
Hey, Patti, could you get in touch with me? I'd like to talk to you about using your story (or stories). E-mail me at juri.nummelin(at)pp.inet.fi.
Sometimes I can follow the evolution of an idea. Other times an idea seems to spring from my forehead, fully formed.
I just completed a story that was inspired by a story in the MYSTERY STREET anthology of a few years ago. I started wondering what street in Shreveport would be a good choice for a story and ended up with Texas Street (basically Shreveport's Main Street).
I also took a little inspiration from a scene in Max Allan Collins' "Shootout on Sunset" from the same anthology, and voila! A full-blown story.
Glad to read that the bus is still working for you.
Graham-With the shrinking marketplace for short stories, maybe we'd better block some of these thoughts. I think Hardluck Stories may be defunct.
I think I go into a trance on a bus. Maybe its the fumes.
They come from everywhere. A conversation, a news story, you name it.
And you'll have a market for those short stories when you're famous and working on an anthology...
Sandra-You're such an ego booster. And I'm saying this to both Sandras.
I'm usually pretty good about tracking where an idea came from, though, like yours, it's usually two smaller pieces that converge at some point. PEOPLE magazine seems to have been a great source for my last few stories. One of my favorite sections of the Best American Mystery Stories anthology is where the authors describe how they came up with their stories.
My most recent story CADAVER DOG developed from a PEOPLE article about the Lori hacking murder and how they were using cadaver dogs to hunt through a dump for her. One line struck me about the dogs being disappointed when they don't find a body set things in motion.
I'd forgotten about that section in the "Best" volumes. Have to go back to it.
I think there are more short story markets than in recent years - I haven't even submitted to ThugLit, Demolition, Spinetingler, Out of the Gutter, or Murdaland. But I'm workin' on it!
I hate to see Hardluck go though. They had illustrations!
Perhaps a lot like you, I think I usually get story ideas from listening to friends, watching people and asking myself the questions that the news stories covering a crime might not ask. I got the basic premise of my novel after reading one such news story. It was about 4 inches long.
Sometimes it's a single sentence I overhear, sometimes it's someone standing on a street corner, once I heard a twenty minute story on the bus and I used it virtually unchanged--it was that amazing. (Although I haven't placed that one because it morphs between literary and crime.
It's a wondrous thing, isn't it?
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