Playing the what if game

Watching the news today, I saw a story about a daughter who found her family after being taken from the hospital by a woman when the baby was 19 days old. This could make a good story—someone snatches your baby. They sell the baby. It’s a baby selling ring. The mother could get into many dangerous situations trying to locate her baby. No one wants to help her. She must find the baby on her own. Maybe ten years later she becomes a police woman or joins the FBI to find her child.

I once sold a story to True Story about a mother who had twins and the doctor sold one of them. I got that idea when I had my first child—before the days when they took pictures of the baby before birth. We had no way back then to know if you were having twins. I had gained a lot of weight and when I gave birth they told my husband we had a daughter. Later someone else came out and said he had a son. He asked if we had twins. I was knocked out and had no idea what was going on. Finally someone came out and said we had a son, no daughter.

I was so out of it with way too much gas or whatever they gave you back then, that I was telling Sir Arthur how he couldn’t behead me now that I gave him a son.

Fast forward thirty years later. I read a story in the newspaper where they told about doctors who sold babies and no one was the wiser. There was no way to trace this. The Doctor I had was known for losing babies and a few mothers. My husband was in the Air Force in Oklahoma. They didn’t have a maternity ward at the base and we had to use a town doctor. The story I read fit the scene I had heard many times when we lived in that town about parents being told the baby supposedly died. But this doctor was the only doctor in town who delivered babies. We later heard he had been taken off the list of doctors for the Air Force, but the only other doctor in that small town had a heart attack and couldn’t work. This, I had Dr. Livingston.

That made me think—did we really have twins and the doctor sold our other baby? We were young and poor and they knew we would have no way to discover if this had happened. Of course, in the story I sold I had that happy ending where the child found his family—just like the girl in the news today.

If you are struggling for a story idea, go back to your past and remember things that happened to you or a friend. Then play the “what if” game. What if your mother wasn’t really your mother? Did folks often tell you how you didn’t look like anyone else in the family? How different were you from them?

Or what about that family painting no one wanted to talk about—the one that looked a lot like one you’d seen on the news that had been stolen 20 years ago—the one that sat in your aunt’s attic.

Sit down and make a list of “what if’s” and I’ll bet you come up with a lot of potential ideas.

Now, if someone finds a woman in Oklahoma who wonders who her real parents are…