Image by Whatlep
Plots, plots everywhere
Give a kid a hammer and, to the kid, everything starts to
look like a nail. To writers there
are plots
everywhere. Innocent
readers in libraries start to look like potential serial killers. Your co-worker is
late on Monday
morning and his door is locked. Is there a whiff of a decaying body in the air?
And you
like your co-worker.
Do people look at you strangely? Have the police been around
asking not-so-innocent questions? No,
you spilled something on your clothes.
(For men, your fly is open.)
Daytime drama, professional wrestling, cheesy movies
relegated to the early morning hours, even
clever commercials have plots and
continuing characters. So do the
squabbling neighbors. Your
neighbors. Mine do not squabble, especially the
neighbors across the street two houses to the right.
They are not squabbling even as I write this.
Your family is full of characters. Mine is just full of
character. And they sometimes read this blog.
When it gets too close to home it gets harder to write. Remember, just because it happened does
not
mean it’s realistic.
Sport stadia (stadiums?) school classrooms, driveways and
porches serve as stages for action, as do
stages, of course.
What plot is thickening around you?
Finding plots is not my problem; finding time to deal with them all—that’s my problem.
ReplyDelete~ Jim
Warren, nice blog. I'm with Jim on this. I find them in the newspaper, hearing a conversation - usually from someone on a cell phone - when I'm standing in line somewhere, or just from my imagination.
ReplyDeleteWarren, I have to add something else. As soon as I went off, a conversation between and husband and wife having a conversation about something that sounded sinister popped up. Nothing that I can click on deletes it. I assume it's an ad for a movie or TV show, but who knows??????
ReplyDeleteCharming post! I love the newspaper for plots. Or old stories. Or songs. Some people call ideas "plot bunnies" ... I totally get this. They do multiply!
ReplyDeleteI agree that plots are everywhere, mostly in my imagination. (I don’t recognize that car parked in front of my house. What if it’s stolen? Is that a bullet hole in the side? What if there’s a dead body in the trunk like on NCIS?)
ReplyDeleteI think we've all discover that sometimes "truth is stranger than fiction" and we would not dare include some things that have really happened in stories.
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you mean--there are unusual and interesting plots all around us. Writers do look at the world a tad differently than most other people.
ReplyDeleteMy neighbors are a never-ending source of plots. Some former ones actually WERE criminals, and I was the one who noticed it first. Now, to turn it into a story....
ReplyDelete