Friday, January 24, 2014

Plots




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?  

8 comments:

  1. Finding plots is not my problem; finding time to deal with them all—that’s my problem.

    ~ Jim

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  2. 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.

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  3. Warren, 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??????

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  4. Charming 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!

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  5. I 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?)

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  6. I 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.

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  7. I 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.

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  8. My 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....

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