By Lisa Malice, Ph.D.
A Writer’s Creativity Tags
Along on Vacation. That was the title of my March 14 blog post for Writers
Who Kill. It recounted how wrong I was thinking my brain could take a
holiday from crafting characters, settings, and plots when those storytelling
elements found their way into my vacation.
This weekend, it happened again,
though not on vacation, but during an event I never would have imagined could
spur a creative thought—a welcome-to-your-new-home party for my 97-year-old gym
buddy, Bert, after he moved to an assisted living facility.
Hanging out with Bert, a man with
nearly a century of life experience to share, is always a history lesson, but
as I talked with some of his new neighbors, I discovered many with interesting
lives to share, too. I met psychologists, teachers, preachers, engineers, even
hourly power company workers who shared fascinating life tidbits.
But one resident really sparked my thriller writer’s imagination—Charlie, an 86-year-old gentleman who spent his life in the water as a professional diver. He started out in the late 1950’s as spearfisherman, keeping local restaurants stocked with grouper, snapper, sea trout, and other sea delicacies from the Gulf. In the 1960’s, Charlie opened his own dive shop, complete with a 40-foot pool for training and certifying recreational and professional scuba divers, and boats for shuttling divers to coral reefs, shipwrecks, and other dive sites.
If that wasn’t enough, Charlie was a commercial pilot, taking to the air in his private plane to ferry fishermen, hunters, and divers across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico (as it was named back then) to the dirt airstrips dotting the backwater islands.
Sounds like a real character? You bet! Strong in mind and body with an adventurous spirit that lets nothing get past him. You know what that means? He often finds himself in tough situations, up against the roughest of characters, some who will put him and others in harm’s way. A whole host of problems he encounters in his life and work can serve as a setting for mystery, thrills, and suspense (e.g., hurricanes, mechanical problems, missing people or boats) and dark characters and their nefarious dealings (e.g., organized crime, Soviet spies, smugglers, treasure hunters).
My mind is having fun imaging all
that could go wrong and how fictionalized Charlie gets out of it alive. Will I
set out to write Charlie into a series? No. This is not the genre I read, nor
write. But what What I’ve discovered from this experience is that such exercises of
imagination are good for my writer’s mind. Pumping creativity instead of
weights, running with a story idea rather than with a treadmill, keeps my mind
healthy, ready to flex its cognitive muscles when faced with the spark for my
next great tale.
How about you? Please share a situation
that unexpectedly sparked an idea for a new character, a new plot, maybe even a
series? If you are not a writer, please share how a spark of imagination helped
you solve a difficult problem.
