The One Hundred Day Creative Challenge: Day 9

The One Hundred Day Creative Challenge: Day 9

Collaborating With Ideas.
Ideas come from all sorts of places. Songs. Conversation. Billboards. Books. Gardens. Pinterest.

I’ve driven along in my car with the radio off and something has dropped into my head. The excitement rises. I can’t wait until I can pull over and scribble it down in my notebook. Have you ever wondered how writers get their ideas? I don’t know how you get your ideas, but my head is always full of stuff. Here’s a glimpse into my world!

Last weekend I was walking on the beach at Bunker Bay at Dunsborough just before sunset. The waves rolled in to shore as perfectly as ones created by a machine at a theme park. Our footprints followed us as evidence we’d been there. The tide began to come in and a wave crashed to shore, rubbing out our footprints as if they were a mistake on a piece of paper. Gone. Never to be seen again.

I had been thinking about the main character, Laura, in a book I’ve been writing for the last five years. Every now and then she comes into my mind at random times and I hear conversations, I see what she’s doing, I see her reactions to others around her. In my head a scene forms, like a movie. I get lost in my head and I’m off.

Laura was with me on the beach. She’s unhappy with her husband and she’s had yet another argument with Greg. He’s patronising and dismissive and so desirable. He apologises for being a jerk. Yet again.

She replays Greg’s myriad apologies over the years and pictures a wave washing over his I’m-sorries, It’ll-never-happen-agains and I’ll-make-it up-to-yous, erasing the hurt. She closes her eyes. The hurt is not erased. It is there. Frame by frame, as if she’s sitting in the giant theatre room of their oversized, overpriced, over done house and watching her life with Greg like a feature film. She could smell the popcorn. Nausea swam in her stomach.

‘Sorry is not enough, Greg,’ Laura says, her voice taut with tension. The sort of tension that hardens into bitterness and then fossilises into deadness. ‘I don’t care anymore.’

And that is how curiosity plays with my writer’s mind. That is how I remain open and collaborate with ideas that are trying to get my attention. That is how I write.