What If?
Happy Friday, campers!
I missed posting a blog last weekend due to being busy with school, work, and visiting family (which was amazing and much-needed), but I’m back.
Let’s dig in.
Some quick updates: “Down Along the Yocona” has been bought by Orca, A Literary Journal, and will be released on November 1, 2020. This brings my total publications for 2020 up to seven! My new goal is to get 12 stories published this year—one story for each month of the year; we’ll see what happens.
I finally finished a first draft of my Iceland story, tentatively titled “Elfland”. I read through the draft for the first time since finishing it last week, and it’s still not what I wanted. But that’s the best part of having a draft written down: now, I have a better idea of the story, and I can start shaping up the draft to match my vision.
Anyways, the past couple days I’ve been getting an influx of new story ideas, as well as more ideas for the novel I’ll be drafting here soon, so I’ve been thinking a lot about story ideas and how to generate them. Which brings me to the gist of my post for today:
What if?
A lot of my story ideas come from those two simple words; I find them to be the best story-idea generator around.
For example, yesterday while I was taking a break from work, I was kicking a balloon around with my 20-month-old daughter. As we’re kicking it back in forth, I suddenly asked myself: What if my baby girl started to float away holding a balloon? Boom. All of sudden this scene unfolds in my head where a panicked mother and father are chasing their toddler along while she’s floating away, hundreds of feet above the ground.
It was absolutely terrifying.
And all of that started from one little phrase.
What if?
Think about it—how many times a day do you ask yourself that question? It’s probably more than you think, especially if you’re a writer or struggle with anxiety. Anytime I drop a spoon or a fork down the garbage disposal in my sink and I have to reach my hand down into that dark, gaping maw to retrieve it, my mind never ceases to ask, What if the electrical system shorts or something and the garbage disposal comes on while I’ve got my hand in there?
I encourage you to pay more attention to the What If? questions you ask yourself throughout the day; you might be missing some great story prompts your unconscious is sending you. And if you’re not asking yourself What if? on a regular basis, start trying it: I’ve found it to be extremely rewarding. And then—and this goes back to a previous blog post—write your ideas down. Will every What if? scenario you generate work for a good story? Probably not. But you don’t know, so write it down. Like I’ve mentioned before, at least you’ll be getting ideas down and making way for new ones. Remember: There are no bad ideas—just good, or better.
So, what if?
See you next week. Keep writing!
