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I remember, as a young writer, fretting about exactly this. Brought up in a bland-beyond-bland suburb, lacking colorful adventures to draw upon, how on earth was I going to find story ideas? Then I watched an interview with Charlie Chaplin where he was asked that very question, referring to his early Keystone Studio days when he was churning out a film a week: “Mr. Chaplin, how did you find your ideas?”
“I got my ideas by going out and looking for them,” the charming old man said, and, simple as the answer was, it was exactly what I needed to hear. Of course! A writer, an artist, didn’t wait for ideas to strike out of the blue — he or she went out and proactively found them.
In my 20s, I went overboard in that direction, appraising almost every interaction with another human being solely in terms of whether it would lend itself to an interesting short story. Anton Chekhov has some fun with this in The Seagull, where Trigorin, a famous story writer, makes entries in his ever-present notebook at the very moment the star-struck Nina flirts with him.
“I was just making a note,” Trigorin says, finally putting away his pad. “A subject occurred to me for a short story. A girl — like yourself say — lives from her childhood on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake like a seagull, and is happy and free like a seagull. But a man comes along by chance and sees her and ruins her, like this seagull, just to amuse himself.”
Most writers don’t have stories handed to them by beautiful ingenues, and yet, like Trigorin, they need to keep the notebook of their imaginations open and ready at all times. Quite often, stories will be seen, witnessed or overheard — sometimes the quickest glimpse is enough to set the imagination off — and it’s part of a writer’s talent to recognize a good premise when it taps him or her on the shoulder.
I remember attending a fair in Norwich some years ago, where one of the attractions, to raise money for charity, was a dunking tub, with a volunteer sitting on a stool waiting to be deposited in the water if someone hit the target with a ball.
The wise guy who sat there was good at this, taunting fairgoers so they would buy more tickets. “You throw like a girl!” he would yell (he didn’t care about political correctness), or “Hey tubby! You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!”
It worked — he had a long line waiting to dunk him — and I remember thinking: That’s a short story if I ever saw one.
A year or two later I wrote it, Nickel a Throw, wherein Gooden, the man on the stool, goes way beyond good-natured teasing to taunt townspeople with home truths about their character flaws, their marriages, their sins.
“Wife beater!” Gooden screams. “Drunkard! Adulterer!” The closer he comes to the secret truth, the longer the line grows of people trying to drown him.
That’s as in-your-face as a story idea ever gets. Often, it’s more subtle kind of prompting. A few years ago, walking through a field along the Connecticut, I came upon two plastic lawn chairs placed side-by-side on the river bank. That’s all I saw. They were unoccupied, with no sign of who might have put them there, but a suggestive something struck me and stayed with me, and eventually resulted in a new story, Two Chairs, wherein a young couple on their honeymoon come upon chairs like these in a setting like this, and invent a whole life story for the unknown people who placed them there.
So, some story ideas you witness in person. Others — maybe even the most — come to you from reading. This sounds a bit circular — writing ideas coming from writing ideas — but I think it’s true in all the arts, that what inspires us, gets us thinking, is the work of other artists.
Getting back to Chekhov, I once read a biography that included a footnote about his devoted younger sister Maria, who, while he was alive, acted as his agent, confidante and publicist, and, after he died, spent the next 50 years devoting her considerable energy and courage to perpetuating his memory.
Chekhov’s Sister was the result — a novel that came to life from, in atmospheric terms, my lifelong admiration for Chekhov’s work, and, for lightning, a footnote at the bottom of a page.
Fiction writers get used to people offering to loan them ideas. “You should use this in one of your stories,” they’ll say, and then with great elaboration tell you what is often a more interesting story than you would expect. But I’ve never actually used one of these, well-meaning as the gesture is. Whatever the process, the ideas have to come to my imagination untouched by human hands.
Many writers claim they’ve gotten ideas from dreams, but, sadly, mine all tend to be about being lost in the halls on my first day of junior high. Others draw upon a rich vein of autobiographical material — think Jack London and gold-rush Alaska. (Later in his career, that early vein of material all mined out, London paid Sinclair Lewis to think up plots for him.)
And repetition can be important; immerse a writer in an experience long enough, no matter how humdrum, and it will eventually result in a story. Washing my clothes in a laundromat. Standing before a stove trying to cook an omelette. Being stuck behind a cement mixer on a highway. Watching snow, endless snow, slant across the window of my study. All these experiences have led me to stories.
Writers need lots of raw material, but end up using only a fraction. In my own case, I like a long incubation period before I start writing a story, since that provides a testing period in which the weaker ideas drop away of their own weight; if I still like an idea two or three years after having it, it’s probably worth trying to get it written.
Even then, some ideas have to be reluctantly abandoned, because, while they might be a possibility for a Chekhov or a Cheever, they’re not within my own capabilities, or require approaches I’m simply not interested in.
The ideas that remain, the ones lingering on in half-legible notes scrawled on a pad, still must fight for their place in the sun. Months more will go by: I’m tossing around approaches, narrators, chronologies now, driving myself half-crazy trying to find the right way to do it.
And then one day, with one idea out of 50, everything will click. For me, that’s the best, most miraculous moment in the whole writing process: when the premise is so good, with so much potential, it no longer feels like it has anything to do with my own volition, but that the idea has reached out and chosen me.
W. D. Wetherell’s new story collection,