In a post on Lit Hub, Ethan Joella says that when it comes to ideas for their fiction, writers are never off the clock. “What if you miss overhearing a perfect word from two booths down at the diner?” he says. “What if someone opens their purse in a waiting room, and random objects spill out: a pair of pantyhose, unicorn-flavored gum?”
But what do we do with this information? What’s useful for our writing and what’s merely static? When is an idea good enough to make it into your fiction?
Recently, Joella overheard a conversation between a group of friends in which a man announced that he was about to take his first trip to Florida without his wife. Based on body language, it was easy to assume the man’s wife had passed away. “After that day, I couldn’t stop seeing that man’s gentle face,” Joella says. “Whenever I thought about what I would be writing if I started something new, I thought about that old man and the trip without the person he loved.” The idea simmered over the next few months until a writing prompt about a towel led him into his story.
“This, the central premise and central object for A Quiet Life, came to me because my writer brain was open and receiving,” Joella writes. “Had I not been listening—had I not taken my friend up on the opportunity for the writing retreat—the two ideas (the grieving man and the towel) might never have come together.”
Joella has gotten ideas from dreams, Twitter, a group of deer, and other observations he’s made in daily life. Some he’s written down and some he’s merely committed to memory. “But it’s the things you can’t forget about that show up in your writing,” he says. “These ideas you gather will become your character’s faded bathing suit, the sound of a moped, the plastic wrap sticking to the cheesecake. It is our job to notice and then show, to have a reader say, That’s right! I do that. That’s me.”
