Think keeping a journal and a notebook at the ready is a
waste of time? Think again.
Many of you will remember Green Stamps. Back in the day, we zealously
collected them every time we bought groceries, and then pasted them into our
collection books. If you were too busy to deal with them when you got home, you
tossed them into a paper bag for a future date. My mother and I and later I as
a young wife had marathon pasting sessions. I would collect the bag jammed with
stamps, a stack of the little paper books, a bowl of water, and a sponge and
watch television why I pasted the thousands of little green possibilities. I
still have several Christmas bells and other tchotchkes I traded my precious
books to buy.
Seeing a picture of Green Stamps recently brought a flood of
memories to the fore, and I realized there is a relationship to my days of
saving Green Stamps and my days as a writer.
Thomas Edison, the genius
inventor, said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
I’m a collector. A list maker. A saver. Once I filled little
books with petite Green Stamps and now I fill larger books full of words. My
current two books (aka WIPs) began with twenty composition books filled with
character names, settings, plot ideas, snippets of scenes, full chapters, etc.
From those yellowed pages, I transferred everything to my
pc—didn’t exclude anything as one would never throw out a wrinkled green stamp—and
an author was born. Many of those became short stories and a few have won
awards and been published in a number of anthologies. Some of those became
non-fiction articles that are in print or online. Most have found their way
into novels, five at latest count.
Into that count of word saving I added hundreds of notes
from journals I’d kept since I was a teenager. In my childhood, we moved over
forty times. In my adulthood, I’ve moved almost thirty times. All of my notes
and journals went with me, including across the Pacific and back. I have been a writer
since I won my first contest in fifth grade with an exciting story about not being
a litterbug, which obviously tells you what generation molded me.
Today, I save snippets from the blogs and websites of others that generate my blog and article ideas and loads of ideas for my creative writing classes.
Pinterest opened a world of pictures to go with my words, turning my files are
burgeoning paths of possibilities, ideas for clients and my own writing. As I
did with the bags full of Green Stamps, occasionally I set aside time to paste
ideas and pictures into readily accessible files and delete those that are too
crumpled and out of date to use.
Recently a writer I respect asked me to describe the room I
was in, not by the room accoutrements themselves, but by the people. We were in
a restaurant, and she asked me to tell her about the restaurant by looking at
the people around me. How were they dressed? What were their ages? And so
forth. I have to admit that I stumbled until I caught the idea and began to
regurgitate information. I came home to make notes on those people, because it
occurred to me that they would fit nicely in a scene in an upcoming short
story.
If you truly want to write, begin your idea files ASAP: journals,
notes, pictures, old photos, info from social media, workshop notes transcribed
and expanded into a viable idea. Writers by nature are collectors: ideas, new
ways to see the world, character studies (just listen to conversations while
you are in line, in an elevator, in church), the color of the moon, the sounds
at the beach.
If you are a writer at heart, every one of these made an
idea jump into your mind. Now turn that into a story.
Mahala
Mahala
