Finding the Story You Actually Want to Tell

Ideas arrive in three useful kinds. Learn to recognise them and you will stop waiting for inspiration. The first is the situation: two people who should not be in a room together are in one. The second is the image: a shoe in the road, a light left on in a shop window, a man carrying a chair down the middle of a street. The third is the sentence: a line of speech or thought that arrives whole and will not leave. 'I told my sister I would pay her back in October' is already a story; it only needs a kitchen and someone to say it to. The test of an idea is not whether it is interesting. It is whether it puts a person under pressure. Ask: who wants something here, what is in the way, and what will it cost them to try? An idea that cannot answer all three is a mood rather than a story. A mood is allowed to become a story, but it has to be spent on someone. Keep a page of these. Do not judge them as you write them down; judge them the next morning, by asking which one you cannot stop thinking about. That one is usually the story you are ready to write, rather than the one you think you should. Try this Write ten sentences, one per line, that could each begin a story - no context, no explanation. The next day, mark the three you cannot forget, and write the first paragraph of one of them. Questions to sit with Which idea unsettled you slightly? That is often a sign that there is something true in the material. Could one of your ten sentences be the last line of a story instead of the first?