Dreaming Up and Writing Down

At this very moment, I’m sitting in a Borders bookstore cafe. I tell you this to give you context for the words that will follow. See, when I’m surrounded by books and people looking at books and people talking about looking at books, I find it difficult to stay focused. My thoughts wander, my words follow. Or my words wander and my thoughts follow. Sometimes my thoughts and words both wander and I lose myself in a…

I can’t figure out if the tiles on the floor of this cafe are arranged in some kind of purposeful pattern or if the tile-placer just made it up on the fly. A five-year-old girl who’s wandered away from her coffee-pondering parents is hopscotching from yellow tile to yellow tile, avoiding the evil brown ones. She pauses, shipwrecked on a small island. She looks down at the yellow square. I wonder if she thinks of SpongeBob SquarePants. She looks up. I catch her eye. She would shrug if she knew how. I shrug instead. Maybe I just taught her how to shrug. She turns and hops back the way she came. I’m pretty sure she didn’t think about SpongeBob SquarePants.

…moment. Lack of focus is quite the opposite from what I experience when I’m actually reading a book. In those moments, I find it difficult to un-focus. I become tethered to the world of the writer’s making. Untethering from a good book before I’ve finished reading it usually requires a radical surgical procedure.

From where I’m sitting, I can see hundreds of novels (there are thousands more I can’t see from here), the result of countless hours of dreaming up and writing down. It’s the first part of that equation that I want to explore here. Where do all those ideas come from? And how is it that writers keep coming up with new ones?

All you cynics can put your hands down now. I’ve heard that, too. “There are only a finite number of plots in all of literature, blah, blah, no real new ideas, blah, blah, etc.” Go back to your spreadsheets and your outlines and your character arcs and inciting incidents. I’m not talking about plotting and craft and structure or any of that crap. [Relax. I don’t actually believe all that stuff is crap. Not in its rightful place, anyway. But here? In a post about the dreaming up? It sort of is. So stop throwing it at me.]

I’m talking about the idea. The spark. The inspiration. The thing-without-a-name that shouts or whispers “follow me,” then takes off like Alice’s rabbit or Hickam’s rockets and…

There’s a rather intriguing character standing over by the display case. I’d bet he’s 20 years younger than he actually appears, which is seventy-ish. “What kind of cookies do you have?” he asks the smiling twenty-something barista. He is staring through the glass window at the four kinds of cookies they have. He needs a shower more than a cookie. “Chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, oatmeal raisin and peanut butter,” she says. He thinks about this, then asks, “Do you have chocolate chip?” “Yes,” she answers, still with the same friendly smile. “Do you have any other kinds?” he asks. “No, just those four today.” He plays a silent version of “eenie, meenie, miney moe,” touching the glass case in time to his unspoken rhyme. I can see the fingerprints from here. She’ll have to clean those later. He stops on the oatmeal raisin cookie. “No,” he says, then begins again. There is a line forming behind him. A man in a suit looks at his watch and taps his foot, oblivious to the stereotype he is becoming. A woman in a floral print dress that might have been a shower curtain in a previous life is trying to corral her three small children, one of whom evidently likes to collect coffee stirrers. “Would you like to think about it a while longer?” the barista asks. “Yes,” he says. She ask the man in the suit what she can get for him. The old man by the display case interrupts, “do you have chocolate chip?” “Yes,” she says. “I’ll have one of those, then.” She apologizes to the man in the suit, gets the cookie, puts it in a bag, tells the old man how much it is. He doesn’t have that much. She slides the cookie across the counter to him. “Consider it a gift.” He finds a ten dollar bill in his pocket. He drops it on the table and starts to leave. “Wait, your change…” she says. He doesn’t turn around, but I see him smile.

…compels you to follow. I’m talking about what the muse brings.

But for the life of me, I can’t figure it out. I don’t know where the ideas come from. One minute you’re just sitting there, or standing there, or lying there, or just there – and the next you’ve got an idea for a story or a character or a poem or song or a blogpost. Yes, lots of those ideas disappear as quickly as they arrive, but the ones that linger? It’s almost like they were waiting for you to notice so you could wrap words around them.

And that makes me think…

There’s an extra chair at the empty table across from me. Someone pulled that chair over from another table so there would be room for five. I wonder what they talked about? Maybe the Franzen novel. Or the crack in the wall under the painting of the boat. “The foundation is crumbling. We’ll probably all die.” I bet they said something about the obnoxious squeal of the nearby escalator. Someone compared it to a banshee. Someone else nodded enthusiastically while trying to remember what a banshee was. Did they all get coffee? No, one would have gotten tea. The one who pulled up the extra chair. They didn’t know she was coming. Thought she was out of town. “Nope. That’s not until next week.” “Well, you look good. We were just talking about that obnoxious squealing sound. From the escalator. Doesn’t it sound like a banshee? What’s that you’re drinking? Oh. Tea.”

…it makes me think…um…I’m sorry. I don’t think I can finish this post right now. I have to write down some stuff. Make up your own ending. Okay? Thanks.

I think it sounds more like the screech of a train pulling into a station…

[Disclaimer: I really was in the Borders bookstore cafe. I really did see a girl hopping on tiles and an old man buying a cookie. And the escalator does squeal. But the rest of what I wrote above? I have no idea where those words came from. I should probably blog about that.]