A Writer’s Mind

Someone (Tom Farr) asked me this week how I write as much as I do, where my ideas come from. How is easy: I have a forty minute commute in the morning, a forty minute commute in the evening, and an iPhone. That’s plenty of time to peck out eight hundred words of story. When I’m really in the zone, I’ll pull out a MacBook and hunch over it to expound. But mostly, my iPhone works fine.

How do I come up with ideas? That’s a lot harder. We like to imagine creativity as something where you go off, think really hard, and shit out brilliance. Maybe it is like that for other writers. It’s not for me. For me it starts with simple words or images. Those are seeds. You get a crazy idea in your head, a flash really, and it grows from there.

That’s how almost all of my stories are born: a wrench falling off a space elevator, a little girl reading at a lake with her father, a town with a funny name somewhere between Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. Those seeds blossom if I can start writing about them. The rub is how often I trip across seeds and don’t get to plant them. Little odd things can become seeds, crazy things. If I don’t write them down they blow away in the mental wind, forgotten.

This week I was working on reporting for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) at work. You can’t imagine anything less creative than making sure XML files are formatted properly. Except there’s this one field, one provision of the law, that got stuck in the murky place between technical plumbing and committing words to paper.

Valid Safe Harbor Code. That’s kind of a funny phrase. I can’t tell you why it stuck in my brain. I do know that I’ve had a knack, a talent, for twisting words just a little to make jokes all my life. “Production Outrage,” was another I saw this week. Something that takes the mundane and twists it into something else. How do I turn phrases into different things? Hell if I know. Practice and a natural inclination I suppose.

So. Valid Safe Harbor Code became Valid Sage Harbor Cove. That’s the seed. From there unrolled a community along Lake Michigan, a little boy asking why Lake Michigan is a lake and not a sea, or an ocean, and a magnificent view of the lake from a cabin in Sage Harbor Cove Wisconsin. It doesn’t matter if there’s really anything like Sage Harbor Cove. A story about a boy and his stepdad that worries about a kid that’s too smart by half is born.

I have no idea where the story is going to go. I just see the sapling that the seed has grown into. I can layer on my own insecurities about being a stepdad (something I’m not), about the interplay between mother, child and suitor (something I only dream of). It’s enough to go with.

I don’t sculpt from marble, seeing a shape in a block of stone. I sculpt with clay, building from a foundation. I’m constantly in wonder of what my writing becomes in the process. I read it out-loud for the dog and the cat and myself, to get a sense of sentence length and structure. I surprise myself, hearing the words spoken. I wrote that?