How to write a story (1. Inspiration)
Back from yesterday’s lightning strike with some more of Neil’s photos taken in the hills the other day. These show some of the local animals and Symi views.
I, meanwhile, am going to share an inspiration tip with you. This doesn’t work for everyone, but it can be fun to try. When you’re thinking that you want to write a story but have no idea where to start, head to your bookshelf (or someone else’s if you don’t have one) and come up with a set of numbers. These need to relate to what you have available, example: I have six shelves on my bookcase but the bottom one is filled with music, so that’s not going to work. So, I pick a number between one and five to get the shelf, then a number between one and about 20, the number of books per shelf, then a number between one and whatever the last page number is, then a number between one and say 30, to get a line. Then I’ll take the first sentence on that line, of the next full sentence along if there isn’t one and use that as the basis for my story. I’ll try it now:
Shelves: 5, choose 3 (down from the top, it’s up to you which way to go), books, 20, so I choose 13 in from the left. I came to ‘The Ingoldsby Legends’, a book from 1882, written by Thomas Ingoldsby (Esquire) and printed by Richard Bentley and Son, Publishers in ordinary to her Majesty the Queen. (I have some odd books on shelf three.) The Ingoldsby Legends is a collection of myths, legends, ghost stories and poetry written supposedly by Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Manor, actually a pen-name of an English clergyman named Richard Harris Barham. The book has 417 pages, so I have chosen page 262 because I have a 200 Koruna note on the desk from Prague and also a phone bill stating 62. I have the page, but which line?
Page 262 is part of a long poem titled ‘The Wedding Day’ and each page here has about 50 lines as it’s a small-print book. I’m going to choose line 16, as I can see the end of the date on the phone bill and it says 16. The line starts with a sentence that runs for two lines and so here, quite by chance is the inspiration for a story. I quote from the goodly Mr Ingoldsby (Esq.): “To dance at her bridal, and help ‘throw the stocking’, a practice that’s now discontinued as shocking.”
This immediately suggests a rhythm but I don’t want to get drawn into a metered poetry style or a lyric, so I have to concentrate on the action and keywords of the sentence. Dancing, throwing the stocking, discontinued. That’s enough to give me a background and a feel, in this case humour. The throwing of the stocking seems to have led to something of a social gaff and the practice, at weddings, has been stopped. So, if that doesn’t give you a good, meaty ‘inciting incident’ as they like to call it in films, then I don’t know what will.
And to the story. Did I come up with one? Well, no, not yet but if you look on these pages tomorrow or next week, I may well put something up. There will, of course be images of Symi which may or may not fit with the story I have yet to write, but then this blog is about a writer living on a Greek island, so you have to expect a bit of both.
