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Some Ideas to Get You Started
Anything you see that makes you ask, "What was that?" (A biology TA shoplifting grapefruits? A girl on your hall with a stack of photos in her lap, calmly snipping the head off assorted people in the photographs? )
"True Life" (is there a story you inevitably tell everyone you meet? A story you tell again and again? What's its importance to you? What's the "real" story?)
News stories and photographs. (You see a front page piece about a 12-year-old arrested in Cleveland after driving there from upstate New York. What questions do you immediately after that a 12-inch newspaper story, or a 30-second TV spot, can't answer?)
Things You Connect. (Anne Frank died on your
grandmother's wedding day; you realize you were conceived on Super Bowl Sunday
in 1982; you read somewhere that in pre-Castro Cuba, Walt Disney
and Milton Hershey, the Chocolate King, once had neighboring vacation homes.)
Lists of "like" details. (Things that make you angry, scared, laugh out loud.)
"Global" Issues Made Intimate. (Hunger, homelessness,
racism, as they show up in the lives of individuals. A homeless woman named
Wen with a hungry child, and a volunteer at a shelter downtown who doesn't
"believe" that Asian-Americans can be homeless or hungry.
"Ready-Made" Fictions. Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso
Seahas as its protagonist Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre. What "minor'
characters in literature could you make take center stage? Or which historical
figures? What did Babe Ruth do on his wedding night? Or Eleanor Roosevelt?
Story Triggers
When you've looked around the world a bit, and have considered
some different possibilities, write down three story "triggers:" three things that, for whatever
reason, make you think there's a story to be had outof them. In addition to the categories above, any of
the images you record this first week
may be places where stories start for you. Examples:
 | ï Line from a letter to a girl who's just left for college: "Your father and I had planned all these activities to get over missing you but, you know, we haven't needed to do any of them." |
| ï Newspaper story about a festival where the townspeople carve radishes into elaborate sculptures. |
| ï The time your brother got lost at Disney World, and
hours later, when everyone was sure he'd been kidnapped, it turned out
he was hiding because you'd told him a scary story about Snow White.
|
Lines of Inquiry
For each trigger you come up with, do some brainstorming
about what interests you about the idea. (Write down your brainstorming;
don't trust that you'll remember what came to you in the heat of the moment.)
As an example of following up on lines of inquiry suggested by a story
trigger, consider the first example above. Are you more interested in the
daughter receiving such a letter from her parents, or the mother writing
it? What might the effect of the letter be on both? Would it "liberate"
the mother from her years of worrying over her baby girl? Would it somehow
convince the daughter her parents are contemplating a divorce? Those kinds
of question can lead you to a decision about how to approach the material:
which character seems most important to you, and thus, whose point of view
to try first. But don't commit yourself too soon: keep asking questions,
and answering them; keep seeing where your inclinations toward the material
lead you. What could happen in such a situation? What kinds of things would
we need to know about a character in this situation? Where could this story
take place? What other characters would be wandering around? Can you identify
possible conflicts among the characters? What would matter in a story like
this? What might the stakes be? And so on .