My brother's been writing short stories -- fantasy pieces that take place in a Steam Punk environment with characters from Grimm's Fairy Tales fighting a vicious villain and a mysterious fog called The Rauck. He shares his stories with only a handful of people. These people, who are unfamiliar with Steam Punk and fairy tales, don't share his excitement for this genre, which has caused my brother to doubt himself and the stories he wants to tell. He told me he wanted to write stories in the "real world," so that his friends and family might want to read them.
I am in favor of writers occasionally writing outside their chosen genre. Writers can learn from the change of perspective and style they encounter when forced outside their comfort zone. I encouraged my brother to write a "real world" story because I thought it would do him some good. And I was tired of reading Steam Punk, which makes little to no sense to me.
He sat at his computer in my living room, quietly staring at his computer screen. He typed a few words, then vigorously pounded the delete key. He groaned. He sat back in his chair and stared toward the ceiling. He groaned again. "How do you come up with stories?" he finally asked me.
Without looking up from my own screen I said, "From life."
I walked into the Half Price Books bathroom at 1:05 pm on a Monday afternoon. An older gentleman wearing all black stood at the mirror. He leaned over the sink with his large eyes glaring critically at his own reflection. He removed a black, wide-toothed comb from his back pocket and ran it meticulously through his grey hair, which was parted neatly down the middle.
I used the bathroom, washed my hands, and stood at the electric dryer feeling the hot breath of a public bathroom blow across my palms, all the while this man stood at the mirror making himself look as presentable as possible. I left the bathroom and lingered between the History and Weapons sections just outside. I wanted to see where this man went. I wanted to see for whom he paid so much careful attention.
After 30 seconds I felt like I lingered too long. I was being creepy. So I returned to a desk near the clearance section so that I could write a few more pages on my current project.
I could not get the man out of my mind. I wanted to know what he was doing. I imagined him sitting alone near the cafe, conspicuously watching the women who visited HPB every Monday for their weekly game of pinnacle. One woman especially intrigued him. He battled with himself every week to muster enough courage to buy her a pastry. A nice little dessert just to say that he would like to know her name.
Or perhaps he was meeting his daughter and grand child for the first time. He'd made an unforgivable mistake sometime in his past and had been estranged from her ever since. What was that mistake? For what did he need his daughter's forgiveness?
I stopped writing on my novel and played the possibilities over and over in my mind until finally I jotted some notes on my legal pad to be discovered at a later time when I would need a new story to write.
The moral of this little story is to remind writers to pay attention. Keep your eyes open. You never know when you'll stumble upon Willy Wonka, Hermione Granger, Darth Vader, or Lisbeth Salander living their life, their story ripe for any willing writer to pick.
