a mystery in my own back yard

there is a boy in my neighborhood who never smiles and is always alone.
i see him at least once a week, walking up and down the street, eyes trained on the sidewalk.

in the three years i've lived in this house, the boy has become a bit of a mystery.
i often see him taking his walk at a time he should be in school. (he looks to be about high-school-Freshman age - tall and filled out, but with a young face.) and i rarely see him with a backpack, though a few times i have, so he MUST go to school somewhere.
i'm not creepy enough to follow him, and i'm too shy (too scared?) to say hi. he looks so focused, staring down at the street. what if i interrupt his concentration? what if he can't speak to say hi back?
so i just observe him and wonder about him, like i do most strangers.

also, in the three years i've lived here, i've had more than one frightening incident of seeing someone walking on the back wall of my yard, like a tightrope, at night. the first time, i hid in the dark, waiting to see what the shadowy man on the wall would do. the second time (after i had been burglarized and become neurotic about keeping people off my property), i shouted for the stranger to go away, and they did.

today, those two mysteries collided.

i was outside with my laptop this morning, catching up on the interwebs and enjoying perfect 60-degree sweater weather and a nice hot cup of coffee, when i heard a rustle in my palm tree. i looked up, and from the palm fronds, out pops the boy, walking my wall, one foot in front of the other.

as usual, he was focused on his feet, so he didn't notice me, standing right there in broad daylight on my patio watching him. i stayed still like a hunter until he got all the way to the end of the wall and spun around. that's when he teetered, the toes of both feet gripping one sharp edge of the block wall, his arms making huge circles as he struggled for balance. he was about to face-plant right into my brick fire pit.

so i did what anyone would do. i shouted, "Whoa! WHOA! Careful!"

i surprised him right back onto his heels, and when he was balanced again, he gave me the biggest grin and two thumbs up. then he went right back to walking my wall, like it was no big thing.

it was a good moment for three reasons. 1) i am no longer afraid of the shadow walking my walls at night. 2) i saw the lonely boy smile for the first time. and 3) i decided to write a story about him. i just don't know what it is yet.

inspiration confetti

i've mentioned before that shiny new ideas often come to me when i'm in the thick of another project. it's my brain's escape mechanism, i think, when i'm tired of revising or when i hit a dry patch in a first draft.
the ideas often lose their luster once i actually have time to write them. i've learned to ignore those light bulbs that pop on and only focus on them when they refuse to go out. i write the ideas that stick with me.

so it occurred to me recently that this doesn't just happen when i'm working on a project. new ideas happen ALL THE TIME... for all of us writers, i'm sure. for every idea that takes root in our mind and eventually becomes a story, there must be dozens - hundreds, even - that we toss aside.

this morning, for example.
the google header today is celebrating Houdini.
hey! what if there was a modern Houdini? a teenage girl? But instead of getting out of tricky boxes and straight jackets, she was an expert at getting out of trouble? Until one day she finds herself in a pickle she can't escape?
then i thought - "what's the pickle? eh, i don't know. i should be revising my WIP."

there was a spark of an idea, but it didn't take hold. it's now like a little scrap of paper in the trash bin of my brain. it could get plucked out, but it will probably just join the pile of hundreds of other scraps - all of those ideas i don't even bother to write down - one big pile of inspiration confetti.

on vacation, standing at the edge of the ocean while the post-tsunami waves pulled away from the beach a little too far and a little too fast, several bits of water-logged prose popped into my head. but i didn't write any of them down or transcribe them into my voice recorder, because none of them blossomed into plot or characters. add those scraps of prose to the pile.

when people talk about writing discipline, we often mean forcing ourselves to sit down and write. but i think it also takes discipline to filter through the ideas and inspiration to determine which ones HAVE TO BE WRITTEN NOW, which ones will have to wait and which ones are just confetti.

what about you? do you jot down every single idea or snatch of dialog that pops into your head? how do you filter the noise of ideas to focus on just one or just a few stories?

the myth of Shiny New Ideas

...well maybe not myth so much as illusion.

clearly, the Shiny New Idea is not a myth. ideas are very real things - tangible even. we can see them, hear them, taste them. it's the "shiny" part that's an illusion... for me at least.

Shiny New Ideas sneak up on me when i least expect them (i.e. very inconvenient times, like when i'm in the middle of another manuscript or about to start a long revision.)
i find new ideas are shiny only when i need a distraction from the work i'm supposed to be focusing on. i had at least three shiny - even glowing - ideas when i was smack in the middle of NaNo. funny how the shine slid off those ideas as soon as NaNo was over. now they're kind of muted and dull and not even interesting enough to distract me from editing.

i'm not saying all SNIs are clunkers disguised as something sparkly. some of them are worth exploring. for many authors, every book started with a SNI.

but i'm learning that, for me, the ideas that become full manuscripts aren't the shiny ones that pop up out of nowhere... they're the ones that slink in barely formed - just a character or a line of dialog - then slowly grow and fester, refusing to go away until i deal with them. (which is probably why i can't pinpoint the exact moment i came up with either Butter or Billy D. - they were both books that snuck into my brain through some dark back door instead of bursting above my head like a light bulb.)

i get those "light bulb" ideas all the time. they just tend to fizzle out. whereas the ideas that creep up on me nice and slow are the ones that eventually illuminate my entire imagination.

okay, are you tired of my lighting metaphors now? me too.

the point is - SNIs, for me, are just fuel for the creative juices. sometimes i need them to get my gears going when i'm in a slump with the current WIP. and sometimes i need them to bridge the gap between the ideas that will actually become stories. But i've yet to turn a Shiny New Idea into anything more than a dusty word document abandoned somewhere inside my laptop.

what about you? did all of your stories start with that burst of inspiration that writers have come to call the SNI? or do your stories sneak up on you?