Once, I saw a blind man cleaning up his service dog’s shit. It was in the middle of a semester in which my creative writing prof had asked us to write down things we saw in everyday life that might make a good story.
When I turned in the assignment, the prof made a note in the margin saying he didn’t believe the story. He said service dogs are highly trained and would never take a shit in the middle of the university hallway.
This turned into a story about a grandfather loving and caring for a dog, even though it belonged to his daughter and how, at first, he made a big show of not wanting to care for Cookie.
And a 2nd story about a professor failing a student for lying in a creative memoir assignment.
Once, I was waiting for a film to start at the theatre, and the woman—white hair in a tight perm—behind me was knitting. “Clickety clack, clickety clack,” her husband said—annoyed, missing his mouth with his popcorn— “Always with the clickety clack.”
Which turned into a bizarre story—part of my forthcoming collection—about an elderly couple driving each other mad through a lifetime of familiar noises and sideways glances and unmet expectations.
Last week, I heard a server ask a couple if the bill was “together or separate,” and the woman said, “Separate,” while the man said, “Together.” After an awkard laugh, the server said, “I just do what I’m told,” and the man said, “We’re together.” The woman looked at her empty plate. “We’re together, right?” he said again. “We’re together?” Desperate now, dipping his head to try to get the woman to look at him.
This image has been growing in my head for days now. To me, it feels like the turning point in a story. I have no idea who they are or what their relationship is like, but that doesn’t matter. The two have become characters in my head, and eventually they will be in a story. She will realize she can’t picture them together much longer, and there will be a strange tension as they continue with the rest of their Saturday night plans. He’ll become more and more desperate, sweating through his suit jacket—
Or maybe it won’t be like that. For now, they are just an image in my mind that is growing and will continue to grow until it reaches an ending. And then I will write it down.
Someone recently commented on one of my Tik-Tok vids asking where I find inspiration for my stories.
This feels like a strange question to me; I never feel like I’m short of ideas. The commenter said they are new to writing, though, and it forced me to consider what it was like when I was a “young writer.” I remember feeling like none of my ideas were good, like sure, I could write about two people being surprised by the love they feel for each other, or I could write about a writer who thinks he sucks at writing, or I could write about anything at all and it would just come out as a story, nothing more. And who am I to think my story is worth reading when so many have written before me?
I think I had to figure out what I wanted to say.
Art is made to—I’m no expert, but in general I think this is true—to draw out some sort of feeling. Humans create to invoke a feeling, either in themselves or in the onlooker, usually—I’m assuming—both. We make art as a way of saying, “This is me,” or more broadly, “This is us.” We use it to tell ourselves that we are, in fact, human, that we can, in fact, feel things, that we can, in fact, find meaning in a life that is otherwise, quite frankly, meaningless.
Of course, art isn’t the only thing we use to create meaning. What (I think) I am trying to say is: a good story idea is not inspiration. Inspiration comes from thinking seriously about what we believe it means to be a human-being (hopefully a good human-being) and using our stories to explore these ideas.
A story about a man who wants to go steady with a woman who isn’t sure if she’d like to is not inspiring. It’s not new or even interesting. It’s dangerously close to cliché. One could easily write a boring and meaningless story based on the interaction I witnessed. And maybe I will.
Inspiration comes from a writer thinking hard about life. The ways we try so hard to feel connected, to feel love, to feel as if we are not alone, how we believe loneliness is one of the worst experiences one can have, even when we know it is one of the central tenets of being human. The ways we experience things differently, even when we are seemingly participating in the exact same things (eg. shared company during a shared meal at a shared table). The ways a perfectly menial and innocuous question—Is the bill together or separate?—can throw a relationship into turmoil in a moment.
It’s not enough to stretch a beautiful image into a story, to have a character drop, fully formed, into your head, to come up with a narrative no one has ever told before. Inspired art says something.
I suppose this isn’t much of a tip, but if you are not simply walking aimlessly through life but are actively and continually considering what it means to be alive—what you believe gives this life meaning—or at least attempting to figure these things out, if you’re considering the things humans are uniquely capable of feeling, you won’t need to look for inspiration or hope that it will touch you with its magic wand.
You’ll just need to figure out how to set it to paper.