I write several short stories a week. Anything from 500 words to near 1,500. If I really like the story, it might run up to 3,000 words. When I tell people, they often ask me, “Where in the world do you get ideas? I have trouble even coming up with one I want to write about.”
If I’m outdoors, I might say, “Look at the near-full cup of coffee sitting on the ground over there,” pointing. Then say, “What if…a man is sitting on the ground near it. Was he poisoned? Is he having a heart attack? That’s a story.” Or, I speculate, “What if…spiders are crawling out of it? Elaborate, and you’ve got your start of a Sci-Fi thriller.” Or, “What if…it’s not coffee at all, but there’s a stolen classified chip at the bottom of the cup, waiting for a foreign agent to pick it up, pretending to be a good citizen cleaning up?”
I hope I am starting to make my point. You can look at almost anything or indeed anyone and say, “What if…” and then fill in the blank. Animals are good. That cat staring at me, do I see a tiny camera behind one of those big eyes spying upon me? Go from there.
A person or people anywhere are excellent topics for speculation of the “What if…” You see two people sitting in a café. The woman is talking and using hand gestures in an animated discussion with a man. What if…she’s telling him about a kidnapping she just witnessed, and he does not believe her because she always exaggerates? Or, what if…she’s telling him about her best friend getting a divorce, and ironically the man is there to tell her the same thing; he wants a divorce. You’ve got the two people to describe, change, or enhance their natural looks to suit your story. Give them fiction names, and you’re off and running with your story idea.
Write it all at once, or at least make a lot of notes as you plot your story in your mind. Add some extreme or outrageous elements of location, the dress of characters, facial expressions, smells in the vicinity, noises that almost drown them out, and even the food they are eating. The point is, make your mind wander; hell, send it down the yellow brick road. Throw up a villain, fabricate a central issue that’s going to develop that your main character must face, make a decision, and solve one, one way or another. There might be a physical or verbal fight that could emerge. What is it about and how is it decided? Then what? How could you have an unexpected ending?
Keep asking yourself those questions and put down the first outrageous thing that comes to your mind. Yeah, now you got it going…now what? No, don’t slow down. Speed up…tell the story. You can always edit later. Let the juices flow. Imagine you’re a kid telling a fantastic fabricated tale. No matter if it is not logical, no matter that it might not be plausible, do not put on the brakes for logic. That is for later. Quick, add an element that makes your heart quicken. Hurry! Put it down before it escapes in the misty rear of your mind.
Whew…OK, rest. Hopefully, you have at least several hundred words on paper.
Now, you can review your idea and see if you want to go somewhere with it. Chances are you will want to flesh it out some more. Whether or not you want to finish the story to your satisfaction, or edit again later, is up to you.
Even if you don’t do anything with it, you had an excellent “What if…” session.
Think of that scene in the restaurant in the movie When Harry Met Sally. Meg Ryan is in the café, demonstrating how orgasm can be faked, and just after it another female patron is asked what she wants for lunch. She says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Generate scenes like that in your mind from simply two people sitting at a table, and there’s the core of your story. At least it’s a fine starting place.
It’s difficult for me to understand why anyone would say, “My mind is a blank, I can’t think of anything.” Sure, you can. Everyone, including you, has a mind that can go off on any tangent you send it on. Let it fly into the unknown. Follow it and put down every word, every emotion, every circumstance, and continue to fill in the blanks of the story.
I could spend ten times these amount of words giving you suggestion after suggestion, but if you get the idea, try it. If you are reading this and have five minutes, stop, go someplace where people are, or go outside and look around. Find any animate creature, and begin asking “What if…” and fill in the blanks and keep it going.
Let me leave you with a thought from the TV series Dragnet from the 1950s. In one opening deadpan monolog, Joe Friday (Jack Webb) says, “There are eight million stories in the naked city, this is one of them.” That’s a big choice. What if you tell one?
