As long as we are still at home keeping everyone safe I thought we could talk about that secret place where ideas swirl around in deep places waiting to be coaxed up to the surface. As long as it is still poetry month I will at least come at the topic from an oblique angle. I say this because many of you deeply appreciate poetry but you get your writerly creds in short story, novel or nonfiction writing.

Ideas

Where do writers find them? Is there a secret place? Let’s talk about ideas.

Remember, it is poetry month and I am taking a workshop. In one of the early lectures Ideas are the focus. I am supposed to make a list of ten of them. Later, I need to expand on them. But the idea of finding and listing ideas is very simple and can apply to your fictional characters or your memoirs, I suppose any kind of creative writing is at risk of forming from an idea.

The workshop suggests a list of ten ideas and to find them we are assigned to make a list of our high points, low points and our turning points. I am still working on mine because I don’t want to choose a high point that every parent will choose and I don’t want my lowest point to be so tragic I have to do a round of therapy as I explore it.

Turning points seem very interesting to me. What were the major turning points in your life? Your character’s life? Some of my highest points became turning points in hind sight. Some of my most dreadful points with the passage of time are now things I would now list among my high points.

The list, if you make one will mellow or compost as you consider what it was about the event making it among the top ten moments. What universal truth did you find in that moment in time? The truths as writers know can be pretty darned messed up. We don’t have to like our truth but we shouldn’t look away from their value. Your reader will appreciate your honesty.

Join us on Sunday for a mini-topic chat on Idea Mining.

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