I used to think that my life was too ordinary for fostering ideas for writing. But finally, I realized that the best story-telling is about human nature itself. That’s when I started looking for writing ideas everywhere and every day.
In this blog post, I share five ordinary life events that I turned into stories or posts.
The Pancake Contest
When I was five years old, I competed against my brother Don in a pancake contest. The contest happened at home at breakfast time. My mother made as many pancakes as we could eat. My brother lost the contest and I won by one pancake.
Fifty years later, I turned this ordinary childhood event into a funny story with descriptions of my brother groaning in pain and of me raising my arms in victory.
A Picture of a Road Bike
One day at 5 p.m., my son sent me a picture of the handlebars of his new trail bike. By 6 p.m., it was dark outside, and I started to wonder if he was biking out in the hills in darkness. Luckily, he wasn’t.
I wondered what it would be like if a bicyclist did get caught in the middle of the hills in the dark. I wrote a story about a girl who starts her bike ride at dusk and gets distracted when she finds a tarantula. She ends up in a valley at nightfall and has to find her way back to the deserted parking lot while the night wildlife threatens her safety.
Taking a Stuffed Bear to a Cemetery
A week after my mother died, my brother texted me and my siblings to tell me that he took a stuffed bear with him to visit her grave. The bear was created from clothes that my mother once wore.
I invented a story about this visit, which I titled Rain. The story describes a man driving a truck to the cemetery to see his mother as it rains. When he arrives, the rain stops. He thinks about how his siblings have connected via text messages since his mother died. He puts the bear next to her tombstone and says a prayer. As he drives away, the rain starts again.
A Hike in San Francisco
A few years ago, I joined a Meetup group that hosted walks all over San Francisco. One walk started at the Embarcadero and crossed the city from east to west for seven miles until we reached Land’s End. Another hike circled the exclusive neighborhoods of Twin Peaks and climbed up to the Sutro Tower, one of the highest points in the city.
When I was writing my novel Whistle, I used these hiking experiences in one chapter to help my protagonist escape the sorrow of her home after her mother dies. She walks along the ocean to Golden Gate Park.
Filbert Street Steps and Graffiti
When my friend came to town, I met her in San Francisco to climb the Filbert Street Steps. This staircase covers three ascending blocks from Sansome Street to Coit Tower and includes well over two hundred steps. On my way to the city in Oakland, I saw some graffiti on an overpass that said “Resist Authority.”
I turned the staircase and graffiti experiences into a short commentary about how I like to read graffiti so I can hear what the needs of people are. This post received a lot of attention on my blog. It seems like many people identified with it.
Now, I have a fertile writing attitude. My whole life is a garden of ideas, waiting for my creativity to take them from a personal experience into the world.
Tess Perko's Blog 