This week at MOTE, Leigh Kimmel prompted me with: And out of nowhere the idea ambushes you and won’t leave you alone.
I don’t recall being struck by an idea as forcefully as that, so I tried to put myself into the head of an author that is frequently so discomforted.
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So where did I get the idea for my latest work?
Imagine that you're walking through the woods on a lovely sunny day. You don't have a care in the world. You're thinking about how to introduce this lovely plot twist that you've just decided should be shoehorned into the plot of the story you're in the middle of. You're so lost in your thoughts that you don't even notice that the birds have stopped singing.
You keep walking aimlessly through the trees through the continuing silence. The amendments to your plot are really coming together. You're drawing up a list of chapters and scenes that need to be altered to foreshadow your twist so that it isn't entirely out of the blue.
You smile, delighted at the way your current story is developing.
Then...
Suddenly, without warning, a weight lands on your shoulders. A cat has ambushed you and is using you as an intermediate platform between the tree branches above you and the ground.
You aren't, for the purposes of this analogy, a cat person. You love the dog that your spouse is walking in a park on the other side of town. So, you're not happy about this cat interrupting your walk.
You're even less happy when the cat won't wander off and leave you alone, but decides to follow you through the woods, insisting on being petted and stroked every few yards or so.
Rather than work on the plot of your existing story, all the rest of the walk you have to focus on, and think about, this cat, which follows you all the way home, and then insists on curling up next to your typewriter.
That's how being ambushed by an idea feels like. Suddenly you have this illumination, and a scene flashes into your head. Or perhaps it'll be a character or a line of dialogue or... It doesn't really matter. What matters is that this idea insists on monopolising your thinking time. It doesn’t matter what else you were working on, or how close you were to finishing it. This idea is all you can think about.
You sit down at your typewriter and press the shift key preparatory to typing the upper case letter that initiates the first sentence of your next section of writing – but your brain isn't focussed on the story that you were working on yesterday. All it can concentrate on is this brand new idea that's filling every portion of your thoughts.
So you put in a brand new piece of paper and start typing out your new story. The idea is so dominant in your head that you have to finish it before you can write anything else.
Finally you finish this new masterpiece, go back to the story you were working on before you were ambushed, and you've forgotten all the pertinent details. It takes you days before you have enough understanding of the plot and characters in your head that you can continue the tale.
So, you were asking me where I got the idea for my latest work from. It ambushed me out of nowhere, and wouldn't let me go until I'd written the whole story down.
I'd much prefer it if ideas waited patiently in a queue until I've finished with the previous ones. But, in my experience, very few of them have any patience, and the one that shouts the loudest in my head gets to drown out the others and have their story written first. It's really very irritating, I have no idea when I start a story if I'm going to finish it before I have to start the next one.
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My prompt this week was delivered to nother Mike. I’m looking forwards to reading what everyone else comes up with.