Susan T. Creations

I took a trip a couple of weeks ago, to visit my son for his birthday. As he lives in Buffalo, New York and I’m on California’s Central Coast, it’s a nine-to-eleven-hour journey of rushing for connections mixed with sitting for hours in airports. Fun times, especially if you don’t have a laptop to keep you occupied. And you finish reading your book in record time. And nothing goes right from the get-go.

Under such circumstances, most people would go into high-stress resistance mode, which includes carping, complaining, pacing, sighing, grunting, and even yelling at the poor employees behind airline counters who have no more control over things than passengers do. But going postal isn’t a writer’s style. We’re above all that, right? Being a writer lifts us from mundane reactions, because everything that happens is grist for our story-mill. Every interruption, delay, time crunch or reversal of fortune is not a tragedy in the making, it’s simply an opportunity to add to our “stash” of ideas, another line or six added to the trusty-dusty notebook (traditional or electronic) in which we jot down our triggers for inspiration.

To wit: I am not a morning person. Still, obedient traveler that I am, I arrived at the airport at the airline-advised ungodly hour of 4:00 am, the requisite two hours in advance of flight time, only to discover the terminal hadn’t yet opened for the day! (No joke, this really happened.) Did I get upset? Of course not (not much, anyway). I just imagined what Janet Evanovich or Joan Hess would do with such a situation, and aha! Into my notebook it went, an idea sparker for that humorous story I’ve been contemplating attempting. The fact that the plane then developed mechanical problems and takeoff was delayed for almost two hours past the original 6:00 am departure time only added to the farce.

And so it went, for the entire trip. Every setback – missed connections, lost luggage, lack of email access, a minor car accident, my mother ending up in the hospital (she’s fine now) – it’s all fodder to feed my imagination. It’s all part of the “What if…” process: What if my protagonist missed the plane? What if the antagonist lost her luggage? What if the cops had an accident on the way to the 911 call? What if the meeting place hadn’t opened yet? What if, what if?

With the holidays – and the traveling it often entails – coming up, be sure you don’t miss out on opportunities to add to your idea stash. The everyday events of travel – by car, boat, bike, train or plane – that drive most people up the wall offer limitless opportunities to us as writers. Each missed alarm, wrong turn, person encountered, traffic jam, or late arrival can make its appearance – as is or disguised in some form – somewhere in your work, if you remember to jot them down. Each travel event, humorous or serious, can trigger an idea for a solution, a situation, a scene, a character, or even a complete article, story or novel. Fiction may be stranger (and possibly neater) than truth, but it’s life’s messy realities that trigger our story ideas. And if we remember to write it all down, we’ll never run out of ideas.

Notebooks ready? Happy traveling!