When you’re running out of ideas for plots, it’s time to walk around your neighborhood and check what your fellow residents are doing.
Sounds nosy, doesn’t it? But no, I’m not advising you to spy on your neighbors or to interview them like a reporter. The goal of this exercise is to tune up your writer’s eyes and ears. You can transform ordinary neighborly activities into works of fiction more vivid than the commonplace scenes that piqued your interest.
Wherever you live, fascinating people are all around you. Here are five tips for bringing neighbors into your fiction without ever invading their privacy:
1. Start with places where you go regularly: the homeowners’ association, school meetings, places of worship, the barber or beauty shop, the gym, or a club you belong to.
2. Sit or stand next to anybody who’s willing to chat with you. Engage him or her in a discussion that concerns something of mutual interest, based on the place you’re both in.
3. Zone in on anything that’s at the front of this person’s mind. You might not care about his or her hobby, but dig deeper. There’s surely an interesting back story to a man’s obsession with model trains or a woman’s passion for homeless pets. Are they escaping something? Are they doing what was forbidden during childhood?
4. Prime the pump. We’re all a little egotistical to some degree; we all enjoy talking about ourselves at least a little bit. Encourage your neighbor to talk by asking leading questions-“Where did you learn about those trains? Or “How do you trap and neuter feral cats?”
5. Do this exercise several times with a few different neighbors. Take notes afterward, and embellish these notes with details that you’ve made up. Change the names, ages, places, and supporting characters. It’s fiction! Read what you’ve written, and you’ll discover that you’re on the way to developing a truly compelling story.
Here’s an example of a real-life family from a typical suburban neighborhood. I’ll call the main character Janice. She was a homemaker with three children in grade school and a husband who was on the road a lot. She didn’t have her own car. She’d never attended college, and confided that she felt limited because of that.
All during the school year, Janice walked her children to and from the bus stop just around the corner, even though the oldest was eleven years old, and crossing guards were out in force. All summer long, she never took her eyes off her children in the neighborhood pool.
What’s so interesting about that? Plenty!
In the middle of June, Janice decided to take in a foster child through a program at her church. Max was eight years old, blond, and blue-eyed, while her children all had dark hair and eyes. I never learned what kind of troubled home Max came from, but he had clearly landed in a foreign culture. As the family group marched to and from the swimming pool, everybody held hands except for Max, who ran behind or ahead or in circles around them.
A natural athlete, Max clambered up on the high diving platform and thrashed across the forbidden deep end every time Janice blinked her eyes, while her three obedient children never ventured beyond their depth. Bold and accustomed to fending for himself, Max joined much older children in water volleyball, pounding the ball across the rope with disproportionate force.
Janice never looked me in the eye, but all I had to do was stand beside her in the chest-deep water and ask a question or two about her children. She seemed lonely and eager to talk to another adult; the other pool parents barely noticed her. And she revealed her conflict about Max: whether to keep him for the summer as promised, or tell Social Services that he was an unfavorable influence on her own children?
How did Max feel about his temporary home? I never found out. He was always moving; moreover, anything the children said was under Janice’s watchful eyes, and that applied to visitors as well.
This story is unfinished. Summer ended, school started, and Max disappeared. I never knew where he went after his sojourn with Janice’s well-supervised kids. Nor did I learn what effect his prolonged visit had on her admittedly over-protected children.
But the end of that suburban summer is the beginning of a really intriguing story. Just imagine all the possibilities!
Here’s one idea, and there are so many others: one of Janice’s children begins to have ideas of his own. He rebels, shocking her. How does she cope with a child who craves autonomy? Does the children’s part-time father get involved? If so, whose side does he take? Who takes the blame? What happens to their other children? Does their marriage survive?
As you can see, a humdrum situation in an unremarkable neighborhood family can lead to an uncountable number of complex short stories dealing with conflict, tension, morality, and control-the elements of human interaction that you see every day, right in your own neighborhood. Just look, listen, and write!
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