Writers Notebook

GETTING IDEAS

Ideas are like lost keys or sunglasses: elusive when you're looking for them, but when you're not they appear. As an example, I was struggling with an oversized television in my arms when I got the idea for where to set the opening of Chapter Fourteen in my upcoming novel The Summer Kitchen. Earlier that day, I'd been writing about Bedford, the moneyed setting for The Summer Kitchen. Now here I was in a roadside appliance repair store, its counter cluttered with a bowl of years-old hard candy and a jar of Hellman's mayonnaise, two dogs barking in an office out back like they'd seen a cat.

What struck me was not how pedestrian the store seemed beside the world from which I'd just mentally emerged, but rather how much more friendly it was. The next day at my computer, I moved the store to the backside of Bedford and had The Summer Kitchen's protagonist Nora Banks visit there and encounter as I did the woman owner's enviable air of contented calm. The setting provided a means for Nora, familiar only with the inner sanctum of Bedford, to see the other side of town for the first time. And drawing on my own unexpected response to the store, Nora's impression of this part of Bedford is this:

"The street was so delightfully humble: it was hard to believe this was still Bedford. It was as if she was seeing the town suddenly turned inside out, or rather she had been looking at things inside out before, for now it seemed she was seeing everything in its true form. This street all at once felt like the town's true heart."

Visit back soon for more perspectives/insights into scenes from my books.