Ideas Won't Wait

I found myself downtown tonight, alone, no place to go. It seemed pretty clear that I should just get into my car and head back home, but I kept finding myself poking my nose into bars. I knew I wanted to write tonight but I could not see what writing I’d get done if I tried. The story I’ve been poking about with hasn’t had much of a point to it. Some deep part of me really wanted to be in bar, though, and bars are all about writing to my brain. So this feeling had to mean something.

First, I sought out this hotel watering hole that I went to earlier in the week. They had this awesome house salad for only $5, but I looked inside and it was just too many lonely people in sweatshirts for me to handle. So then I looked at the menu at The Black Sheep, and just wasn’t feeling it.

I started to walk back toward my car, but my mind kept turning to other places. McGlinchey’s? Good Dog? I’m tea-totalling these days and don’t have much cash in my wallet till payday, as it is. I knew I should just go home, but some part of me seemed to really want to be in a bar. I even turned my feet towards my car and started walking away from any place I might go. Normally, this would be a done deal. It’s very rare for me to change course, but tonight I did. The feeling would not let me leave.

I’m very partial to writing in bars. For example, New Year’s Eve weekend this year was honestly one of the worst weekends I remember going through in some time, but in the emotional oubliette I found myself in that Monday, I made my way to Coyote Ugly in the early afternoon and had one of the best two or three hours of writing I’d had in months.

It sort of happened again tonight. When I went to Good Dog, the bar was packed. I only write in bars if I can write at the bar, so I left. I had noticed this place around the corner, though, called Misconduct, and it looked nice. I went inside.

There was space at the bar, nice light and a good buzz to the crowd. The menu had a nice veggie sandwich on it, too. Perfect, I thought. So I sat down, found my bartender totally unstressed by the fact that I wasn’t drinking (did you hear that, Johnny Brenda’s?) and got my notebook out.

The story I’m working on is an adaptation of Fatman, the Human Flying Saucer, a post Captain Marvel invention of C.C. Beck in the 60s. The character’s name will be changed to ‘Plato’ (as it means “The Wide”), he won’t be a rich guy and there will be no magic milkshakes. Instead, he’ll be a bit of an outcast in Pittsburg, Kansas and he will be 17. In a way, it’s going to be a kind of young adult story, but, besides teen angst, it will also grapple with some narrative tropes in, I think, illuminating ways.

Well, I think it will now**.** I sat down at that bar and opened my notebook and started thinking of the trajectory I had so far. I knew my character, Marlo, would gain his flying saucer powers and set out to solve all the world’s problems. Then, I knew, he was going to realize he had to focus in a little more, because even a human flying saucer can’t fix this awul world of ours.

I had also come up with a big problem in one city for him to discover, but where to go from there? I mean, why? So what? A story needs an end that means something.

I had nothing.

I’d even talked it through in a coffee shop with a friend recently, and she’d just sort of given me this look that said: “it sounds pointless.” And I knew the look was right.

Tonight, though, I looked at the big picture, the big themes, and — BAM! I could see where it was headed. Where it had to go. I wanted to write a superhero story that made a statement about superhero stories, about life and about finding a bit of power. Sitting at that bar, I found the way.

I’m not going to spell it out here, because I still have a lot of writing to do (and a very important new character to develop). I have to say, though, that feeling of finding it is one of the best things about writing fiction for me. Incidentally, many of the best moments like that have happened for me at some well-lit bar, somewhere. I should budget a bar fund just to keep my writing going. I really should. They work for me.

Some days, you’re writing a story and it just feels as though you are putting one word after the other, but they aren’t headed anywhere. You’re wasting ink. You’re wasting paper. Sometimes, you never get anywhere (it’s been that way for me a lot lately). Sometimes, though, whoosh! Your mind opens. You can see where you’ve been headed all along and you start scribbling and scribbling just to get the future written down.

That happened for me tonight. At last! I haven’t popped that particular mental cork in a while, and it felt really, really good. I have secretly worried for a few months now that I didn’t actually have another book in me. I just couldn’t find it. I just didn’t know where I wanted to go with any of the ideas I’ve gotten started.

This is it, though. This is the one.

It’s got action. It’s zany. It’s weird. I daresay it’s even a social commentary. It’s all that, but it was all that before, too. I knew those elements were there. What I didn’t have for it, though, what I needed, what I couldn’t write without, was a point. Now I’ve got it. Now I’ve got a point.

I could feel that idea in me and I knew it wanted to get out. It wanted to get out its way, though. In a setting it liked. I’m so happy that I listened and that, for once, the endless rush inside me didn’t barrel its way through something else I needed to take time for. Because I listened, I have a point for a book.

The Gods can let me live another day. I have a reason to be here.