Digging Deeper
Short post tonight. Sorry, bit of a rough day.
I’ve been having a bit of a dry run on creativity lately, so I decided to try something a little bit different. Sometimes I like to come up with first lines that could go to a story, even if I don’t know anything about the story yet. I actually did a blog post where I discussed it. So, I took one of those sentences, typed it up, and just started exploring.
The sentence I chose is, “This is the story of how I drove to work and ended up three states away with an angry possum in the backseat.” I had no idea who the ‘I’ was, or anything about the possum. I actually left the ‘I’ mostly blank at first to explore the possum. I decided it would be more fun if the possum was intelligent and could talk. So why? Could change, since it’s a little cliché, but for now, he’s an escaped lab animal who managed to slip in my protagonist’s car.
My protagonist who I didn’t give a name to until I had to, is Monica, who was on her way to her boring soul-destroying job when she ends up in a fender bender. She’s fine and the car is still drivable. But when she tries to take the next exit so she’s at least not on the highway anymore, a voice tells her not to turn there.
She freaks out, which I think is a completely fair reaction as there isn’t supposed to be anyone else in the car. Then she discovers the talking possum. Which she finds mildly less frightening than a potentially invisible carjacker, since possums really aren’t aggressive and are resistant to rabies. But they aren’t supposed to be talking either, so she’s understandably agitated.
Monica also isn’t sure about taking driving instructions from a possum, and asks what if she ignores him and goes where she wants anyway? He threatens to bite and scratch if she doesn’t. Which is where things get interesting.
She comes to the conclusion that the possum is more desperate than angry. But she makes a mental note that desperation can be more dangerous than anger, a fact that she was well aware of. Even as I typed that, I found the idea interesting. What does she know of desperation? Was it her desperation, or another’s?
So I did a freewriting exercise where I dove into it. Then, and only then, did the character begin to speak with me. Until then I had a generic character, I didn’t even know man or woman until page three. Now I know both why she immediately agrees to help this possum and what her biggest temptation to walk away will be.
When I realized this plot seemed similar to another WIP I have, I dug deeper, asking myself what the differences were. And the more I dug, the more I understood all of my characters and came up with potential future plot points.
So my advice is to follow those moments. There may well be gold there if you choose to dig. Maybe you’ll realize that something has potential when you write it. Maybe it’s a re-read where you decide that throw away joke could lead to something deeper. Built in foreshadowing.
Freewriting will give you room to explore your ideas before putting them in place in your story. Ask yourself the deep questions and don’t necessarily take the first answer you get. First answers are easy and the most likely to be cliché. But if you keep digging deeper, you find things you never knew.
What have you discovered while freewriting?