My thoughts after reading..........
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
~ Somerset Maugham ~
One of my standard — and fairly true — responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.
~ Roger Zelazny ~
I tend to agree, but I would add short stories are postcard/letters from the characters and are scenes taken from their everyday life - novels are short stories joined together by the characters who return wanting to share with us more of there lives.
For me I see something, hear a tune, or have a dream that just won’t leave me alone - such as with the beginnings of the Jumping Rope. It started with just a “fictional” idea to have someone send me an e-mail with the jump rope rhyme.
I have been lucky to become acquainted with an artist, Faramond who takes a jumble of ideas that I have for a story and brings them to life in his paintings, such as the one posted at the top of my blog. Its title “1919 Joplin” and is a corner lot in a fictional town, Putney, on New Island.
I have also been very lucky to have a job where I work with someone who I knew high school - sharing memories of those times is such a treat.
There are days when we start remembering those times and then a story just starts to evolve from those musings or is it that I start developing the story that leads us back to those days.....its like trying to figure out which came first the chicken or the egg!
I just wanted to say thank you to Judy and to Lee, for allowing me into their lives, and sharing their talents with me. ~ Travelin’ Gal ~
And now the beginning the "first sketch" for the “Jumping Rope”.
