I'm out of town this weekend. Heading down to spend some time with my family, which is always interesting and fun.
I got an e-mail from my cousin telling me she had a fabulous story idea. I can't wait to hear it. She's hilarious and highly entertaining, so I have no doubt her idea will be great.
Her e-mail got me to thinking, though, how hard I think it would be to work as a write-for-hire writer. Taking someone else's idea and very specific instructions and making it all work out. Part of the fun for me - the biggest part - is coming up with a new idea. Rolling it around in my head, listening while the characters begin speaking and telling me their stories. I could spend hours sitting in a quiet room, just thinking through ideas. You all know about me and my shower time.
Once before a writer friend and I came up with the idea of co-writing a story. Problem was, we both had different ideas of what should happen and how, and we both thought our ideas were pretty cool and good - on both sides. Hers were great ideas. Just not my ideas. And I didn't have the ability to move my creative brain in a different direction. In the end, we agreed not to write the story together, no hard feelings at all.
So, I'll listen to my cousin's idea. And I'll mull it around. See what happens.
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similar situation arose with me recently. I have a very close friend whose writing style can be similar to my own. We used to take turns writing a humorous column for a magazine and occasionally readers would even speculate that we were one and the same writer. We find each other's opinions and feedback invaluable and both want to write something together but we've found it difficult to fet started. As an experiment, we decided to write a few sentences and give it to the other person and kep on alternating and just see what happens. She wrote a chunk of story, I liked it and kept going with the same tone, but when she saw what I had written she got all possessive about it and said back off, exercise over, like where you're going with this but I like where I'm going better.
So now we have two short stories with identical beginnings that head of in different directions. Weird.
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