The adage “write what you know” can be limiting. It’s unlikely your path in life—family, community, trade—will expose you to a significant portion of what the world offers. The better advice for writers is to be interested in everything and use it as grist for the mill, especially if you were born into a family of millers, because you have to make a buck.
Still, any random job can be the starting point for a writing career. Or it can be your entire career. It depends on what you do with it as an artist. If you work with other people, there’s going to be conflict and drama. There will be jerks, schemers, morons. The boss’s mood may ebb and flow with the daily sales.
People who work together fall in love (or at least get horny for each other) and then it gets messy. Not everyone pays attention to that other adage, “Don’t shit where you eat.” In fact, a lot of people I know like to shit at work—it’s the only time you’re going to be paid for sitting on a toilet—so they may as well scratch a lusty itch there as well.
The Mad Crapper Strikes Again
Speaking of pooping at the office, one of my first screenplays was about a bad guy who plugged all the toilets where he worked. He left a calling card, scrawled in feces, of “The Mad Crapper Strikes Again.”
Obviously, that was a dumb idea for a movie (it’s not even a good idea for this newsletter) but I borrowed heavily from the people at the sales office where I worked to create the characters in the story. It was a fun story to write and if the market for scatalogical thrillers ever emerges, I’ll be ready.
And Again!
My first full-length novel was set in the office I worked at the time, using characters I’d met in my ten years there. To be clear, there wasn’t a clear cut drama at that place or story-ready characters. I assembled a main character from people I knew, used the business as scaffolding, and invented stakes that would make for a compelling story.
Or so I thought.
I got an agent but the story never sold.
The Story-Story
This month, I offer you another borrowed story-story an author shared about their recently published novel. Sarah Thomas, writing in [Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/article/my-surreal-years-tutoring-the-children-of-the-super-rich), took a job as a tutor and wound up spending ten years with oligarchs, the insanely wealthy, and the merely super-rich, teaching their children English.
She admits to eventually being bored of all the wealth, but it sure beats heavy lifting.
The key moment came one evening when, in her words:
I began to think: Maybe I should be writing about _this_. It started as texture. I blended what I had seen in the past 10 years, and characters began to form.
That was the spark. Then it begins to take shape:
…and little scenes I’d witnessed between her and her husband that gave me a sense—nothing I could put my finger on—of a darkness in their dynamic.
At then, a clear-cut figure emerges:
I began to see a character, Kata, and to see her as a woman held hostage.
Best of all, Sarah’s novel, Queen K, is available wherever fine books are sold.
Maybe I’m Just Old
I see story possibilities all over the place now. In my youth, I kept waiting for something fantastic to happen, either to me or near me, so that I could write about it. Maybe it was The Great Gatsby effect, that I thought I had to be taken in by someone exciting and adventurous in order to have a longform story. Because I sure wasn’t doing anything exciting or adventurous myself.
Now, I watch a barista for five minutes while sitting at a coffee shop and I think I can fashion something out of it. Possibly it’s having read so many novels the past four decades that I’m familiar with many more forms and storylines.
Actually, it probably is that. Reading fuels your creativity. So go read and then take another look at the place you work for a possible novel.
Going Forward
If you have a story-story to share, send it my way. Just a couple hundred words on how you turned the spark of an idea into something you could write as a first draft.
Thanks for your time. Now get back to your desk and type faster.
All the best,
Mickey