I read "The Mist" and thought it was cool. I also had a text-based computer game version of it, which I had been excited about but ultimately proved too frustrating to play for very long. I thought the movie version of "The Mist" was great, even if it had arguably the most disturbing ending of any Stephen King movie ever made.
It always fascinated me to think of how a story that took on such a life of its own had started with just a simple "I wonder" moment for the author. A lot of the things I've written have started off in similar ways, with just a strong image or half a premise that I can't shake. For example: Back in the 17-18 school year, I had regular recess duty for the first time in many, many years. Most of the time I didn't mind it. Sometimes it was even a nice break in the day. The important thing was it got me back in the playground. Out at the south end of our school playground is an enormous tree, both majestic and gnarled with age. The roots of it come up out of the dirt like strong knuckles holding onto the ground for dear life.
Maybe it was because it had been so many years since I'd been on the playground to have the time to get a good look at it, but something about the sight stuck with me. About a year and a half after locking on to that image, I found a story for it and wrote a creepy middle grade horror manuscript based in a tree, in three weeks.
A couple days ago I noticed this:
Right beside the parking lot I use every day, wedged between branches in a tree I usually park by, just below a small hole that has a family of birds living behind it, there was this baseball just sitting there.
My first thought was how some kid had been playing with it, probably left it there and then forgot about it. Not a stretch since it's been my considerable experience that most kids are true experts at forgetting about things. But that same ball was in the same place the following morning, and the morning after that, after a long night of pounding rains and punishing wind.
I sat there in my car staring at it through the windshield, and I started thinking: It must be wedged in there pretty tightly to have survived the storms. It had been a couple of days since it appeared and hadn't moved, so it was clearly lost property now. Why would someone have jammed it in there in the first place? That part of the school grounds isn't even close to anywhere kids would be playing anything that would involve a baseball. Was someone missing it? Was it hidden as part of a prank? And if it was, did the baseball have some kind of personal significance to the person who lost it? If it did, what? And, more importantly, why? There had to be some real backstory to how that ball had ended up in the tree. There were also infinite other speculative reasons about how it happened. My brain started collecting them. Not formally writing down notes or anything, but just latching onto some interesting ideas and stashing them in the mental vault.
I guess the point I'm dancing around here, if I can make it without sounding to self-important and arty (because I still feel a little uncomfortable with trying to call myself an artist) is that I think moments like this and the reactions I have to them a part of what makes me a writer. There have been very few instances, if any, when I've intentionally thought "I'm going to write a story about this topic" and go from there. Usually it has more to do with noticing the weird little incongruous things that surround us every day, and considering them from a slightly different perspective.
Maybe someday one of those partial ideas related to that baseball will find an existence. There are a couple already swimming around in the soup of what my Big Secret Project is right now, so it isn't impossible. Not that even this means those ideas will ever come to any fruition, but they sure are interesting to play with and wonder about.
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