One of the most important skills a children’s writer can hone is their ability to catch ideas. Without an idea to write about, we don’t have much of a job. So where do we find them?
The answer for most of us is … everywhere! Every interaction we have, phrase we hear, show we watch, challenge we face, and creature we meet brings endless possibilities for plots, characters, and titles. Ideas are swirling around us all the time, whether we see them or not.
Each year I try to participate in Tara Lazar’s Storystorm, which started out as Picture Book Idea Month, where published authors describe in daily posts where they find their inspiration and how to capture and tame the best ideas.
Well, to be honest, the way it’s done is to NOT tame them! We tend to think that catching an idea means lassoing something fierce and strong, hopping on its back and breaking it like a bronco until it loses its wildness and submits its power to us, the heroic writer, who then puts this tamed horse of an idea down on paper. Not so at all. While those ideas are swirling around us, the approach is much more often like gently waving a giant butterfly net above our head, enveloping as many of those fragile and flitty butterflies of ideas as possible, then watching as they continue to flutter around the net, transforming, joining together, taking on different shapes and colors depending on our view of them in the changing light of day … even laying tiny eggs that hatch into new baby caterpillar ideas without warning. There is no taming here, just observation and wonder as we try to describe what we see in our net to others in a coherent way.
One of the tricky things about this approach to ideas is that while we’re sitting with our back turned from the net, jotting down everything we can remember into a story we hope is as engaging and beautiful as what we caught, the original idea is likely continuing to change. When we turn around to take another look we may not even recognize it anymore! Here’s an example from my own writing life:
As a middle schooler, I was often frustrated that my younger sibling was devilish to me when we were alone, but whenever an adult was around the same sibling seemed downright angelic. I remember struggling to reconcile how my parents and I could have such different perspectives of the same person, and I began to write a scathing poem about how a sweet child parents knew was actually one and the same with the monster their sibling knew. I thought it was brilliant! However, as my pen hit the paper that concept evolved and shifted and led to new thoughts which led to others … eventually I had written a song, not a poem, and it was about humanity and how little separates the good and the bad, and the role of faith and love in that distinction. No siblings anywhere to be found.
The thing is – the sibling idea changed in that moment, but never actually left my net. Decades later it found its way into a picture book manuscript about a boy whose parents bring home a monster for a pet. The monster is awful to live with, but astute readers may realize it’s no monster at all, but the child’s view of a new sibling. Again, the original idea evolved a bit, and created something new. If that manuscript ever gets picked up by a publisher it will likely shift and transform a few more times before hitting a printed page.
Stories and ideas are magnificent, living, breathing things. Us writers have the extraordinary privilege of getting a closeup view of them as we swing our nets around trying to catch some that bring beauty and humor and joy to others, but we are never fully in charge. Those ideas are never fully tamed, and we wouldn’t hope them to be; their wildness is where their power lies. The same shifting and transforming that allows our butterfly net of ideas to evolve on a page into something unexpected is what allows them to evolve in the minds of our readers as well. What I think I’m writing may not be what my reader takes in, and that’s a good thing. I want readers to see, in the idea I caught, something that resonates with their life, their perspective, and leads to thoughts I never intended.
So fellow or future writers: grab your nets, look around, and start gently waving that net wherever you go. Find a way to record the ideas you catch – observe them, look at them from other angles, let them play and join together if they want to. Don’t be discouraged if a caterpillar of an idea you once thought was genius finds its way into a chrysalis and hangs unused for a while. Give it time. Focus on another idea for a while. It’ll come out eventually, and who knows what it will be when it does!
