A Virus with Shoes*

I've begun to think about what my next project will be.  Yes, I have at least two rewrites of my latest project to do, but that will have to wait for a few days until my friends who are reading my latest give me feedback.

So how do I decide what to write?

I keep ideas in a folder called stuff.  These ideas range from potential future titles (yes, I have written pieces, long pieces, starting from as little as a title.) to projects I have outlined (I like outlines) with character sketches that may run to more than ten pages.  I update these when inspiration or boredom strikes.  Some of the things in the folder are years old.  Some were added days ago.

After looking through my folder earlier this week,  had picked out a couple of things to consider.  I do research (o_O), if you can call it that.  I call it that.  I go on line and look up random stuff that seems to apply to what I'm thinking about.  I read books and plays that seem to have some tangential relationship to what I'm considering.  I watch movies, old movies.  I listen to my old comedy albums.  I watch youtube videos of... stuff.  (I love old vaudeville.)

And I live my everyday life... doing dishes, exercising, talking to friends, driving the girls, etc.

As I do daily, I was doing the dishes first thing in the morning yesterday and listening to NPR: Morning Edition when I heard a story about a musical group from New York that sang Medieval music.  I am not a devotee.  I half tuned it out, but something caught my attention.  The group (I will look up who this was and post a link to the NPR report at the end of this post.) commissioned a composer to write them something modern and one of the songs was about how, in a committed relationship, if one person suffered, both people suffered, shared suffering.  Intentional suffering.  I've been married for a long, long time.  This struck a note with me.

And I thought of an idea that was in my stuff folder that I had considered and rejected earlier in the week and how well this idea of shared suffering fit that snippet of an idea.

I know what I am going to write!  Well... I know where I am going to start.  The idea is only three lines long.  I need to write some general notes, probably an outline, and character sketches and probably other stuff before I start putting dialog on a page, but more about that as I do it.

Thank you, *Bill Hicks - People Suck, Rant in E-Minor.

NPR: Morning Edition link - Anonymous 4  Thank you.