Since joining the Writing Group and being committed to write an 800-word story for every Friday meeting, I’m always on the look-out for good ideas. Some of my fellow scribes only write about their own lives, others regurgitate stories from history but I think, if the stories are to be worth reading, they need to be varied and a little quirky.
So, I was delighted to read an interesting phrase in a novel I'm reading. Written on a sign in an outside toilet of a remote house is the injunction: ‘Please replace the stone on the seat – it is to keep out the mink.’ Surely, I can turn that into something worth reading, I thought. The very idea of a mink, the creature which provides luxurious fur for the wealthy and glamorous, being regarded, in some places, as a pest which breaks into toilets has the makings of a good yarn.
The novel, The Ice Twins, is the story of a couple who inherit a house on an island off the coast of Scotland and decide to live there. So, I have a setting – Scotland – where mink run free. Now I need a plot. The couple might be in danger from a storm, or be cut off from the mainland by bad weather. There might be smugglers who want to use the island as a base, or a boatload of refugees from Eastern Europe might be shipwrecked there and need assistance. Is it during World War II and German commandos have their eye on the place?
Maybe the couple are fleeing to the island after a personal crisis and are looking for a fresh start and will find redemption in the company of seals and seagulls. I don’t get too bogged down at this early stage; I’m more inclined to start writing and see where it leads.
I’ve used the phrase ‘Please replace the stone ….’ as the opening line and have reached 564 words without any enthusiasm for what I have written. I think I’ll regards this as just another dead end and put this idea aside for the time being. Maybe I’ll come back to it later, or maybe not.
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