Musings: 5 Things That Brought Me Story Ideas

People: According to both Boy Meets World and Girl Meets World sitcoms, the secret of life is that people change people which are absolutely true! The world would have been a sad, lonely place to live in if we had to stay here all by ourselves. It is essential to have relationships in order to draw our experiences from there. Most of the characters I have written have been inspired from real life. Sometimes the fictional versions become the paler realities. So people have definitely brought me story ideas.

Places: The other thing that has always intrigued me are places. I started saving up money and travelling in the last few years because I just wanted to write about different places. Because all my novels, novellas, short stories always had Kolkata as a backdrop. Even though I haven’t used any of the locations that I had gone to in the recent past in my stories, I have made sure that I remember every single detail from the trips. Because you never know when a story might hit you!

Incidents: I don’t know about you but sometimes the only way I seem to be able to make sense of life is if I write. Maybe I got my heartbroken. Maybe a friend of mine had an awful spat with me. Maybe I received unbelievably good news. Maybe I am just having an off day. No matter what is going on in my life, I know that I would only start to feel better if I started writing. And that’s exactly how incidents trigger some of my stories and even blog posts. I don’t write to get back at people or to get even with people. The only reason I write is because that’s always been the best therapy for me.

Memories: Story ideas more often than not also come from your memories. As Paulo Coelho once put it, it takes effort free oneself from memory. Some of our memories are not pleasant. There are some that we are completely haunted by. So we write stories to either remember or to forget. But there are good memories too. Memories we do not want to hold onto no matter what happens in our lives, you know. As J.M. Barrie said, God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December. How amazing is it then that some of our story ideas are formed from memories?

Wishful Thinking: Until a few months ago, I would write stories in order to correct mistakes in fiction and get my do-overs from real life. So the story ideas would come from wishful thinking and mindless thinking. Hoping and wanting the real life stories had played out the way it had in the originals.