Finding Inspiration in Everyday Places
I’m afraid of flying.
Long drives make me anxious.
I don’t like being far from home.
I push myself to travel to experience new places but I’m a homebody. I love that most of my days look the same. I’m such a creature of habit, I only wear one color—turquoise. The problem is I’m exceptionally curious and have countless questions about life.
Since I live a rather simple one, I started trying on pretend lives and traveling to imaginary places to look for answers. It actually works! If I go deep enough into these made-up minds and explore their worlds, I find real answers.
I’m not crazy. You might be wondering, then, what is my diagnosis? I am a novelist.
The French author Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” It seems to work for me.
For over 25 years I’ve supplemented my ordinary days with weird characters, strange places, and riveting storylines. All this examined life in the convenience and safety of my own mind. So imagine my shock when I walked into the grocery store one afternoon and saw the character Dottie, from my novel Magdalena, standing there in produce.
“Well,” she said holding up a ripe tomato, smiling, “you’re a nice one, aren’t you?”
“Dottie?” I whispered. There in the flesh was a woman who looked and acted just like my character. Dottie, an outcast in her small town, has almost no one to talk to so she is absolutely the kind of woman who might chat with a piece of fruit.
I watched Grocery Store Dottie roll her cart to the apples. I heard her tell a bruised Fuji “not today,” before she set it back down. My God! I told myself. It’s really her. I followed her down each aisle as if pursuing a ghost. And this was the day the stalking began.
I didn’t run into her often. In a good month, I might see her twice, but then I wouldn’t see her for several weeks. Whenever I did, I’d light up like a child coming face to face with a superhero, or a teenager running into her crush. The feeling was complicated, and while I tried to be discreet as I watched her, I didn’t always succeed.
Once she narrowed her eyes at me, noticing my attention as I followed her outside to her bike. She set her grocery bag in the handlebar basket while watching me suspiciously. I pretended to look out toward the parking lot and then at my phone, as if waiting for someone. I kept up the act and she seemed to buy it. It was easy enough to dismiss me, a 50-year-old woman in jean shorts, a turquoise tank top, and Birkenstocks, acting strange but not threatening. The irony made me laugh. I was stalking her because she reminded me of my odd character and yet the real oddball was me.
I learned to be casual when I ran into her. I’d see her from the corner of my eye while pretending to read a cereal box label, or I’d stand with my back to her and just listen. She came to be an inspiration, a spark of excitement to the often tedious work of developing a novel. Each time I saw her I told myself she was like a mystical message from the universe confirming that I’m writing what I’m supposed to be writing.
With each run-in, I’d report the details to my writers group and we came to call them “Dottie Spottings.” Only my writer friends understood the innocence involved in stalking someone for the sake of a story. My husband laughed at me, and my daughter told me to leave the poor lady alone. But I couldn’t. Who in their right mind turns their back on a miracle?
When my novel Magdalena was accepted by a publisher, I no longer needed Grocery Store Dottie to keep me in the spell of the story. It was time to let her go. So one day in the juice isle, I stopped her and said, “You look so familiar.”
“Oh?” She smiled in surprise and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that I’d been watching her for years. I congratulated myself on how good of a stalker I’d become—even as I was preparing to quit.
“Were you a librarian at the old library down the street?” I asked, finally voicing the suspicion I’d had all this time, which I kept to myself so that she could remain what I needed her to be. Standing face to face with her, she didn’t look all that much like Dottie. Maybe similar in age and overall quirkiness but the details were different. Why had I chosen her? Maybe because she’d spent her career surrounded by the spirit of books? Who better than a librarian to bring my fictitious character to life.
“Oh, that was years ago,” she said. “You remember me?”
We went on to have a brief conversation and I learned her name. Getting to know the real person allowed me to let go of my illusion. I don’t follow her anymore, though when I see her, she still makes me smile. She unknowingly gave me the magic I needed to finish writing Magdalena.
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In my latest novel several homeless characters are teaching me new lessons about life. I am purposeful about not stalking any homeless people I see at the grocery store. Still, the universe managed to send me a message again confirming that I’m writing what I’m supposed to write. One afternoon, I found a homeless woman in my garage.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Someone sent me,” she said sort of shaking her head in confusion. “They told me to come.”
“Who?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
She never completely explained herself. To my rational husband, she was too high on something to know what she was doing or saying. I was slower to accept his logic. In that moment I decided to believe my characters sent her. They wanted to help me better understand their complicated lives. Though the experience left me with even more questions than answers, it was exactly what I needed.
Do I literally believe that Grocery Store Dottie was a miracle, or that my characters really sent the homeless woman to me? No. But just as I love writing stories for readers, I also get a thrill telling stories to myself. With this kind of thinking, I have found that life is always an adventure. Even just staying home.
Discover how the seven core competencies of storytelling—concept, character, voice, plot, theme, scene construction, and style—combine to create compelling narrative. By understanding the engineering and design of a story, and using Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering and Nancy Dodd’s The Writer’s Compass, you’ll learn how to quickly and effectively get your story out of your head and onto the page.