I’m always looking for new types of story prompts, images or phrases that I can use to brainstorm a creative journey I haven’t been on before. When a line from a poem catches my breath, I’ll scribble it down in my notebook. I also keep a note on my phone that’s mostly a collection of offbeat things my wife has said. Now completely devoid of any context, they all sound like song lyrics or titles for unwritten stories.
Earlier this week, I went to a site I like called The Slideshow that generates slideshows on the fly from Google Image searches. I plugged in the keywords “street photography” and just sat in my office eating lunch and dreamily starting at images of strangers waiting at bus stops or hailing cabs. Sometimes a really mesmerizing image comes up like the one of a boy staring out of a rainy laundromat window at night, his face distorted by the rain on the glass and the reflections of neon signs and brake lights. When I see an image that might lead somewhere, I save the picture to a “seeds” folder I keep in the cloud. Sometimes when I’m out of practice writing stories, I’ll load one of these photos, set a timer, and write a quick flash fiction piece.
Today I tried something a bit different. I’m sure you’re familiar with NextDoor.com, the social media site for people who live in a particular neighborhood. I never log onto my NextDoor site for any legitimate reason, but the daily digest emails keep filling up my In Box.
— Best of Nextdoor (@bestofnextdoor) March 19, 2019
At some point, I realized that NextDoor subject lines are completely amazing. I don’t even need to read the whole post most of the time, because the message titles are like works of art. If you spend any time on NextDoor, you quickly learn that most message threads inevitably turn into shouting matches. There’s always an asshole in the comments, just trying to stir people up. There’s also a great Twitter account @bestofnextdoor that documents some of this neighborhood lunacy.
But the message titles! Sometimes they make me laugh out loud. Sometimes they make me shudder. Today I decided to jot down a list of my favorite posts from the past few days, and start using some of these as starting points for my own stories. Every one of these posts suggests its own story set in a world that is offbeat, absurd, perhaps even exaggerated to some degree, but always true.
Here is today’s personal, curated list of NextDoor stories waiting to be written.
- The Outside Guy!
- Person walking into backyards
- Loud bang
- Plant guy from out of town
- Found Glasses — Brentwood Park
- Gun shots?
- Room available temporary
- How to dispose of a mattress
- Hearing the helicopters again
- Loose dog on Arroyo Seco
Which one’s your favorite? Which story should I write first? Leave me a note in the comments.
A Writer's Habitat 