Ever have that thing happen where you are minding your own business, maybe in your car or doing some other mindless repetitive task and your mind just wanders, then out of nowhere something triggers your imagination, and before you know it, you have cooked up some grand paranoid fantasy that gives you a huge case of the heebie-jeebies? Happens to me all the time. I call it the What Ifs.
Example: Once upon a time, on a trip out of town to a soccer tournament, one of the other parents drove my son and some friends to the local mall. Later that same afternoon, I was wandering around the hotel after they returned, wondering where my son was. Down to the game room; no Riley. Okay. How about the arcade by the pool? A group of boys from our team was there, but no Riley. I get a little mental frisson, which is the precursor to a probable onslaught of possible horrifying scenarios of my son’s whereabouts. I keep it under control for about 10 minutes (okay, 30 seconds), but then the cranial floodgates open. Isn’t there a pool in this hotel? What If he was horsing around with his friends and fell and hit his head on the pool coping and fell in and his friends thought he was fooling around when he lay on the bottom for so long but then they figured out he wasn’t fooling and they got scared and left him there because they didn’t want to get in trouble and that siren wailing outside is the ambulance coming to haul him out?
Whoa. Deep breath. Don’t be silly. He’s probably fine. But What If he did go down to the pool, but some of the hotel guests were actually predators staking out hotel because they knew a soccer tournament was that weekend and they figured lots of teams would be staying here and they also figured the kids would be unsupervised in the closed environment of a name hotel and so they staked out the pool and waited for a kid to come along who was obviously unsupervised and used the old ‘I’m with the hotel staff would you please come with me, son, your mother asked us to come and get you’ and poof! before you know it he’s whisked away in an unmarked black sedan with darkly tinted windows.
Whoa!! Stop it! Don't be ridiculous! But What If he was fooling around with his friends playing hide and seek and was tearing up and down the stairwells and turned an ankle and flipped over the railing and landed a whole story down on that hard concrete and got the breath knocked out of him and can’t call for help and nobody missed him for so long the bump on his head put pressure on his brain and he’s still lying there?
I can go on for days with the grim scenarios, but I think you get the picture. This is an example of the kinds of things that flow through the tortured mind of those of us with overactive imaginations. Being afflicted with the What Ifs is definitely a good news-bad news situation. The bad news is, you can really get yourself worked up over the most insignificant things. That thump you just heard downstairs that no one else seemed to notice, in your mind becomes the serial killer from three states away finding that broken latch on your basement window. The good news: it is a dream come true for a writer.
Scientists believe creativity and imagination are dictated by nature; that some of us are able to conjure up the fantastical more easily than others. My husband is a prime example of the have nots, as it were. He would think nothing of leaving our son home alone with a box of matches and a Bowie knife. His response to my objections is usually something like “He’s twelve years old, for crying out loud,” or “You worry too much”. It used to anger me that he was such an irresponsible caregiver. But now I understand that his brain is wired differently, that he sees what IS more easily than what COULD be. He is an educated and literate man, but he's definitely not cut out for writing fiction.
Put to a more practical application, the talent of conjuring infinite What If scenarios can stimulate fresh plot ideas for your fiction. The key is to let your imagination run wild – anything goes.
Let’s say you have a middle grade novel in the works with a young female protagonist. You have a solid plot outlined but your story seems a little flat. Your critique group determines your story does not pass the ‘who cares’ test (“Who cares what happens to your heroine?”). Here’s where the What If talent comes into play.
Perhaps you need to build a more intriguing background for your heroine. Instead of being the shy loner, What If your character is seen as shy because she doesn’t cultivate close friendships? Common enough, but What If she doesn’t make friends easily because she is not Katie from Schenectady but Katya from Sebastopol who was sent here as a sleeper agent to be groomed throughout childhood until she is ready to be released as an adult superspy on the unsuspecting public? What If she is the other kind of alien, jettisoned from her home planet, receiving weekly communications to guide her home planet in taking over Earth? What If she is a genetically mutated fox trapped in human form until she can find the key to changing herself back and also the thousands of children around the world who are similarly trapped when their fox den was too close to a nuclear plant when a meteor struck in Timbukstan but the incident was covered up by the government to avoid panicking the populace?
Okay, perhaps some of these examples are farfetched and unwieldy. But you never know where that next brilliant inspiration will come from. Often the most outlandish brainstorming will condense into the plot twist or character trait that will take your story from flat to fabulous.
So the next time your What Ifs give you a good case of the heebie-jeebies, embrace your natural talent. Take a deep breath. Put that talent to good use. Choose a scene from your latest project and say to yourself: “What if . . . ?”
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