This post is part of the A to Z Challenge. So far, so good.

I always find it a bit puzzling when people ask me where I get my ideas because I am never really conscious of looking for them, they just kind of tumble out.

That doesn’t mean that I can’t help someone create the conditions for coming up with good ideas themselves, though. I *am* a creativity coach and ideas are usually the first step.

Personally, I think that people generally have a lot of ideas but they have a mental filter in place so the ideas are ‘caught’ before they make it to the conscious mind. So, the trick becomes in teaching yourself to let those ideas make it to a part of the brain where they can be recorded – giving yourself permission to have all kinds of ideas, silly, serious or anything in between.

It’s a bit like when I took a drawing workshop a few years ago and my instructor mentioned that step one in learning to draw is learning to SEE. What she meant by that was they we need to see objects as made of lines, and shapes and light, not just as a solid unit. When we are trying to be creative and find ideas, we have to learn to break down ‘units’ of thought into their component ideas. Then we can take those pieces and look at them different ways and see where they lead us.

ANYWAY, about me and my ideas…

(yes, it’s always me, me, me, it’s like this is my blog or something!)
I have always had a strong imagination, firing off elaborate mental scenarios for the tiniest thread of evidence and when I get started with ideas I ‘chain-smoke’ them – each one is lit from the idea before.

Pulling one idea out of my oddly connected brain is like pulling on one piece of a net – you may get one string of ideas or you may get all kinds of offshoots and interconnected pieces. It might be hard from the outside to see how they are connected, but I know.

For example, when I said chain-smoke above, that reminded me of my friend Jason because we used to say he chain-smoked conversations, lighting one topic off the one before so the rest of us could barely keep up. Mentioning Jason reminds me that he used to have blue glasses, and that reminds me that my youngest kid wants his hair dyed blue and that reminds me of how my sister Ange used to dye her hair with kool-aid and the stench of kool-aid would permeate the house.

Now, I might not say all of those things aloud to you. You might mention chain smoking and next thing I am talking about the smell of kool-aid, it’s not obvious when you are outside of my head. 🙂

And you might be thinking ‘Okay, Christine, that’s a flood of associations but where are the ideas?’

Well, from that net of connections, I thought about including smells of childhood – playdoh, crayons, kraft dinner, and kool-aid in a story and how those things can bring back such vivid memories, both good and bad.

And I had the idea of writing a story in which someone’s hair colour reflects their magic ability, or perhaps it makes them stronger – kind of like an update on Samson.

And I thought about writing about someone who is brave enough to be who they are, no matter what anyone thinks of them -their own opinion of themselves is far more important to them than anyone else’s.

And I thought about why someone might talk a lot – are they excited? Nervous? Do they just have a lot to say? Sometimes a lot of talking seems rude but it doesn’t always have to be. So I could write about all the different reasons around talking a lot. That could be for a fictional character or someone real.

So, now that I have told you all about how my brain churns out ideas, I am going to turn the question to you…

Where do you get your ideas?

Also, what does the colour blue make YOU think of?

The A to Z Challenge takes a break on Sundays, so I post a story. I just started the StoryADay prep class with Julie Duffy and I highly recommend it. I have only been in the class for a week and I already have 15 new story ideas, some excellent writing exercises and I feel like I am making a workable plan.

Here is one of the stories I wrote this week for the course. The challenge was a story in 100 words. By the way, this intro is 88 words! 😉

She stared at her phone until the words blurred.

She knew that this was the fashion, this was how it was done, but she couldn’t get used to it.

She would have liked to go back to the time when it was considered rude to break up with someone over the phone, when being respectful meant meeting someone in person to deliver the hard news.

Even a phone call would have been better than this though.

The text ‘We’re done.’ made its point but it broke her heart.

In a way though, she realized, breaking her heart was the point.

I’m hitting the whole alphabet for the A to Z Challenge in April. It’s pretty fun.

When my kids were smaller, and the weather was decent, I would tax my brain and my neck by walking them to school. Trying to hustle them both along and keep an eye on them both (usually one behind me and one in front – hence the neck issue, it was from the swiveling)was often an exercise in frustration, even though I enjoyed that sort of transition time from home to school. We used to play little games and make up songs and act like characters from movies (Trillian, DentArthurDent and Zaphod Breeblebox most often).*

If the weather wasn’t decent then we would drive to school** and that meant that we picked out some songs to play and howl along with*** while we were in the great big line of cars waiting to drop kids off at school. And that’s where the title of this post comes from.

I used to tell the boys that if we wanted to figure out how old the parents of the other kids were, I should wait until they were walking up toward the school and then blast Spirit of the West’s Home for a Rest. The ones who stopped in their tracks, listened, then waited until the song picked up and then danced their way into the school – those parents would have a maximum range from their Aunt Ange’s age to their Uncle Dave’s age, and they would most likely be between my age and Aunt Neece’s.

We never did run the experiment**** but we always had a grand laugh bellowing along to the song and imagining all those dancing parents on the way in to school. Can you imagine how fun that would have been?

Feel free to dance along at home:

*I still walk my youngest to school most days and we have grand conversations and we goof around. I get those sort of times with my oldest son when we drive to appointments and the like. That’s one of the oddest transitions I have noticed about parenting lately. I used to have to take them everywhere with me and now that they are older, they can stay home by themselves more often. That is freeing in a way but I miss those in-between times, the chats in the car, the goofing around while we wait in line-ups, the foolishness of riffing on something odd we all noticed going on at the store. I don’t miss having to juggling their moods, my mood and crowds at stores and I don’t miss having to organize every part of my day around naptime/snacktime/school time, but it is strange to realize that some parts of parenting are largely behind me.
**Well, we always walked to school, in all kinds of weather, up until my eldest was in Grade 2 and we got a second car.
***Our family all follows the rule that YaYa Vivi Walker told to Siddalee ‘If you can’t sing it good, sing it loud!’
****We always think up fun sort of experiments like this. Now I’m thinking we should actually do some of them 😉

PS – Next weekend will be Spirit of the West’s final shows. I wish them well and I hope that Mr. Mann’s can find some ease from his health issues in his retirement. Thank you for the music, Spirit of the West. <3