Story ideas come to me all the time, but they are fleeting. They don’t wait for me to happen across a pen and paper, or a spare few minutes, or all of those things at once. They need noting down immediately by any means possible, or they’re gone for good.
Reciting new lines under my breath to try and keep hold of them, I write with whatever comes to hand: an envelope, a marker pen, an old receipt, a crayon. I have small, scrappy collections of paper all over the place, written on in all different colours. They are little caches of treasure.
Sometimes I find old notes that I had forgotten about. They don’t all stand up to re-reading after time, but at least they had the chance.
When I can, I’ll sit down with pen and paper, transcribe that colourful scrawl into something more coherent, and start to work with it. At times that means gathering different notes from different places, all part of the same story. I love it when they begin to knit together.
Then life speeds up again, throwing all kinds of inspiration and ideas at me, and the best I can do to catch them is to find an empty envelope and a stub of crayon.
Tania Sickling 