The other day while I was stuck in traffic, I saw a guy on an island of a busy intersection trying to fix something on his bike. The bike had a cart filled with bags attached to the back—the kind of thing people with kids like to ride around in. This guy was scruffy and looked hot and frustrated. The cart had overbalanced the bike and knocked it over. He got it back up again by himself, and I speculated while I waited in that knot of cars that if he’d been a cute girl, guys would have been jumping out of their cars from all over to go help her.
Cute young girl, mind you. Not average looking girl. Not a fat girl.
My point here, however, has nothing to do with sexism or fairness or simple human kindness. Believe it or not, this is a post about ideas. The first draft of my current work in progress came out more as a glorified outline than a story. That’s okay. Secrets and delightful possibilities keep surfacing. At the time that I saw the guy and his bike, I was working on a section that needed a little backstory added to get my guy from point A to point B realistically. Smooth as the flow of water.
We’ve all read those stories that come out as clunky as hell as the writer tries to force a connection between points A and B in order to move the story along. Awkward is a first draft situation. It’s not supposed to stay like that. It needs to be reworked. I needed my guy to reflect on his current predicament through the lens of his past, and I wanted his reflection to occur organically, to be spurred by something in the natural course of his day. I didn’t want to rely on He remembered when… or That reminded him of… I wanted some agency. I wanted him to deliberately think of a particular incident in his past but in away that he almost couldn’t not think of it.
The guy on the bike helped me do that. I don’t want to reveal too much because this is a work in progress, but that guy on the bike led me to think about the privilege of looks and the power it can hold over us, either because we have it or because we admire it. That got me to thinking about how we immortalize looks, which led me to the solution to my problem.
Ideas are everywhere, but sometimes they camouflage themselves. It never fails to amaze me how writers think what they think—and how tenuous the process of storytelling is.
I’ll be forever grateful that a sweaty, frustrated guy at an intersection could lead me to a contemplation of physical beauty and its questionable value.
