“Got it!” I exclaim to everyone else’s consternation at the dinner table. I bolt from my chair, down the hall, take a flying right turn into my bedroom, grab some paper, scribble madly—rats, my pen is out of ink!—find another pen, scribble madly, and calmly walk back to the dinner table. Everyone is still staring at me, mouths handing to the table.
“What was that?” My dad asks.

“Got it!” I exclaim to everyone else’s consternation at the dinner table. I bolt from my chair, down the hall, take a flying right turn into my bedroom, grab some paper, scribble madly—rats, my pen is out of ink!—find another pen, scribble madly, and calmly walk back to the dinner table. Everyone is still staring at me, mouths handing to the table. “What was that?” My dad asks. “That was how to get Jakon out the mess that he’s in,” I say. “What?” I simplify. “Idea for my book.” “Oh boy,” my siblings groan in unison. Honestly, I can’t help it! I get inspiration at any hour of the night or day, sane or insane. I’ve stayed up til three in the morning writing, I’ve woken up and started writing in the middle of the night, I’ve been walking through the grocery store and suddenly begin dancing because I have a story idea and no paper to write it down with! The bad thing is that I get ideas from the most random things and the most random linking of words together. To illustrate, one night at about 11:30 I brought my parents the teaser I’d written for a futuristic thriller. It was about a government agent, Lucas Whitaker, whose scientist friend invents a time machine that, as they accidentally discover, has the ability to send someone back in time to change history. Lucas decides to use it to redo a mission in which his best friend and partner got killed. Only when he does redo the mission, it ends up messing everything up worse than it already had been. He’s tempted to keep redoing it until he gets it right, only to realize that then he’s playing God. My parents read it and said, “Sounds cool!” “OK, I need a title,” I said. I hate working with books that don’t have a definite title. A strange little quirk of mine. “I don’t know. ‘Chain’ would be a good title,” my dad said. My brain started spinning. Chain…chain fence…chain link fence around a building with a time machine inside…time machine...time machine links past and future… “Time Link!” I shouted. “I heard your brain wheels clicking and saw your ears smoking,” Mom said. Sometimes its not that easy to trace my thoughts. Like I once heard the phrase, “A heart like David” and the next thing I know I’m writing a story in which sin is symbolized as a giant (for those of you who’ve never read it, it’s “Giantkiller”). I hear the phrase “cursed world” and my brain spins away with a speculative fiction tale of a spaceship’s crew that lands on an uninhabited planet only to find it inhabited by demons in the shape of “friendly” space aliens. I think my brain is constantly going. Twenty-four-seven. I can’t even make it stop in my sleep, which probably explains my reluctance to get out of bed in the mornings even when I haven’t stayed up late. I’m also constantly doing something with words. When I drive, I’m singing or listening to music or trying to see how far away I can read a road sign. When I’m shopping, I read everything…the label on the ketchup bottle, the signs over the aisles, the label on my conditioner, people’s shirts, the label on the dog food…everything. I could probably recite the list of what exactly goes into almost every food item we regularly buy. I’ve run into my mom while perusing the ingredient list of my favorite granola and trying to figure out how to pronounce one of the weird preservatives they put in it (do I want to eat something I can’t pronounce? Unfortunately, my spelling skills may be a hole in one but with pronunciation I’m still on the first green). I sing in the shower or spell words or ponder how to get my character out of this newest dilemma or think of questions I might one day be asked and how I’d answer them. When I’m sitting in a room, I make categorized lists of everything in the room and alphabetize them while carrying on a conversation. Or I study people, pinpoint their habits and gestures, decide exactly what color I’d call his hair or her eyes or his skin tone, and wonder how I’d describe her nose, which isn’t exactly shaped like a potato but isn’t exactly aquiline either. I note what words people use the most, what grammatical mistakes they say, how they say it…was that sarcasm with a bit of concern? A growl covering a giggle? How do you describe the lovely colors in the bruise I got after running into a water pipe playing hide and go seek with my friends? Come to think of it, how do I explain that I ran into the water pipe? I doodle words in my lecture notebooks. I sign my name over and over or make up ways for my characters to sign their names. I write down Bible verses and phrases used by our small group leader, and questions that I ask people later. I’ve come up with some loopy things that people just look at me like, why did your brain ever come up with that? Sorry. Curiosity is going to kill this cat one day. Even as I write, I’m constantly looking for new ways to express an age-old idea: “Trying to get information out of him was like trying to bail the sea dry with a leaky snail shell.” “My life felt like a Frisbee—flat and thrown around.” I write down words and switch around letters or switch out letters, seeing what new and exciting words I can come up with. I make rhyming lists. As I read I study how authors turn a certain phrase, how they build tension or create peace. I scribble down quotes and Bible verses in a special notebook. I make a face at a scene I don’t like, and rewrite it in my head. I wonder how nineteenth century authors would’ve written if they’d been born in the twenty-first century, and vice versa. I’ve also been known to be so busy constructing a scene in my head that I completely blank out, only to find out I’ve been staring at one of my friends for the last twenty minutes. Now that’s embarrassing! If your head is spinning now, that’s OK—so is mine. Off to another story idea, another book, another essay…oh, new story idea! Sweet! Has anyone ever wondered if authors were the original gene-carriers of ADHD?

copyright 2008 by Magical Ink (magical-ink.blogspot.com)