Chasing Wattpad

Writer-y bits and pieces

As a writer I have lost many more stories than I have written. I am never in a hurry to write so if a story pops into my head I don't immediately sit down somewhere and start writing it. More often than not I leave it up to my memory to "get to it later" and, as you can imagine, that rarely works out.

This doesn't bother me too much because most of my stories are non-fiction. They are in my head somewhere already and I take it for granted that if I dismiss them for now they will find a way back into my consciousness again someday. I don't know if this an accurate way to think of these things. Maybe when I dismiss them they never come back. There is really no way to know any of this.

Recently, while thinking of the above, I decided to keep a notepad available to me at all times for just such occasions, and especially at night. I think that is probably true for writers that many of our story ideas come to us in the middle of the night when we are our most relaxed. I know this happens to me. This is especially true as I am about to finally doze off. It is often at that time I get taunted by words or sentences that float into my mind. Or, less often, I get up several times a night and again sentences enter my head. Some of them are continuations of stories I have already started. Some are brand new sentences that may begin a new story or find themselves later somewhere in the middle of it. I have often started stories on a single sentence that lay somewhere in the middle of it all. Other times I have no idea what I was thinking when I came up with the sentence. Some may very well be quotes I once heard or read somewhere which suddenly came back to me in the middle of the night and I mistakenly thought I created them. I really have no idea where they come from or what to do with them.

That last bunch, the ones I have no idea what to do with, I keep in a small folder (somewhere). I think someday I will do something with them and find a good place for them (it involves fire). Here are just a few of these sentences I have found around my apt. written on little scraps of paper. These are just some of the ones I don't know what to do with. I have others that I have incorporated into a story. That's not to say they won't end up in a story some day. They just might. I just don't know where I was going with these or why I wrote I decided they were important enough to write down when I should be sleeping. Some of these I could barely read. I don't have good penmanship as it is, much less moments after I get up at 3:30 in the morning.

#1  "I buried him 2 years ago out by the woods along the south side of town. I imagine he died just minutes after that."  Lol I am really hoping this is for a fiction story I am writing or it was just  something I read somewhere.

#2 "Her mother was the kind of woman that was apt to have seizures in church. You know the kind."   No idea.

#3. "The one thing I can honestly say is that old age is the one true thing you don't see coming. Not because it comes along slow or fast, but because you turn your head every time you feel it coming around the corner. You deny it a chance to come into view. And then, one day, when you turn to ignore it, you find it everywhere you turn your head. And you lost out on all the chances you had to get used to it."   Yeah, I hope I wasn't talking about me.

#4. "A police officer, particularly a homicide detective, rarely goes to bed warm at night thinking the world is a good place, but he gets up in the morning anyway, because he can't let the world win."  Spoiler alert. The world wins every time.

#5. "We are all candles. We will all go out someday. Some will go out long before all the wax melted. I don't want to be one of those."  This guy needs some Xanax.

#6 "I can honestly say that in my entire career as a police officer we never talked about death, or life, or loved ones and their futures. We never talked about the feelings of victim's family nor the feelings of the suspect's family. We talked about murder. We talked about bodies. We talked crime scenes and evidence.  There was never time for anything else. "  Don't know what story I was thinking of when I wrote this.

#7. "It's a miracle I found you at all. What are you doing on the other side of the world?" Hmmm.

#8 "I followed her lips as she talked and did not hear a word she said.  I didn't let her talk long." Who the hell wrote that?

#9 "I will never have friends like that again. Not because my friends today aren't special, but because none of us are innocent like that anymore. It was the innocence that let us love as freely as we did. We can't do that anymore."  Me just probably feeling old.

#10 "What am I doing thinking I have words when I should be asleep?"  Okay this one I get.

These are just a couple of scraps of paper I found around the apt. and happen to have in my bag today. I have dozens of others.  Am I the only one that does this? How do you handle random thoughts in the middle of the night? Are they always ideas, or sometimes just random sentences that don't seem to fit into anything you are working on?

Just wonder what you guys do with these things. Please tell me I am not alone here. Have a great writing day guys.