Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Where do you get story ideas?
My great, and very talented friend ran into a story idea while riding the Red Line train today and she told me about it."I was on leaving Park Street toward Cambridge and this dude gets on playing Stevie Wonder and clears the aisles," she said during a chat on GMail. But wait, it gets better.
"He started break dancing in the middle of the train, then he walks down the aisle, grabs two railings and does a back flip. [I'm thinking] like this never happens in Boston.
"Oh this is wobby, I like it," he says, and does a back handspring on a moving train...this is all between Park and Charles. It was really cool."
That's when I started thinking.
If I saw this in person I'd be thinking as a writer that I need to write this story. But sometimes I think I'm too shy to do what she did: get the story.
"He's apparently a part of a larger traveling performance group from NYC," she found, "but sometimes he breaks away from the group to do his own thing."
I see crazy things like this all the time. Like the guy in Times Square I saw last year who charged people a dollar to tell him off. Like, all the way off. He made money, too. People actually told this guy their life's problems. He actually listened. It was amazing.
But I didn't have the [guts] to ask him what his name was.
Of course, for her part, she got the whooooole story about the Stevie Wonder guy.
"He's 22," she gushed, "and has big muscles."
Labels: shyness, silly sources, story ideas
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