My Serial Killer Co-Worker & Other Imagined Tales

So you have a dream of becoming a writer?

You've treated yourself to a shiny new laptop, a new coffee machine and set up new social media accounts to promote your work via. You are feeling great as you turn on the laptop that is soon to be used to write your masterpiece. You have the perfect playlist of music lined up to help motivate you, the view offered by the window in your newly created writing space is inspiring and you are eager to get started.

You open up your computer’s word processor and are presented with a wonderful blank canvas upon which you will paint YOUR story. That story that has been bursting to get out of you for what seems like an eternity.

Except now you can't quite remember what your story was going to be about. The blank page before you now seems to taunt you as you desperately try to come up with something interesting to write about. It soon dawns on you that your life isn't actually that exciting and you can't seem to draw inspiration from anywhere to help start writing something that might just turn into a best seller.

The longer you stare at the screen, thinking back through every aspect of your life for something interesting to write about, the worse your mental block seems to become. Exasperated by your efforts you slam your laptop shut with a satisfying thud and retreat to the kitchen to make yourself a coffee, only to find that you have no sugar!

Throwing on a baseball cap to cover your bad hair day and pulling on a coat to help you brave the cold weather, you make your way to the shop a few minutes walk away from your house. Catching sight of your reflection in a store window you realise that you are far from looking your best and begin to feel self conscious, believing that everybody is staring at you, perhaps you should have taken the time to make yourself more presentable. 

Upon entering the shop you realise that the shelves are very poorly stocked, with next to nothing available and seemingly no staff working to improve things. After waiting by the counter for a minute or two the shops owner comes out from the back and asks if they can help you. After a few minutes of sorting through the delivery which has just come in the owner triumphantly returns with a bag of sugar for you, you pay and are back on your merry way after exchanging the usual pleasantries on your way out. 

The sky above you has taken a turn for the worse and the dark clouds swirling above you seem to be moving worryingly quickly. The first droplets of rain fall on your face as you are watching the clouds. Cursing your luck you begin to hurry home. 

As you round the corner onto your street you notice a car stopped next to your house. It isn't parked and you can't see through the tinted windows to see who is driving. Being alone you feel uneasy and wonder who is inside and what they are doing sitting in such a car outside of your house. As you get closer the passenger door opens and out jumps a child dressed in the uniform for the school just down the road. You breathe a sigh of relief and feel slightly foolish for having worried. After all, who else would it have been?

At this point you may have resigned yourself to the idea of putting writing on hold until something exciting happens that you can use as inspiration for your novel. But wait! What if you had just encountered some great starting points on your walk to the shops? Nothing exciting happened, you say, I just bought some sugar from the local shop. Wrong!

What if at the point when you believed that everybody was staring at you they really were? What if it wasn't just your anxiety born of being out looking less than your best? Perhaps you are somebody of note and people recognise you. Perhaps you don't even realise you are this person. If that is the case why don't you realise who you are? Why is it that people seem to know who you are? Think Sterling Archer believing that he is actually Bob from Bob's Burgers rather than one of the worlds most infamous secret agents. Yes, Archer & Bob's Burger references...somebody call Kenny Loggins!

What if the shop wasn't poorly stocked and understaffed because it was time for that weeks delivery? What if you had stumbled into a post apocalyptic nightmare and supplies were beginning to run out? What has happened to lead to this point? How have you managed to survive this long? How are you going to help get the world back to the place it was before whatever disaster has taken place happened?

The dark clouds were swirling quickly because of strong winds and a storm was about to begin, right? Wrong! The god's in your alternate reality are pissed off and coming down to earth. Or perhaps an alien spacecraft is creating the strange phenomenon. It really could be anything!

What about that car with tinted windows that was sitting ominously outside of your house? That was just a child being dropped off to school late wasn't it? Perhaps in the real world it was but imagine if it was actually an unmarked police car waiting to arrest you for something that you have done. Perhaps it is your former friends from a life of crime you used to be a part of who have finally caught up with you. What if it was somebody waiting to snatch you off the streets and hold you prisoner in an abandoned warehouse?

I'm sure you get the idea now. We all believe that nothing exciting really happens to us, and in reality that is true for most of us but that doesn't stop our imaginations from going wild. Look around you every time that you are out and about, you never know what story might be unfolding. 

That person tailgating you may really be trying to run you off the road. That person who you locked eyes with for the briefest of moments before your trains went their separate ways really could have been the love of your life, your one true chance of happiness. The co worker you always feel uneasy around may really be living a double life, perhaps they are in fact a serial killer yet to be caught. Your neighbour who you haven't seen for a week or two; are they on holiday or has something more sinister happened? Who knows? Let your imagination run wild. Don't wait for something exciting to happen to you. Use every mundane detail of your real life as inspiration for something far more exciting.

Go out and make the ordinary...extraordinary!