One Image, Two Story Ideas: Man at a Window
Jen and Tina love writing prompts. Sometimes they turn into stories, sometimes they just get our creative juices flowing. Either way, they’re a lot of fun.
Jen’s Idea
This image feels like Eastern Europe to me, the site of so many Cold War thrillers. The man’s pose feels like one of anticipation. He could be a villain ready to spring a trap or a hero getting ready to evade someone else’s plot. I haven’t written a thriller, and so this felt the perfect opportunity to think about one. Despite those intentions, the back cover somehow turned into an alternate-history adventure story. Who am I to question my muse?
Tina’s Idea
When I saw this image, I placed my character in an old Parisian arrondissement, someone who left his life behind to start new. Someone a bit sad for being alone, but who had made a clear choice and had agency. As I started to write, I found out that my character doesn’t go to Paris to start fresh but to address some unfinished business, something that forces him to leave all that he knows behind. This is more than a personal quest; it’s a life or death imperative and he needs to face this alone because he has come to understand just how dangerous it will be.
Jen’s Back Cover
Melvin’s life is perfectly ordinary, and he likes it that way. Each day he goes to his office at the Bureau of Maps, each day he inputs data sent back from the government’s explorers, and each day he sees the map of the world grow a little bit more defined. Each night he makes a vegetable sandwich, solves the crossword, and lays out his oats and dried fruit for the next morning. It is a predictable routine that some might call dull, but Melvin considers perfection.
Then one day a distant cousin drops into his life, bringing fun and sparkle he doesn’t know he is craving. Sarah plays the trombone. Sarah prepares hot meals with exotic spices. And Sarah has a plan to make them both a fortune.
All Melvin needs to do is share some of the information he receives about the Unknown World with some of Sarah’s friends, who are prepared to pay handsomely for the inside track on newly discovered veins of gold and deposits of gemstones. It is unethical and illegal, and Melvin flatly refuses. But when Sarah vanishes, Melvin finds his employer unsympathetic and his old mode of life intolerable.
Then Melvin gets a lead on tracing Sarah. It requires daring and intelligence. And resources. He must decide between staying loyal to a bureaucracy that’s provided him with stability, or risking everything to find the first person who’s made him see how much bigger his life can be. It’s not long before he realizes Sarah may not be all she seems, and he wonders if there’s anyone he can trust in this strange world of adventurers, tinkerers and master map makers.
Tina’s Back Cover
When his parents are found dead in a hit and run car accident, John Leland discovers a letter in his mother’s belongings addressed to him.
It starts:
If you are reading this, we are probably dead and we can assure you that our deaths were not an accident.
Your name is not John Leland. It is Yves Armand Jr. You were born in Paris. Yes, your father was Yves Armand, the notorious activist. Some call him an anarchist, others call him a terrorist. He is wanted by every European government. Your father was fearless in every way except when it came to you. After you were born, he gave it all up and moved us here to the States to this quiet town. But the work was never finished. His successor was gunned down just three months later. I know your father has been difficult to live with over the years. Please forgive him. His guilt has eaten away at him. He has been torn between protecting us and doing what needs to be done.
Before he can finish reading, something slips out of the envelope. It’s a small key taped to a scrap of paper. On the paper is an address penned in a foreign handwriting he does not recognize.
Yves spends days rifling through his father’s office looking for clues to a life he had no idea existed. When he is visited by “company men” in search of answers to questions Yves doesn’t even understand, he realizes that he has more than soul searching to do. He leaves his quiet life behind, takes the key and departs for Paris to learn the rest of his story and to finish the work his parents couldn’t.
At first, he finds more questions than answers, but he soon discovers that he is his father’s son in more ways than one.
Tina’s Response
Master map makers! What’s not to love about this story? Once again, Jen lays out a complex and fun adventure that has great potential to be developed. I love how perfect his quiet life feels to Melvin and yet how quickly he falls under his cousin’s spell.
I’m intrigued that both Jen and I started with one story and our characters took us on a different adventure. The process of channeling a character never fails to amaze me. Usually, I experience this with a character that I have thoroughly developed, but this was a brand new character taking control of the story.
Both Jen and I wrote about someone leading an ordinary life and how that was turned upside down. It makes me wonder if Jen and I have yearnings for fun and sparkle we don’t know we are craving…
Jen’s Response
I want Tina to write this story! The search for identity and possibility of moving the reader back and forth through time have all the makings of the kind of lush story that I love to lose myself in.
I’m also struck that the image took both Tina and me to the thriller end of the mystery spectrum, and that the stories we each ended up telling weren’t the one we envisioned when we each began brainstorming. That experience of discovery in the writing process is one that never fails to delight and amaze me.