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Shoutout to the guy at the Phoenix airport who gave me a story idea
I was stuck on a 5 hour layover, just people-watching and scribbling in my notebook, when a man sat down and told me his suitcase was full of sand from every desert he'd visited. He said it was for his garden back home, to 'mix the horizons.' That one phrase unlocked a character for me I'd been struggling with for months. What's the strangest real-life detail you've ever worked into a story?
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umathompson6d ago
Tell me more about that garden.
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the_eric6d ago
My buddy tried to grow tomatoes on his balcony last year. He ended up with a single sad fruit and a family of squirrels that moved in, lol. It was a whole thing.
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jamesm486d ago
Sometimes the best details come from overheard conversations. I once wrote a whole scene around a guy arguing with a vending machine about a stuck bag of chips. Real life is just weirder than anything you can make up.
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