Where Ideas Come From

This is a cautionary tale. Turn away now if you're squeamish.

Do you have one of those travel coffee mugs with a screw-on lid? I do, and I fill it as soon as I get up, with coffee and chocolate milk, and I drink my daily dose on and off for an hour or two. But with that dairy product in there, I don't like to leave the dregs sitting around too long. I wash the mug and the lid out with hot soapy water. I rinse and rinse until it's clean. Or so I thought.

I wiped the inner lip with a paper towel yesterday, because it looked as if some dried chocolate milk had gathered there. A bit of the towel slid under the inner ledge. It came back smudged. I crooked my finger, still covered with the paper towel, under the lip and circled it round. There was actually a deep crevice under there and---turn away now!----my finger came back covered with a half inch of sludge. Yeeech!

How could that have happened? How could I have been drinking toxic waste for some time now and not known? What kind of evil designer puts a hidden ledge into a coffee mug and then sleeps soundly at night?

I'm sitting here, trying to think how coffee sludge can be inspirational. How it could be a metaphor for all the gunk in our heads/hearts that we don't even know is slowing up our writing processes. But---and maybe this is the toxifying effect of drinking sludge for untold weeks now---I can't think of a thing that would make this a worthwhile lesson.

Sometimes, sludge is just sludge. Except that perhaps...and here's where I love being a writer...I'm already thinking that if I need a character to have an interesting occupation in one of my books, travel coffee mug designer wouldn't be too bad. Think of all the work generated by trying to make an attractive mug that will fit comfortably in multiple sizes of cupholders, that won't tip over, that will keep coffee hot all morning, that will appeal to those who walk and those who drive and those who take trains. Think of the conversations this designer mom/dad could have with main character as she/he brings home various test models. It's just the perfect bit of stage business that allows a writer to reveal character while moving the storyline along.

I love my own brain. I really do. It takes sludge and makes an idea out of it. Once upon a time, there was a girl who believed...