Creative Exercise

Again at the bagel shop, this train of thought pulled me into world-building possibilities for fiction: in the Sunday comic "The Family Circus", one child asked, "Who would be my mother if Daddy hadn't married our mother?" Hm, I thought, applying the question to my own life and letting imagination run rampant. The first of my father's interests that I can remember was Sally Jackson. She worked at the Hancock Beauty Shop, which my father owned for a few years. She so resembled my mother that it was spooky!

He also had two other wives one year, and with one of them, Wanda, he spawned a child. That could have been me ... 14 years younger. Instead, it was a boy they named Tom, a half-brother I've never met. Half-siblings seem to be a staple in soap operas, sometimes playing major roles and often just serving to move the plot along. Or, what if it turned out that one of these other women were my true mother, that a back story existed which I found out only after my mother died--which happened in real life almost a year ago.

Now I have several plot elements with which to construct a frame for the house of my story. It doesn't have to be all about me. I'd clothe the characters in other's personalities and appearances, using a chart like I wrote about yesterday.