Like a Perpetual Motion Machine, Only for Stories

Story ideas usually come pretty easily to us. Inspiration can come from anywhere. An all-day DIY and HGTV home renovation marathon, a news report about biopolitics and eugenics experiments, or—in the rare case of Driven to Distraction—a submissions call. Usually, we’re scrambling to find places to put what we’re going to write.

Our trips to visit each other are generally filled with outlining and planning our next few projects. We’re pretty sure they look like normal visits—if you’re a geeky laptop addict. When we’re not talking about writing, we’re usually online… talking to each other. You can put us in the same room, but you can’t make us socialize!

In the spring, Dianne visited Anah and pulled out her stack of index cards. Dianne always has a list in some form or another. Index cards are particularly awesome because they come in colors and require things like paperclips. One by one, we eliminated every submissions call—except one. The “Working Stiffs” series from Amber Allure was something we were both certain we wanted to be a part of.

That we’d found a submission call we agreed at all on was a miracle. Getting Anah to go after a submission call is like trying to bribe a cat with a cracker. But we’d both loved our past blue-collar heroes and decided it was time to bring a couple more into the family. We just had to decide who that would be.

“A mechanic,” Anah suggested. “But let’s not have two this time.”

Dianne can’t resist playing opposites attract, you know. She clapped her hands and bounced on the couch, trying not to unseat the dog who’d claimed a spot on top of her toes. “And a guy who collects vintage cars!”

From there, we were on a roll. The car collector would be a college professor, and the cars would have belonged to his recently deceased grandfather. The mechanic would have a couple kids and a supportive family to help him with them. The conflicts fell into place quickly, drawn from the differences between the characters and their very disparate backgrounds.

We probably wrote that outline in record time, definitely faster than any other outline we’ve put together, and we got the story written pretty quickly too. We weren’t running behind; we were just so excited about the story and the characters that we couldn’t help ourselves!

As usual, we didn’t get more than a few minutes past signing the contract on it—literally—before Dianne mentioned (you know, parenthetically, slipping it into a whole other subject) that she had an idea for a sequel. It’s hard to tell which of us is worse about that, but Anah swears it’s Dianne. Anah is the one who randomly sends Dianne pathetic little IMs that say things like, “I miss Denny. *snif*” and other woeful commentary.

We’re going to be cranky little old ladies on a nursing home porch, with our vintage iPads in our laps under our crochet, and one of us is going to IM the other with, “I had this idea…”

--Anah Crow & Dianne Fox

Websites: www.anahcrow.com & www.foxwrites.com
Fox & Crow Newsletter: www.foxwrites.com/newsletter
LiveJournals: anahcrow.livejournal.com & diannefox.livejournal.com
Twitters: @anahcrow & @diannefox