COMM 337: Surprise, 'people-watching' and story ideas

Since I was assigning you guys to do a list of 25 story ideas like Don Murray's list of observations in a supermarket (Writing to Deadline 16-17), I decided I'd better do the same. In addition to jotting down quirky little things I noticed that might be developed into a story, I also started free associating right off the bat ... as I saw things that reminded me of stories I've read before, that I might be able to spin off in a new direction. So I stuffed a napkin in my shirt pocket, kept it there all weekend and scribbled down ideas as they came to me. The resulting list:

1. Sacred Harp "singing" at Christian County Historical Society. Why there?
   
2. How do Midwesterners get interested in Sacred Harp singing? It's a Southern tradition of old-time gospel singing, very old-fashioned and folk music-ish.
   
3. What is a Sacred Harp singing like? I've seen stories based on interviews at individual singings in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press. (A lot of writers keep what they call a "swipe file," clips of stories they might be able to do themselves someday.)
   
4. Does anybody sing for fun anymore? Why? Why not?
   
5. Portapotty next to 1820s log building on CCHS grounds.
   
6. How do you get a portapotty? Why? What are the regulations? Where do you rent one?
   
7. Is "portapotty" a trade name?
   
8. Volunteers setting up chairs, brewing coffee, helping in kitchen, etc. What does it take to put together a statewide singing convention?
   
9. Married couple from Sheffield in England. They're Sacred Harp afficionados ... on a two- or three-week vacation in the U.S., going on from Illinois to singing conventions in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
   
10. Southerners dressed up, e.g. wearing dresses, shirt and tie, starched white shirt, Midwesterners in T-shirts and Birkenstocks
    
11. Variety of down-home and major metro yuppie food at potluck -- ham and beans, barbecued chicken, church basement-ish casseroles, hummus bi tahini, vegan casseroles
    
12. Singer playing kaen (a wind instrument from Thailand made of one- to three-foot lengths of reed pipe). She is a returned Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Chicago.
    
13. Combines out. What kind of a crop year for corn and beans has it been?
    
14. Sign at Rochester city limits honoring high school science fair winner in addition to athletes
    
15. Business sign in Rochester for orthodontist, "Where Braces are Fun." How can that be!
    
16. Mural showing Abraham Lincoln and Martin van Buren painted on old grain elevator
    
17. Fiberglass cow from "Cows on Parade" outside restaurant on North Grand Avenue
    ___th anniversary of Cows on Parade promotion in Chicago (I did a Google search, and Cows on Parade was in 1999)
    
18. Chicago cows at State Fair in 1999
    
19. Traces of Chicago at the State Fair ... the "et'nic village" features Chicago restaurants and it seems like stage shows of traditional dance, etc., from half the ethnic churches in Cook County. Jamaican roots band called Waterhouse ... front man is an ethnomusicologist.
    
20. "Original Red Coach Inn horseshoe"
    
21. Horseshoes as Springfield "delicacy" (??) ... does anybody still eat these things? Who? Why?
    
22. Origin myths -- north end taverns vs. Leland Hotel
    
23. North end tavern food
    
24. The north end -- is any of it still distinctive in an increasingly homogenized, Wonder Bread culture?
    
25. I just did a keyword search on "Wonder Bread," and discovered a Wikipedia entry saying the U.S. manufacurer is having financial problems. Since Wikipedia is not always reliable, I am going to keep my eye on the Wonder Bread story for a while. If it stands up (i.e. isn't corrected by an irate PR person for the manufacturer in the next few days), I could use the product's apparent loss of market share and financial stablity to peg several trend stories on whole-grain, organic breads, changing taste in foods, etc. Wonder Bread has been a bland, white, middle-class icon for my generation.
    
26. Waggin Tails shelter -- an "evergreen" that gets profiled every few years in SJ-R, Illinois Times. It's a no-kill shelter with a lot of volunteers -- what do they do? why do they do it? what do they get out of it?
    
27. African American father and daughter in "kitten room"
    
28. Little girl and kitten -- do we choose our pets, or do they choose us?
    
29. Why a separate room for kittens?
    
30. How many cats are there in the sheleter? I count at least 30. What are the logistics of having 30-40 cats in the same building?

Some of these would make excellent stories. Others would go "pffft!" and vanish as soon as I tried to ask somebody the first question. Most of them, probably all of them, look pretty lame when you see them in a list like this. But if you start looking up background and interviewing people, any one of them could turn into a really interesting story. They're all about people, and dreaming up story ideas is nothing but old-fashioned "people-watching" focused on a specific objective.

One rule I try to make for myself when I'm brainstorming. There's no such thing as a bad idea. I don't want to censor myself. Like everybody else, I've got a little creep who sits on my shoulder and tells me, "Lame, lame. Nobody's going to want to read that." If I listen to him I'll never get anywhere, so I'm open to lame ideas. My own and other people's as well. Which leads me to my second rule. There's no such thing as an idea that's so good it can't be improved on. Especially when I'm brainstorming in a group, the best ideas often take shape when somebody says something kind of half-baked and somebody else takes it, changes it just a little bit and it turns into something absolutely brilliant.

As we look at each other's lists in class today, remember Rule No. 2. Read them over, choose an idea or two that seem especially do-able and suggest how you might go about turning them into a story -- who you might interview, what you'd ask them, how you might modify it a little bit and so on ... Post your suggestions as comments to each other's lists.