How You Can Find Amazing Ideas for Stories in Your Messy Garage
Your garage can be a treasure trove of story ideas.
If you are anything like me, your garage is where you stuff things when you don’t have space in your home. It is where things get stored that you’ve never used in five or ten years, but there may also be great subjects for story ideas.
On a recent trip to my garage to retrieve our artificial Christmas tree, I had an epiphany: My garage was a gold mine for potential articles. Your garage is most likely filled with possible story ideas too if you know what to look for.
So if you find yourself frequently stuck on what to write about next, let me reacquaint you the treasure trove in your garage. I chose to write this article because the main problem new and old Medium writers face every day is:
What do I write about today?
How can I make money from my stories?
The answer to these two questions might just be in a bin in your garage.
My Gold
My gold was a story I’d written while working as a journalist for a newspaper 20 years ago on two guys who created the first mobile magazine, publishing a newsletter and later a magazine with a glossy cover and 40,000 subscribers.
It was called Mad Monk magazine. James Crotty and Michael Lane (aka The Mad Monks) wrote about their experiences traveling across the country in a 26-foot motorhome, meeting all kinds of people through their meanderings:
- Nebraska bingo addicts
- New Mexico shamans
- Country singers
- B-movie actors
- A guy named Apple Pi
- Dogs and dancers
While my wife and son waited for me to bring in the Christmas tree, I skimmed the article and thought it would make a great Medium story.
Your Treasure
Your treasure may be different than mine, but I’m sure you can find it. I also found journals and poems I’d written twenty years ago as a college student. I tweaked or used some of my journal writing or poems as is for publications like Promptly Written and The Brain is a Noodle.
Maybe, this being the last year of your artificial Christmas tree is a story. My point is, while you’re looking around, open your mind up to the possibilities of what you see.
See how that journal you kept twenty years ago is relevant to others. I’ve still got a few more journals to go through. One of which I wrote back and forth thoughts on whether or not I was ready to get married at age twenty-seven.
Your closet has treasures too
Another place I’ve found story ideas is in my closet. I’ve found lessons I taught on the 12-steps in a recovery group (that’s what happens when they find out you’re a teacher in recovery) and tweaked these to be my most read articles.
How to refurbish your treasure
Some things you find may need a few tweak to turn into an article. For example, my concern with my newspaper article I found in my garage was, would I be violating copyright issues with the newspaper it was published in?
I’m still looking for that answer (anybody know the answer, leave me a comment), but when I was typing the article into Editor, I had my second epiphany of the day that solved my concerns with any copyright issues.
The Mad Monks were the precursors of the Digital social media era. The Jack Kerouac-like pioneers of Instagram, Facebook, Medium, publishing whimsical accounts of their experiences on the road via a solar-powered Mac computer.
All I needed to do was rewrite my story with a fresh new timely angle. You can do the same with the treasures you find in your garage or closet. Just tweak them a bit to give them a fresh modern angle and new coat of fresh paint.
I changed the story enough that I didn’t have any copywrite worries. I also googled the Monks and found one had an email address. I sent him some questions to answer to give my 20-year-old story some fresh perspective (it’s still in the draft stage, by the way, waiting for the reply to my email).
The garage is a place of self-discovery
For me the garage has become a place of self-discovery. I worked as a sportswriter for newspaper in my early twenties, but I was heavily coerced to resign after I made one typo on the gambling odds on a horse racing page.
This led me to switch careers from a journalist to high school teacher.
My forays into my garage are like a deep dive into myself, and they have reminded me how much I’ve always loved writing. The treasures you find in your garage or closet will have the same impact on your self-understanding.
Maybe you’re at a crossroads. Maybe you’re too busy to stop and to think. Maybe you’ve just started asking some of the important questions you’ve avoided.
Looking back at my past articles, journals and poems has taught me to listen to my life, what is this article, journal or poem I’ve found saying to me? You never know what piece of yourself you may discover in your treasure hunt.
My article on the Mad Monks not only reminded me how much I love to write, but it also showed me I have wanderlust to travel that I need to set loose.
I need to hit the road or travel back in time with a trip to the garage.
Check out my YouTube video on my journey as a writer.
