Letting Our Writing Imaginations Go Wild

The day before yesterday, while we were driving down the back road to town, we saw a tractor.

“I’m glad it’s not going our way,” I remarked as it crawled along the road in the opposite direction.

Yesterday, we were out on the road again. And again we came face-to-face with another slowly chugging tractor.

This morning, as we were driving out of our village…

“Look another tractor!”

“The third this week!”

Now tractors aren’t an uncommon sight in our area. We do live amongst farms. But three tractors in three days, all out on the road, all headed in the opposite direction from us? Well, that caught our attention.

As we raced past the latest tractor, my eyes lit up. “You know what?” I said. “I bet tractors are gathering somewhere near here. They’re coming from all around the country. And they have a plan. They’re going to take over the world!”

“Oh yes!” My girls’ eyes were dancing too.

“They were hoping to sneak to their secret meeting place without anyone noticing,” someone said.

“But they didn’t know we would be on the road. We’re observant. We notice everything!”

“We’ve foiled their plans!”

We all laughed.

Then I said. “If any of you get stuck with your NaNoWriMo novel, if you run out of ideas before you get to your word goal, you could add in a few evil tractors. Or you could save this story for a future novel!”

“Would the tractors just take over the world or would they threaten human life?”

“A tractor apocalypse instead of a zombie apocalypse!”

Tractors are gathering. They’re going to rise up and threaten human civilization. Beware!

(I wonder how they’re going to do it…)

If you’re finding it hard to come up with an idea for a novel, all you have to do is write about the ordinary things around you, things you know about…

And then let your imagination go wild!