Scrolling on Instagram instead of writing I see a writer’s account has shared an image of a man at a kiosk for what I think is maybe a ferry? Because it’s near water. The caption tells us to use the image as the spark of the story.
The writer I am now is interested in the man. Jumping into his mind, his time, his mood. Has he just missed the ferry? There’s nobody else in the picture I’m not sure there’s even someone in the kiosk.
It crosses my mind you could also be a character looking at him. This voice is immediately female and is going to fall in love with him.
Now that character is well known to me.
She’s hanging around because I’m tired and I’m anxious so my mind is resorting back to what it always wanted to write.
Girl meets boy.
More specific than that girls meets boy in a coffee shop. Ideally the boy works in the coffee shop. The girl is cool and aloof and usually has a giant purple scarf. And when I say giant, I mean it’s like two or three normal scarves in width and length, knitted and even wrapped around your neck it would still nearly reach the floor, maybe mid-calf lets be practical. I don’t like or wear purple so I don’t know why I’ve chosen purple but it’s been a purple scarf since I was about 15.
He story would be about them meeting and falling in love but maybe not staying in love. I used to like the idea of it being set over a day, just a few hours where the entire magnitude of their relationship was concentrated into a rollercoaster of emotions. Or sometimes it could be told over years, years of short exchanges over the counter. In reality at 15 I didn’t think much on the structure or think to do anything exciting or different. I think I just wanted to meet a boy. Obviously one who worked in a coffee shop would be a good status symbol.
When Starbucks opened where I grew up, we were thrilled, Starbucks was cooler than Costa obvs. (The irony now that I love Costa so much, I genuinely dream about it.) I remember us all traipsing to town after getting our GCSE results. The added bonus was that a friend’s older brother worked there and then someone else from the boy’s school got a job there and that was peak coolness and desirability. So therefore, in my teenage writers mind it would be ideal to meet a boy who worked in a coffee shop. (My order back in the day was a caramel and coffee frappucino, now it’s a skinny flat white… I mean what a metaphor for growing up than that change in coffee order!)
I wonder if I will ever write a story about a boy and girl who fall for one another over a coffee counter… I’ll add it to my never-ending list of stories to try for fun.
Oh! I’ve just remembered I do know someone who this happened to except the genders were reversed. Something like 12 years later they are married with three children.
Not so far-fetched after all.
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