Stealing Imagination

I have decided the best way to get an imagination is to borrow one.  Some might call it stealing, but when the person agrees to it I guess it’s not illegal anymore.  One of my friends was thrilled that I want to be a ghostwriter.  When I explained my lack of imagination dilemma she offered me her own, overflowing jar of story ideas.  She’s mostly French and thinks the idea of writing them herself would be about as much fun as going back to high school and asking for extra homework.  She said “Here! Here, take them, I have lots of ideas! Write something! I want to read it!”

Naturally, this was all somewhat overwhelming for me.  Let her read what I’ve written so far?  I think not.  No, I’m not ready for a big step like that yet.  But I do want to start using her ideas.  Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I do intend to compensate her for these ideas, should I achieve any success with them.  I’m actually tempted to steal her name while I’m at it, and use it as a pen name so that my anonymity can be that much greater.  For the time being, however, I’ll just stick with borrowing her ideas.  This should be excellent practice for me.  I will learn how to ghostwrite for someone who has never written a story. It will be a challenge.

Over the next few days I will elaborate on my plan to get ideas out of my friends.  Step one of the master plan is to get their creative juices flowing.

Step One, point two: is to get her to read and force her to enjoy the kind of books that I like.  They say you should write the type of book you’d like to read.  So I might as well follow that bit of advice, or at the very least try. I need to make her like my favourite authors.

Shouldn’t be too hard since I know what she likes in terms of movies and she shares many of my other interest.  You know what they say, birds of a feather flock together, sheep of a fleece, etc…  We do.  Flock together that is.  One problem is that my good friend does not read many books.  In fact, I doubt she’s read more than a handful since we graduated from high school eight years ago.

Problem number two is which books to start her on.  I’m not going to leave it up to her, because her lack of reading experience may lead her to the wrong books, or worse.  By worse I mean she may do what I would do and procrastinate into not ending up getting a book at all.  That reminds me, I think my library books are late, again.  Damned agenda never reminds me of anything.  In any case, I need to pick a book that she will like so much she’ll want to take up reading as a hobby.  I’m not deluding myself, converting a non-reader into a reader will not be easy.  Fortunately I just need her to read maybe 5 books, to get an idea of what styles I’d theoretically like to go with.

I’ve narrowed it down to a few options.

First I’d go with an Iris Johansen, there’s enough sex and action, with the odd dash of humour.  In theory, it very much resembles many of our common favourite movies.  And of course she’s one of my favourites.

Next perhaps a Nora Roberts, to ease a bit more romance into her.  Or perhaps a Janet Evanovich or Jayne Ann Krentz.  Janet Evanovich hits the humour mark best, with a good balance of mystery.  Jayne Ann Krentz gets lots of themes like archeology, art (which fascinates me) and has rather entrepreneurial characters.  Nora Roberts is a grand master of balancing the brilliant and talented damsel in distress with a bit of mystery.  She may have to read one of each.

I’d love to con her into reading an Agatha Christy or an Ian Fleming novel.  They’re both classics, massive successes, and awesome.  But neither is particularly contemporary and I fear my friend may be turned off by the references to things she does not understand.  Maybe I’ll slide one of these in once she sufficiently sucked into the reading world.  Correction, if I can get her sucked into the reading world.