A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 10

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Last week, I provided a daily explanation about why you should make it a habit to be generating story ideas. This week, I’ll give you some tips on how to come up with stories.

Tip: Look at magazines.

I love magazines. Or at least I used to. Before at one point, I had over 30 subscriptions! [Now I’m down to 2: The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books].

The thing is if you’re trolling magazines for possible story ideas, you have to avoid the biggies like People, US, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, and so on. You can be sure that Hollywood studios and producers cover those regularly. Indeed more and more magazine writers tailor their stories as possible movie projects.

No, you need to dig deeper and go wider with your research into magazines. Fast Company, Smithsonian, New Scientist are some good ones.

Then think regional like Southern Living. Or foreign like Der Spiegel. Or really odd like Miniature Donkey Talk Magazine.

Again there are plenty of story ideas out there, especially in magazines. You just have to look for them.

Today’s story idea: A girl in Mexico attached her Christmas list to a balloon. A man across the border found it.

The spot of red was what first caught Randy Heiss’s attention last Sunday as he hiked the remote expanse of land behind his ranch in Patagonia, Ariz., a town near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Draped against the sacaton grass was a balloon — or at least the tattered remnants of one. Heiss walked toward it with his dog, Feliz, thinking he should pick up the latex pieces and throw them away.

That’s when he noticed the balloon’s string was attached to a piece of paper.

“Dayami,” it read on one side, in a child’s handwriting. A hand-drawn bow accompanied the word.

Heiss flipped it over. It was a numbered list, all in Spanish.

“My Spanish isn’t very good, but I could see it was a Christmas list,” he told The Washington Post in a phone interview Friday.

Heiss was charmed. He suspected that a child had tried to send Santa Claus a Christmas wish list by balloon, something he used to do himself when he was a kid. Nobody had ever returned the letters Heiss had sent aloft — but he wondered whether he couldn’t find the girl who had sent this one.

It would be difficult, but Heiss had a few clues. About 20 miles to the southwest, just across the border, was the city of Nogales, Mexico, with a population of about a quarter-million.

Can you see where this real life story is going? The Heiss couple attempts to locate the child who sent Santa Claus a wish list from some town in Mexico. Read the article to see how things turned our, but as I was reading the article, I put on my Hollywood producer’s hat and I thought: In a movie, This couple has to be dealing with some sort of loss to fuel their drive to make this connection with the mystery child in Mexico. Then I read this in the article:

Heiss, 60, has lived in southeastern Arizona for more than three decades and now splits his time between Patagonia and the city of Bisbee. Nine years ago, he and his wife lost their only child, a son. They have no grandchildren.

You could write this as a duel narrative a la Sleepless in Seattle. The Anglos in the United States, the family of the young girl in Mexico. Would it be too much for the guy who discovers the balloon to hold strong anti-immigrant views which enshroud a bigotry toward Mexicans? Living near the border between the U.S. and Mexico, it’s likely he would have strong feelings about these type of issues.

But that’s where his head is at. What about his heart and the loss of his only child? Does attempting to locate this young girl whose existence quite literally floated into his life become — over time — a kind of obsession?

This could make for a wonderful indie spin on a Hallmark Christmas movie, a story involving diverse ethnic characters, not just lily white families.

There you go: My tenth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free! Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.