Blind Date + Boy = Story

Ever wondered how authors decide what story to write? If you watch Studio C, you might think stories can be bought from Teddy's Story Joint, but reality is better: some ideas come from a weird conversation, some from the vibe you get from a certain location, and some from a perfect first line that drops into your mind screaming, "I have no idea what story I go with but you need to use me!" And then we have different kinds of writers: some are bursting at the seams with all the ideas they have; others, like me, find our ideas one at a time, and often by accident.

When I started Smiles, Boyfriends, and Other White Lies, it wasn’t on purpose. I was in a creative writing class at Brigham Young University and doing a rush-write—writing continuously about a prompt for a short amount of time. I have no idea what the prompt was that day, but I wrote a scene about a girl who’d just gotten home from yet another terrible blind date set up by her mother. I could imagine it in detail, down to the scratchy plaid couch the girl was lying on. It was a fun scene to write, but I had other things to work on and Blind Date Girl fell into the abyss of my computer files.

Fast forward a few months to Women’s Conference at BYU. I had gone with my mom and grandmother, but we split up to go to different sessions. At one point, I was sitting alone in an auditorium, sweaty from trekking around in the warm sun and bored waiting for the next session to start. Now, a few months before this, I’d met a guy. (No, not like that. No dating involved.) This guy—we'll call him Tyler—intrigued me because he could come across as flippant one minute, dead serious the next. The first time we met, his flippancy about an important topic stretched my nerves to the breaking point (don't worry, it all worked out and we became friends afterward). As I sat in the auditorium and thought about Tyler, I got out my writing notebook and, on a whim, wrote down our first interaction from his point of view. I liked writing about this "character" and exaggerating what I knew about his personality, but the conference session started not long after that, and the scene got tucked away in my notebook and forgotten.

Some time later, I was hunting through my computer files and writing notebook for a new story idea. Both the blind date scene and the Tyler-inspired scene caught my attention, and I thought, “What if I mashed these ideas up into one story? If Blind Date Girl and Tyler met, could I get them to date? What might keep them apart?”

And with those questions, my main characters, Lauren and Conner, were born, a story spark was ignited, and my journey toward Smiles, Boyfriends, and Other White Lies got underway.

Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash