My Story About Coming Up With Stories

It was supposed to be Book Week this week. So to mark the occasion, this weeks episode is the answer to my most commonly asked question when I visit schools for Book Week. It is my explanation of how I come up with ideas for stories. It is quite a story in it's own right.

I’m very excited to announce that we now have merchandise for BEDTIME STORIES WITH R.A. SPRATT! You can order t-shirts, sweaters, hoodies, notebooks and coffee cups all with the show’s new logo on it. They look super cool. Here's the link to the online shop...

https://raspratt.threadless.com/designs/bedtime-stories-with-r-a-spratt-2/kids

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:36

Hello, and welcome to bedtime stories with me, RA Spratt. Now, when I do author presentations, the most common question I get asked is how do I come up with ideas for stories? So I decided I was doing a zoom presentation to record my answer because over the years it's evolved into quite a long story in its own. Right? So this week's episode is me telling a story about how I come up with stories.

Speaker 2: 1:08

No, I'll tell you a story about coming up with stories. This is actually really good advice. Okay. So I used to be a sketch comedy writer. And so when you're a sketch comedy writer, you have to write about four or five or six sketches a day, and you do this every day and every week and every month and every year. And if you just like, it's, you get to a point where it's like, what am I going to write about today? Oh, my glasses on my desk, I'll write a sketch about glasses. It gets like that. So I had a friend give me a piece of advice about how to write comedy. And his advice was if you want to have really good comedy ideas, go to big w or Kmart or target one of those types of stores, Costco, and you think, why do they sell ideas that those doors, no, they do not sell ideas, but it's a great idea to go there. If you're trying to come up with ideas. Cause I, you know, I'm in my office, I've, I've written like 12 books in this office. So I've stare at these walls all the time. There's nothing left here to inspire me. Well, there is. But anyway, you get, uh, in a rut. Whereas if you go to big w or Kmart or one of those stores, you go in and there's so many different things that can spark your imagination. I mean, first out this, the PayPal, like oftentimes you see people in those stores and they, you know, some people have this idea that to write a great novel, you have to have an Epic experience. You have to like go to Paris and fall in love or drive a car across America and B be hijacked or something. It's like, it's not true. If you want to see true human emotion and drama on an Epic scale, all you need to do is go to Ikea or Kmart on a Saturday morning. And you will see people just having breakdowns in their relationships and fighting over whether or not to get a Billy bookcase or wanting to kill their kids. Cause I won't stop screaming. They just need to get the shopping done. So you get all that when you go to the store. But also as you walk around one of those, uh, discount department stores, you get things from all different aspects of life that yes there's closed, but there's also a garden section and fishing and sport and white goods. And any one of those things can spark an idea. So what happened was I was at my local big w once and I was walking around and I was walking through where they have like the kitchen appliances and they had this little kitchen appliance and it was a chocolate fountain, like, uh, you know, there's, it's like three dishes. They get bigger and the chocolate comes up through like a straw and it cascades down like a little fountain. And so I was riding nanny Piggins at the time. And nanny Piggins is a pig who loves chocolate cake. And so I saw that and I thought, and so I was trying to write a nanny Piggins book at home. I thought, well, what would nanny Piggins make of a chocolate fountain? And then I thought, well, cause I'm a comedy writer in comedy. If you get an idea, it's always good to make it bigger. So I thought, well, that's a tiny chocolate fountain in the store, but I've seen big chocolate fountains in shops that are like, like this big. And then I thought, well that, you know, if you can have one this big, why not have a really big one, you know, like a fountain in a public park, imagine the fountain in your public park near you had chocolate built instead of water. So you get like these big statues of lions and dragons and, and, and soldiers. And like guys is like huge, like a Fireman's hoses of chocolate, just spewing out. And at the base, there's like a massive pool, like a swimming pool of chocolate, like a 50 meter Olympic pool of chocolate. I just thought that would be so good. Nanny Pickens wouldn't love it so much. Cause she loves chocolate. She would dive in and she would swim laps and be doing the backstroke. It would be so cool. So then I thought I've got to make this happen in one of my stories. So I thought, how can I make it happen? So oftentimes when you come up with an idea for a story, I'm going to talk about this in a minute. When we talk about story structure, oftentimes when you come up, the first idea you come up with of like, Oh, that's so cool. That's not going to be the starting point of your story. So I thought that to me, that's the middle point of a story. That's somewhere in the second act. So I thought, well, I want that to happen. I want nanny Piggins to dive into a pool at the base of a fountain that is massive chocolate fountain. So I thought, how can I make that happen? So that's the middle of the story? Where do I start to get to that point? So I thought, well, why would she go somewhere? Where, where would I find this fountain? I thought, well, sometimes they have chocolate fountains at weddings. So I thought, well maybe she goes to a wedding of incredibly rich people. And that's where they have this massive founder, like billionaires getting married. So I thought, well, why would she go to a wedding? And then I thought, well how about cause weddings, they always have cake don't they in anything is loves cake. So I thought, how about it's Saturday morning or Sunday morning now Saturday morning. And they've got no cake ingredients left in our house. And then I thought, well, she could just go to the bakery. And I thought, so how about you can't go to the Baker because she made the Baker bake so many lemon moorings the day before that, that he, he sprained his wrist and has had to take the day off. So she can't cook at home. She can't go to the Baker. She really needs a slice of cake. So she decides she's going to go around every wedding in their town, crashed the wedding just so she can have a slice of wedding cake. Okay. I thought, Oh, that's really cool. There'll be a lot of fun in that. And so then I started to imagine what nanny Pickens would do and how she would behave at a wedding. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to a wedding, the hands up, if you've been to a wedding at some stage, yes, they're really boring. Aren't they? The party outwards is kind of fun, but the actual wedding ceremony is really boring. You sit, I mean like I got married in a church and get married in a church. There's a lot of, you know, you're in church and the Pew is uncomfortable and you're sitting there and they're up the front. You can't hear properly. Can't see properly. And there's a lot of, you know, I really love you and I really love you and I love you and I love you forever. And it's so tedious. What am I going to get some cake already? So I thought nanny pagans would get really fed up with that. And when nanny pickers gets fed up with things she always takes over. So I thought she would want to take over and become the wedding celebrant. And then I started thinking about, well, what would nanny pickins do if she ran a wedding, how would she handle that? And I thought she would completely reverse the order of things because you've got to have all the, I love you. I love you all that stuff. You've got to have all that, but she would change it. She would start with a cake. The way nanny Piggins would run a wedding would be this you'd start with a gun. And the bride's at the back and her beautiful long white gown and the veil and her dad in his suit on her arm. And as the doors open and she walked into the church, duh, duh, duh, duh. And she would walk in now nanny Piggins used to be a flying pig in a circus that got blasted out of cannons. So she's got access to four military grade cannons. She would line four cannons down, either side. So eight cannons. She would load them with chocolate, mud cakes, all the cannons. And they'd be like air cannons. And as the bride started walking down the aisle, imagine this for your wedding day, girls, you're walking down the aisle in your white dress. And then as you come down there,[inaudible] flat mud cake flies and hits the bride straight in the face. As you can, talking to her, took it up, boom, boom. It was everywhere. And by the time she gets the flood front, she's just drenched in chocolate sauce and crumbs and chunks of Kagel over her. And she has to like flick it off. And the entire congregation is also covered in cake. And then during all the boring bits, like, no, I really love you. Congregation will enjoy it because they'll be able to sit and scrape the cake off their clothes, eat it. So I thought that's what nanny Piggins would do if she, if she went to weddings. And so, so I'd sort of like, I'd come up with all these ideas and we'd already had the chocolate fountain and then she's had the weddings. And then I started to think, well, if she did that, what would happen next? And I thought, well, shit, these weddings would become so famous. If there was a Royal wedding, you know, when Harry and Meghan got married, I thought, well, imagine they have like Harry and Meghan or the whoever the Royal Prince and Prince were at the time. What if they got her to come and bake their wedding cake? And so I thought, well, how would that go? And I thought, well, she would bake a cake and she'd bake her, her, her, her, her favorite cake, which is Octa CHOC chocolate cake. You know how an octopus has eight legs? Well, an Octo cake has eight different types of chocolate. So there's chocolate cake, chocolate icing chocolate cream, chocolate chips, chocolate reinforcement logs to stabilize the cake because it's got so much chocolate. You don't want everyone to die. Um, a block of chocolate on the top of the rocket docket and bottom and an ice cream on the side, chocolate ice cream. So this is the Octa chocolate cake. She would build the cake so big that it will be three stories tall, like as tall as a three story building as tall as a church. And then the cake is so big and has like the big layer and the medium land. It's always the top layer. The cake is so big that the bra, you know, like on a regular wedding cake, you get the little plastic statues of the bride and groom. They're called cake. So on this huge wedding cake, it would be so big that the actual real life bride and groom, the princess and the juke that were getting married, they would stand on top of their own wedding cake and be their own wedding toppers. The Bishop would stand up there with them and to, to do the service. And they'd have the whole wedding ceremony up on the top of the cake. So as they're up on top of the cake and do it though, I love you. I love you. And, and the Bishop says, you may know, cause the bride, it would all take place up on top of the cake. And then as I said to him, I know cause sobriety, I pronounce you man. And wife, there would be a lift built into the center of this three-story tall cake. As they kiss the bride and groom would be drawn down through, into the center of the base of the cake. And then as the finale, the bride and groom would eat their way out through the cake as all their guests ate their way in. So I thought that's, that's a really cool idea. So I wrote all of that up in one of the books. And that's how your question was, how do I come up with ideas? And it was, I go to big w and that's how it came. It just one little thing of say the chocolate fountain led to that big snowball, which became an avalanche of ideas. So that's like the longest answer to a question ever. So has anybody else got a question?

Speaker 1: 10:39

Thank you for listening to support this podcast just by a book by me, RA spread, there's lots to choose from, from across the pesky kids, Friday bonds or nanny pagan series. You can order them through your local bookstore or go to my website, RA spread.com and click on the book. Depository banner. They've got all my titles and free international shipping. Okay. That's it for now until next time. Goodbye.