A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words (or more!)

One of the questions I always get asked at school visits is, "Where do you get your ideas?" So today begins a regular feature about coming up with ideas.

See that picture of the samurai throwing a baseball? That's the picture that gave me the idea for Samurai Shortstop. I was reading a book about baseball in Japan, and I was already thinking that a story about the early days of the game in Japan would be great. But who would my main character be? What was the actual story?

Then I ran into that picture. The caption told me the man in the photo was throwing out the first pitch at a 1915 National High School Baseball Tournament. He was certainly interesting. Why was a man wearing traditional Japanese clothes throwing out the first pitch at a modern game? Because clearly the two men behind him were more "modern," at least in their dress. And who was the boy? Just the pitcher, who had stepped aside? Or did he have some other connection to everyone?

I started to put together a story in my head that led up to the photograph. The boy, I decided, was the man's son. The man was a traditionalist. He didn't like the West, which was why he chose to wear Japanese clothes, right down to the geta on his feet. So how had we come to the point where the boy had convinced his father that baseball was all right?

Those questions became the heart of Samurai Shortstop. Samurai Shortstop is the story of a 16-year-old boy in 1890s Japan who learns to blend bushido--the samurai way of the warrior--with his baseball practices, to prove to his father there is still room for ancient traditions in a new and changing Japan.

I did a lot more research from that point, and I added a lot more story. But that one photo kickstarted the idea process that led me to write Samurai Shortstop! If you're eager to write, but you can't think of an idea you want to write about, go to the library and start flipping through magazines and books of portraits. Ignore the captions, and ask yourself questions about the people in the photos. Who are they? Why are they there? What happened before this? What happens right after it? The more questions you ask, the more your mind will fill in the blanks for you, and soon you'll have a story idea!