Brainstormed

by Stephanie Black

It drives me crazy to have someone looking over my shoulder when I’m writing (unless the word peeper is too young to know how to read). Even if I’m writing a boring little e-mail, I don’t want someone watching the words appear on the screen as I type them. Wait until I’m done, and then you can read it. Why does it bother me so much to have someone observe the writing process? My husband suggested it’s like having someone crawl into your brain. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I’m just neurotic. Or insecure. Or something.

I am less paranoid than I used to be years ago, long before I completed my first novel. I was so nervous at the thought of having my husband see my writing that I would name my story files as though they were letters to my family (this was in the pre-email days when I actually wrote whole letters now and then), figuring that such letters wouldn’t interest him, and thus he wouldn’t be likely to open one of the files. Yeah, it sounds silly now—my husband is a very nice man and wouldn’t have looked at my writing files if I’d simply have asked him not to—but I was very shy about what I was doing.

These days, it’s not news to anyone that I have a bunch of writing files on my computer, and I no longer give them code names. In fact, I frequently leave writing files open, just minimizing them so they lurk at the bottom of the screen. If I’m working on a file frequently, I’m not going to shut it down every time I leave my computer. This was never much of an issue until recently, when people have started crawling into my brain. See, if I have a writing file open and someone clicks on the Word icon to write their own paper, my file might bloom to full size automatically (depending on what other files are also open), tempting the person to have a sneak peek.

I could try to ban people from my computer--it is MY laptop, after all--but it wouldn’t work. With two high schoolers, one middle schooler and one elementary schooler, the computers in the house are in high demand these days. It’s amazing how often computers are needed for schoolwork these days, particularly since the curriculum for high school seniors seems to involve a great deal of instant messaging and occasional episodes of Psych (ha!). Often, more than one child needs to use a computer at the same time, so my laptop gets pressed into service.

I’m currently brainstorming the plot for my next novel, so my brainstorming file is often open. I really do not want people reading my brainstorming file. I need to feel free to jot down ideas, no matter how stupid, and to keep writing ideas until a plot emerges—which can take a while. But lately, I’ve found notes added to my notes. Where I had written something like, “What does (protagonist) want?”, a new answer was now provided for me: “Just a small piece of turtle cheesecake.” “Who is (character)?” I wrote, and came back to find out something along the lines of, “She’s a girl in my chemistry class who teaches rich people to play tennis and is surprisingly nice, considering how popular she is.” And I’m already getting critical feedback— “I don’t like your characters’ names,” my daughter remarked to me last night. Aargh! Okay, fine. I'm not attached to the names yet anyway.

I guess I’m going to have to start closing my file if I don't want eyeballs peering at ideas not yet ready for a public debut. Otherwise, I'm going to keep returning to my file to find new notes, such as last week's “I think I’ll write a biography of some inner demons.”

Then again, the inner demon thing is not a half bad idea. Maybe I should leave the file open and see what else my daughters come up with.