You do not like them.
So you say.
Try them! Try them!
And you may.
Try them and you may, I say.

- Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss

My husband and I are house-hunting. (bear with me, folks, I swear it relates to writing!)

Our realtor is showing us massive lists of houses in our town that fit our search criteria. We’ve been scrolling through the lists, kicking out the ones in neighborhoods we don’t like, dismissing the ones with too few pictures or not enough curb appeal.

Yesterday we went to look at houses, and on the way home, we passed another house with a For Sale sign in the yard. Why wasn’t THIS house on our list? It was perfect! Perfect neighborhood, perfect price range. We went home and looked it up online — the inside was perfect too!

And guess what? It was under contract.

Well, we went back to the list and discovered that we’d zoomed right past it because the website picture didn’t do the house justice at ALL. So I spent several hours last night going through the list again and investigating every house in depth, even the ones that we’d ignored earlier. And I found some more possibilities.

Often in writing, when we hit a scene and we’re stuck, we dismiss ideas of where to go because it’s too outlandish or too extreme or too ugly or too [insert adjective here]. But maybe we should try it. It doesn’t hurt us to look at a house. It doesn’t hurt you to write a few hundred words and see if there’s any potential. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve wasted a twenty minutes, and you can delete it with a click of a button.

But maybe you should try it, because otherwise, you never know what you might miss.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 7:22 am and is filed under Diana Peterfreund. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.